Skip to footer

Could Uber be the best form of mass transit out there?

A city in Florida offers a glimpse of what the future of mass transit could be.

|
Jeff Chiu/ AP/ File
Uber driver Karim Amrani sits in his car near the San Francisco International Airport (July 2015). Altamonte Springs, a suburb of Orlando, will cover 20 percent of any Uber ride that starts or finishes within its city limits.

A Florida city has become the nation's—and presumably the world's—first to subsidize Uber rides beginning or ending within its borders.

Altamonte Springs, a suburb of Orlando, will cover 20 percent of any ride that starts or finishes within its city limits.

Call Uber for a ride to SunRail, the region's commuter train system, in fact, and Altamonte Springs' government will pop for 25 percent of an Uber fare.

The public-private partnership between Altamonte Springs and Uber is being touted as a low-cost alternative to subsidized mass transit. 

Altamonte Springs City Manager Frank Martz told NPR that funds for subsidizing Uber come from $1.5 million the city had allocated for a stalled project that could have operated like a city-owned Uber. 

The stalled project was called FlexBus, and it consisted of an app that let users request a small bus to come pick them up.

Ultimately, that program failed, despite a $1.5 million Federal grant, leaving Altamonte Springs to look in a new direction for alternative mass transit. 

With its low population density, Orlando area is largely carcentric. Its commuter rail system, which opened in May of 2014, carries only 3,300 riders daily, while a bus system called Lynx services most of the metro area.

However, as in most lower-density cities, mass transit on a fixed route for Altamonte Springs would require many users to walk a lengthy distance and wait considerable time to get to their destination.

Altamonte Springs' deal isn't the first time that cities have partnered with Uber, or its ride-sharing rival Lyft.

However, it marks the first time that a municipality has directly subsidized such a service for all in-borders rides.

Other cities have partnered with Uber and Lyft to promote the services as a link between mass transit hubs and riders' final destinations, but they have not directly provided funding to reduce the fares.

Other cities, including Montreal and San Francisco, have municipal programs of various sorts that compete with the car-sharing services.

This article first appeared in GreenCarReports.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Could Uber be the best form of mass transit out there?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2016/0414/Could-Uber-be-the-best-form-of-mass-transit-out-there
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe