Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 188: Microtransit

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

it's so small you can't even see it Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ marcus's article: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/experiencing-navi-the-ultimate-urban-circulator/ the ATU study: https://www.atu.org/pdfs/ATU_FalsePromiseofMicrotransit.pdf?link_id=0&can_id=cd24f759fa3e8cdb724f5115b807a48f&source=email-not-your-average-joe-the-atu-applauds-president-biden-for-fulfilling-promise-to-protect-transit-workers-from-brutal-attacks&email_referrer=email_2312122&email_subject=new-report-the-false-promise-of-microtransit Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

There you go, now it's recording. Weirdly, the Zencaster doesn't look like it failed to me, but the OBS looked like it did, because I can't see the slides. I also can't see the slides, fuckface. Well, yeah, that's because I haven't started the thing yet. Oh, okay. You and confident buffoon. Ah, yes, your problem.

Yeah, you're not gonna get to see my face on this one, and there's a beautiful, intriguing reason for this. There's a magical reason. There's a magical reason. There's a magical reason for this, which is also that I'm trying to save bandwidth. When you feel, when you hear the reason. You're probably wondering why I have to say it. You have to say bandwidth, because my fucking internet is extremely bad, and it's 4G. Yeah.

Which means that like, even after a lot of fucking around with it, we've gotten it to a point where it's just about acceptable, but the upload speed and more importantly, latency is very high, which means the lag is atrocious. All right, well, the sig point's gonna be a hoot. Oh yeah. I was about to say, I'm gonna gonna do a 3-2-1 mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Three, two, one. Mark. That didn't sound that bad, actually. Yeah, see, it's improving, right? Like, the more time you give my wife to try and fix things, the better the things will be. I have learned to trust in my, I've done to trust in my wife, yes. Yeah, my favorite part of Tor was just running around looking for Corinne's saying, has anyone seen Borat voice of my wife?

And without fail, Ross would go, my wife, and I'm like, not your wife, bud. For all intents of purposes, I'm your wife. Your work wife. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, we've been over this. I would marry Ross if I had to. You have a, you have the married couple energy.

What is, what is this podcast but a polycule? Oh yeah, let me talk to me about polycules right now. So the reason, the reason why I sound like this and the reason why Liam before we started recording went, are you sure you don't want to sort of punt on this one because you sound like you're dying, is because my girlfriend's wife, love that woman, deeply, deeply fond of her, took me out for dinner before the recording, and she took me for dinner to the restaurant where she works, where everyone loves her because she's an angel. And because everyone loves her, customer service workers, restaurant workers like to express that love by giving you free drinks. And she doesn't,

drink. Oh, yes. I have been drinking for two people across dinner and now had to run uphill in the dark, freezing cold to get to work. That's why I sound like this. When my lungs stop burning, I'll be okay. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I thought you were sad. No, kill her.

Killer. I was having too good of a time. This is what I've been doing with your Patreon. Or Patreon. That's not even true. She paid. Like I... No, no sympathy.

I thought you weren't feeling good. No. Kill her dead. Kill her dead. I really cannot stress enough my fondness and affection for my girlfriend's wife, who is a beautiful woman, and all of whose drinks I consumed. I had a similar experience to this in Pittsburgh, at least the running up the hill part. part.

Yep. It's just, the one's the time you threw up. The guy serving you who is like, her friend is like, okay, you don't want to see the dessert menu, that's fine. Do you want a couple of limoncello's? And I, knowing that what this means for me is drinking two limoncello's go, yes. Yeah, it's not like physically possible and is also very rude to refuse a lemon cello. Yeah.

Livencello. Although that said, no, no, I thought you weren't feeling good. I thought you were sad. All my sympathy is gone. No, first time in a minute, I haven't been. Okay, let's go. Let's fucking go. Yeah, everyone's in a good mood.

All right, excellent. Fuck you, buddy. Fuck you for being happy. Yeah. It's a podcast that thrives on shared misery. Yeah. Oh, it sure does, November. Hello, and welcome to Well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns is she and her. I'm very sorry.

I try not to get drunk before work unless it's a bonus episode, but in this case, the circumstances This will be on my control. Yay, Liam. No, they weren't beyond your control. They were beyond your control. They were beyond her control. All right, fine. I'll take that.

