I mean this is just a private corporation that replaced an older private corporation (a taxi company) who in turn was trying to solve the core issue with car dependent infrastructure, which is: what does one do if one doesn't have a car?
Because if you're just at home, car centered infrastructure while expensive, inefficient, and dangerous, does function. But then, if you leave home on a business trip or a vacation... the problems become quite apparent quite quickly.
And you're completely correct here diagnosing the problem:
> Suppose number of drivers needed off-peak is 100 and the number needed at the peak is 500 and they have 300 drivers. They need to sign up another 200 drivers to satisfy the peak demand, but they already have 200 more than they can use off-peak. What would you have them do? They effectively need a large proportion of the drivers to be working part time specifically during peak hours.
Where I disagree is that there's a car-based answer to this, because restricting ourselves to working within the bounds of the car has caused the damn problem: because you need X number of cars with X number of drivers available to move Y number of people at Z time of day, and all three of these are going to change with availability in unpredictable ways. Whereas just... good mass transit could move all of those people, with less fuel, FAR less vehicles, and while those journeys would all probably take a bit longer even in ideal conditions, they would be safer, our air would be cleaner, and you wouldn't even need a taxi company or an app that pays people slave wages to take you places.
The transit problem is largely a housing problem because mass transit needs a threshold amount of population density to function and that level is below what you get when the majority of the land area is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. But that's not something you can solve overnight -- it takes time to build stuff like that -- so people are still going to have to decide what to do today.
Moreover, even if you build more multi-family housing and mass transit, you're still not changing the nature of the issue, only the scale. There will never be 100% mass transit use because there will always be higher and lower population density areas and some proportion of people living in the latter. Then the people who live outside the reach of mass transit may want to come inside it from time to time, and you'll still have car service for that, and still have peak and off peak, and still have to answer the same questions even if there are only a third as many people doing it.
For sure, but we still have a massive proportion of what could be served by Mass Transit in the States all dedicated to cars, which is why gridlock is basically the American commuting experience in one word. I just spent a week in a major city visiting my employer's office for some face time with everyone, and every morning was started by spending about 20 minutes stuck in traffic, even though my hotel was only a short drive from HQ.
More than three quarters of Americans live in suburban or rural areas. If you tried to run an hourly bus down a suburban street in the middle of the day, it would have one passenger. You can't run bus service at the density of the suburbs, with single passengers it's just a slower, more expensive and less efficient Uber.
Then you get traffic congestion in the city because those people come into the city in their cars. But you can't just add mass transit where the traffic is because those people still need to traverse the part of their path where it isn't.
Because if you're just at home, car centered infrastructure while expensive, inefficient, and dangerous, does function. But then, if you leave home on a business trip or a vacation... the problems become quite apparent quite quickly.
And you're completely correct here diagnosing the problem:
> Suppose number of drivers needed off-peak is 100 and the number needed at the peak is 500 and they have 300 drivers. They need to sign up another 200 drivers to satisfy the peak demand, but they already have 200 more than they can use off-peak. What would you have them do? They effectively need a large proportion of the drivers to be working part time specifically during peak hours.
Where I disagree is that there's a car-based answer to this, because restricting ourselves to working within the bounds of the car has caused the damn problem: because you need X number of cars with X number of drivers available to move Y number of people at Z time of day, and all three of these are going to change with availability in unpredictable ways. Whereas just... good mass transit could move all of those people, with less fuel, FAR less vehicles, and while those journeys would all probably take a bit longer even in ideal conditions, they would be safer, our air would be cleaner, and you wouldn't even need a taxi company or an app that pays people slave wages to take you places.