a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2768 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 26, 2017

Do you guys have vanpools over there? Because it's an interesting market segment over here. The way it traditionally works is you get like eight or nine people together and the city gives you a van. You then keep it at your house and drive everybody to work. It's sort of a low-effectiveness high-cost method of reducing the number of cars on the road.

It seems to me that what you're talking about is an autonomous vanpool, effectively, and I wonder if some of the research behind vanpools might be relevant to your thesis.





veen  ·  2768 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I vaguely recall you mentioning that a while ago! I've seen some research into ridesharing, but I'm not sure that's the same.

The Dutch urban transportation market is quite different from the US market, with public transportation and bicycling having a much higher market share and coverage. For every trip that someone makes by car, someone else makes a trip by bike. This means that most people that are served by Chariot will probably have access to at least a mediocre level of public transport or a bike, which makes the market segment for vanpooling much smaller. The closest we have is municipality-owned 'on-demand' transport services, hoping to help bring transport to the elderly and people who can't afford a car or ride a bike. But it is objectively terrible, requiring people to reserve very wide time slots (e.g. 'we will pick you up somewhere between 9 and 12') both ways.

kleinbl00  ·  2768 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Seems like some synthesis between the data on vanpooling and the data on your on-demand transport services (which we also have here, and are also terrible) might give you some insights.