I've been, I've been hammered drunk recording this before. That's no big problem. Fuck. What's my name? Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronoun, he and him, right? Yeah. It already has bonus episode energy.

Well, I think this one, this one is a little bit of a silly one. one, I will say. What you see in front of you is a car. That's a van. It's a minivan. This is a, this is a minivan. A minivan is a type of car. No, a minivan is a type of car. It says on that, uh, smort. Smort. Smort. Yes, it says smart. It says it in the notes. No, it's not. This is a, I've got oh, you already downloaded the PowerPoints. I can't interfere with you. S.MQRT. There's a subtle line here. It actually says smart, but it looks like smart. No, it doesn't. That line's coming out of an angle.

That says smirk. Squirt. Squirt? Scort? Scort? Yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna get the squirt home one second. Yeah, I'm just gonna, let me just call a squirt. Yeah.

Even better than the, uh, the South Lake Union trolley. Yeah, I get my, I get my, I got my burrito taxi to my house by a, by a squirt. It's. The escort. Yeah. Oh, I'd like to share a squirt with her. I hardly know her.

What? This... It's not that bad. It's just your radial fluid. Um... This... This... This is a car branded as a transit vehicle.

It's a van. It's not supposed to look like. I feel like it very much is supposed to look like that. This could be the episode where we could do one billion I actually identify as a bus jokes, but we'll work, so we're not going to do that. No, I identify as one of those nice conversion vans from Explorer with the TV in the back and the couch, I bet their couch works, motherfuckers. But they didn't have Ross.

I actually identify. The fucking Amish. I identify as a car made by a communist country that no longer exists that had to make like the headlaps in a separate part of it for representation reasons and doesn't work at all. I don't, I haven't figured out my van sona yet. I gotta work on that. You need to study the sacred texts of cars, cars, two, and planes.

Yes. Not cars really. You just get that. The esoterica, like Pixar's Metros. They almost produced it. Almost made it. I saw the concept art too. Yeah.

Yeah, it looked dope. Oh well. But anyway, so. A bunch of people figured out how we could take some cars and say they were public transit. It's an ancient technique called lying. Yes. Oh, yes, with this newfound technology called speeding. Yes.

Well, that does speed up the transit. On today's episode, we're going to talk about micro-transit. But first we have to do the goddamn news. I want the record to show that there was a crispy timing on the news drop for a drunken woman. Oh, yeah. You did a good job there. Thank you. So does anyone remember the California forever people who are going to build a new city somewhere

in the middle of nowhere? Solano, yes. Yes. Their final plans came out recently before they hold the big referendum, you know, the idea being, okay, if we just change the zoning, we can build the perfect community. Oh, okay. And we're gonna be the ones to do it, right? Can you, Devin, can you flash up in the edit, Erronomich Bosch's The Haring of Hell, please?

Oh, right, the California housing policy? Yeah. Because I mean, yeah, California Central Valley, most impoverished part of California, has had no investment in it. But what these guys want to do, notably, isn't investment, it's just, kind of vibes, as I understand it? It's a weird plan. I mean, it's not actually, I don't know where the Central Valley

begins and ends. This is sort of like north of San Francisco. Unless you know about California. Here you are, my guy. What you might call it. I want to say Richmond, something like that. It's supposed to be this like sort of new, like, dense, like housing thing.

And then there's going to be businesses and there's going to be, you know, we're gonna be able to build any kind of building you want, you know, as opposed to having to be constrained with zoning, although there's a little bit of zoning. It's interesting. I've noticed, oh, you go first. Okay, sure. It's interesting reading these people's tweets, it gets a bit Anderil and they get a bit Natsack brained because if you see on the sort of bottom left of this plan here, technically

this has access to the Pacific in the form of a bunch of boggy swamps. or whatever. Yes. And all of them are like, hey, we could build like an AI shipyard downstream and like dredge this, and you could use this for some like Natsakh stuff, which is strange. Big shipyard. This right now is a bunch of like pasture, I want to say. This isn't even like Central Valley like sort of intensive agriculture, you know, which

I think should be obliterated. This is just past your land right now. I don't know what they do with it. I've never been to this part of California. Don't go to California. That's a rule, my guy. Yeah. The one thing I thought was interesting about this plan is, you know, this is supposed to be, again, dense, walkable urbanism that's illegal to build in most American cities.

