Brad Ideas - Better door to door shuttles - Comments

Anton Sherwood — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 04:10:51 -0800

I've heard that at some airports it is forbidden to troll for ride-shares, because taxi drivers politically outweigh tourists.

Glen Raphael — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 14:02:36 -0800

An airport is full of people who are either driving themselves home (using a car left in a nearby lot) or are being met by friends who are driving them home. Either way, the car probably has spare seating.

Suppose we had a way for the people who don't have a ride arranged to match up with people who live in the same neighborhood and do have a ride arranged. Then they could carpool home, with the spare passenger paying a few bucks to offset the cost of gas. You could do the matching-up over the internet. The tricky thing would be arranging the meeting location.

Airports could easily facilitate either this sort of thing or simply more efficient taxi-sharing by putting up some signs representing popular destination areas. "Downtown", "SOMA", etcetera. If you're going to SOMA, you go stand by the SOMA sign, meet a few other people who also are, and hail a single cab. Or carpool.

Glenn Fleishman — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 11:32:06 -0800

If you lived in Seattle, you'd be able to use the often superb Shuttle Express service. When I first moved here more than a decade ago, it was a toss-up between getting a friend to drive you, driving and leaving the car, and using Shuttle Express. Timing and cost were all reasonable variables to measure.

Starting after a major airport renovation about three years ago, Shuttle Express has made use of this modern innovation you discuss, the Difference Engine, and it's pretty remarkable. It's not so amazing when you're picked up -- you can reserve on the Web, prepay, etc.

But when you arrive, you go to their booth right next to where you're picked up. There's rarely a line, even in the busiest of circumstances. You give a phone number and you're always in the system. They hit a button and your name goes into the queue.

By the time I've walked the 25 feet to their waiting area--benches with heaters underneath since you're in the garage proper--my name is already up on a screen showing which van I'm waiting for by number. The van usually arrives in anything from 1 to 10 minutes. We usually leave in < 10 minutes after that.

On many occasions when other travelers are light, they'll stick me on a shuttle that needs to pick people up on the way back in, and I'm home in less time that it would have taken to get a shuttle to a car parking area that's affordable near the airport.

Better door to door shuttles

brad — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 11:08:09 -0800

Just back from the nightmare of holiday travel, which started at 5:30am on Christmas morning and a security line snaking all the way to baggage claim. Coming back 6 days later, I braved the door to door shuttles from the airport.

I generally regret the decision to use these shuttles, which seem to average about 1 hour 30 minutes for the 35 minute drive to my home from SFO. This time, they had 10 people waiting for my town (which would normally be a dream as you would not spend all that time wanding around closer towns dropping off earlier folks) but in fact after we saw others had waited an hour for any shuttle to show up, we went to the caltrain, which takes an hour for the trip but is predictable.

The curse of these shuttles is how unpredictable they are. For some they are a quick trip but often they will drive you many times around the airport waiting for passengers, and then on an unpredictable drive. The public hates unpredictability even more than slowness, and would pay for predictability, I think.

So can computers, and some common sense, fix this? Surely you could make reservations which tie your flight number into the database so the shuttle company sees your plane arrive and knows pretty accurately when you will make the curb. (You can confirm that with a cell phone speed dial if your cell number is registered.) If lots of people did this, you could know how quickly a large enough group of people who live close together would be ready to leave.