<story><title>Chariot is shutting down</title><url>https://blog.chariot.com/2019/01/10/important-update-from-chariot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blt</author><text>old cities: built dense for walking, because cars didn&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn&amp;#x27;t that common in China&lt;p&gt;20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation.&lt;p&gt;The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction &amp;amp; rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.</text></item><item><author>geofft</author><text>A lot of the history of transit-disrupting startups in the SF Bay Area can be attributed to how &lt;i&gt;truly bad&lt;/i&gt; public transit in the SF Bay Area is. I understood Uber a lot more after trying to hail a taxi in SF. (Same with Boring Company and LA traffic.)&lt;p&gt;A real disruptive solution for humanity - but a hard one to monetize - would be to figure out why cities with good public transit &amp;#x2F; shared transit infrastructure managed to build them (off the top of my head, Tokyo, NYC-of-the-past, parts of China, Chicago, etc.) and figure out how to replicate it elsewhere.</text></item><item><author>dsl</author><text>SF public transit is pretty disfunctional and Chariot was trying to offer an alternative.&lt;p&gt;- Timeliness - Busses and trains reliability are a joke compared to developed countries&lt;p&gt;- Cleanliness - Due to an unmitigated homeless problem, the busses and trains operate as &amp;quot;day shelters&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;- Organization - There are dozens of different transit operators for what is one major metro region. Schedules are poorly synced, and even with a unified payment card you still have to buy different passes for multiple agencies&lt;p&gt;- Reliability - The union bullies the city around, and there is no accountability.</text></item><item><author>aniketpant</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t what you described an example of how buses work. I know very little about the state of public transport in SF but if it was better won&amp;#x27;t it solve what Chariot tried to do?</text></item><item><author>idoh</author><text>I used Chariot a bit a couple years ago. Sad to see it go. For people who haven&amp;#x27;t heard of it, it worked like this: I live in SF, and worked in Redwood City. Every day, there was some type of large van that would pick me up a couple blocks from where I lived and dropped me off a couple blocks from where I worked. So it was like a middle ground between public transportation and Uber &amp;#x2F; Lyft.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wutbrodo</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t quite true for many of the big cities of interest. There was an active high-modernist effort in the ~70s to destroy the walkable, transitable, livable parts of many American cities and cut freeways across them like big ugly neighborhood-destroying scars.&lt;p&gt;Even transit wastelands like LA had an actual urban core (that they&amp;#x27;re now rebuilding), as well as a relatively extensive network of streetcars.</text></comment>
<story><title>Chariot is shutting down</title><url>https://blog.chariot.com/2019/01/10/important-update-from-chariot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blt</author><text>old cities: built dense for walking, because cars didn&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn&amp;#x27;t that common in China&lt;p&gt;20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation.&lt;p&gt;The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction &amp;amp; rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.</text></item><item><author>geofft</author><text>A lot of the history of transit-disrupting startups in the SF Bay Area can be attributed to how &lt;i&gt;truly bad&lt;/i&gt; public transit in the SF Bay Area is. I understood Uber a lot more after trying to hail a taxi in SF. (Same with Boring Company and LA traffic.)&lt;p&gt;A real disruptive solution for humanity - but a hard one to monetize - would be to figure out why cities with good public transit &amp;#x2F; shared transit infrastructure managed to build them (off the top of my head, Tokyo, NYC-of-the-past, parts of China, Chicago, etc.) and figure out how to replicate it elsewhere.</text></item><item><author>dsl</author><text>SF public transit is pretty disfunctional and Chariot was trying to offer an alternative.&lt;p&gt;- Timeliness - Busses and trains reliability are a joke compared to developed countries&lt;p&gt;- Cleanliness - Due to an unmitigated homeless problem, the busses and trains operate as &amp;quot;day shelters&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;- Organization - There are dozens of different transit operators for what is one major metro region. Schedules are poorly synced, and even with a unified payment card you still have to buy different passes for multiple agencies&lt;p&gt;- Reliability - The union bullies the city around, and there is no accountability.</text></item><item><author>aniketpant</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t what you described an example of how buses work. I know very little about the state of public transport in SF but if it was better won&amp;#x27;t it solve what Chariot tried to do?</text></item><item><author>idoh</author><text>I used Chariot a bit a couple years ago. Sad to see it go. For people who haven&amp;#x27;t heard of it, it worked like this: I live in SF, and worked in Redwood City. Every day, there was some type of large van that would pick me up a couple blocks from where I lived and dropped me off a couple blocks from where I worked. So it was like a middle ground between public transportation and Uber &amp;#x2F; Lyft.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brezina</author><text>The core of san francisco, probably 30% of the city&amp;#x27;s 49 sq mile landmass, and where 60%+ of the population lives, was built before cars existed.  Most of SF was a walking&amp;#x2F;horse city, and then a walking&amp;#x2F;streetcar&amp;#x2F;cablecar city.</text></comment>