Public transit tapers off because demand drops off. There will be a spike around closing time for bars but it seems unlikely that you'd want to launch a whole commercial service just based on that.
> Public transit tapers off because demand drops off. There will be a spike around closing time for bars but it seems unlikely that you'd want to launch a whole commercial service just based on that.
Public transit is also based on an order of magnitude larger transport. You're talking about buses that are made to move 50-100 people or trains made to move hundreds... not a car that will be moving 1-3. The reason many routes get cut down isn't because there's no demand at all - it's because the demand is below the threshold to run the service profitably. If you can cut down on the cost to run the service by cutting the driver out, making the vehicle cheaper to run the route, and so forth... the route will come back.
I think this service will do fine. This is one the issues that SF has in a large part. Very hard to get around at night because public transit is dead before midnight.
Busses rarely run at a profit, if your metro service is very lucky user fares cover half the cost of bus service (lookup farebox recovery ratio), hence some US bus systems going fare free since it makes a minimal difference financially.
Semantics. Profit, net zero, sustainable with tax dollars, etc.
Doesn't matter. You get the idea dude. It's about routes not being worthwhile because the damn transport option is too costly for just a few people. Autonomous car is gonna be more effective for these scenarios.
Rather than profitability, perhaps the right metric is utilization.
Even if you don't care about the revenue, having only a handful of people on the bus per run in the evening makes it hard to justify the cost of operating the line. Having other options to get home is great.
> it seems unlikely that you'd want to launch a whole commercial service just based on that.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. There's immense value in getting _any_ commercial service out there, not just in PR but in a full end-to-end test of all the ops/logistical/product/etc that come from having to deal with customers in reality. A good chunk of a decade and billions of dollars have been poured into the research behind these services. I doubt anyone at Cruise or Waymo cares or even expects these limited services to be profitable, but that's entirely missing the point.
Presumably, they want to launch a commercial service to get some real-world data and a foot in the door; the intent is to expand both time and geography.