Guess what they did not put in. A train station? That's right, a train station. Don't need it, you know? Just walk there. Yeah. Have you seen the long walk? Well, now you can replicate it by going to Solano.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's weird. There is a railroad line here, which they plan to use as like a spur to bring freight in. Maybe they get two or three cars a week to whatever tech industries are over there. I don't think those guys use a lot of material in a way that a railroad makes sense. You know who owns this railroad is right over here. I lost the cursor.

There we go. Right about here, this entire line is owned by the Western Railway Museum. Okay, sure. That's their only access in and out. Talk about living history, you know? You're gonna get a really, like, curated list of locomotives working on. Yeah, you're gonna have, uh, they're gonna have to go out with the little steeple cab and go pick up the freight cars and drag them into the ultra-high tech city.

So sad of this, yes. I think they got a steam locomotive too, but they got to restore it. Really covering their bases, yeah. Yeah. Just reaching a kind of compromise between these tech chuds and these fomers in the sense of like you get to drive your steam engine, but we get to put a bunch of neon on the sides to make it look cyberpunk. And you have to wear like tech wear.

Yeah, like once a week. One of those Nike Jaggons that weighs three ounces. We go up to the Union Pacific interchange once a week and pick up. five box cards at graphics cards. The question is, do the box cards, it's just like hoppers. Bring back SLI, you fucks. How to like, you know, coal cinders respond to the fabric of an acronym jacket, you know? Like, I assume well.

You gotta wear only cotton on the footplate. No, what if I'm wearing this like cool tech fabric, you know? It's fine, it's fine, it's the future. You know my funniest example of this? is there's this one brand called, I think, Volubak. I don't know how they want me to fucking pronounce that, but they make like, German. Kind of like jerk off motion future clothes, right?

And one of the things that they make is a jacket that costs like $1,000 because it's made in like, with like, copper fibers woven through it. So I will say this, it looks incredible. It looks incredible, right? Because it looks like a big sheet of copper with a zip on the front. the front. But I think every so often about the kind of hubris of, well, how did he die? Well, he was walking around in the thunderstorm in his copper jacket.

Yeah, it's like a hot, you get like a hot cinder, a, very small hot cinder hits the, it's the clothing, and then immediately the heat is transferred to your entire body. Or you get skin poisoning like gold finger, yes. I guess technically this is a plug. It's not sponsored content, but it's technically me going, hey, these clothes look good, but are conceptually dumb as hell and really expensive. So if you want a jacket, then you could be like electrocuted in and have a thousand dollars to spare.

Yeah. Copper jacket. Oh, I like when I search copper jacket. It comes up with Palmer Lucky. Oh, God. Of course he's the kind of person who's into this. Yeah. Yeah.

Ballaback, Copper Jacket, Palmer Lucky Edition, yeah. Yeah, oh, God, he's gonna be the first guy who's copper jacket gets like Statue of Liberty colored just because he doesn't wash. Well, I will say this, I don't know what's gonna happen with the whole, the whole, you know, Tech Bro, Greenfield City situation. I will say, go to Western Railway Museum before they either get destroyed by Tech Bros or receive give a huge windfall of money. I don't know, one of those two things is gonna happen.

I kind of back them to, I back them as a kind of fallout style faction or a new order style faction, primarily train-based, who are going to defeat Solano. Oh, that'd be really funny. Oh, that'd be, you gotta start up. You do a, like, a Mad Max style, like, war rig with old interurbans. Oh, yeah. Oh, Miles will have a field day, yes. Yeah, but in other news, new fetterman rising.

This fucking dip shit. I said this on Twitter, I am going around America like Johnny Appleseed with a bunch of apology forms for Americans to fill out for making fun of the your party shit, because not so easy to build a left that isn't stupid, is it? Apparently, yeah. No. They want $175 for a t-shirt? I'm excited for you to be mad at this brand for the rest of the episode, yeah.

Fuck you. Graham Platner. Oh. He's a... He's a Mainer. He's running for Senate in Maine. He is a dip shit. He was a...

And possibly a Nazi. Who's to say? He's the work truth. He's the woke troop who also worked for Blackwater. He's the woke PMC, not professional managerial class, the other kind. The PMPC stands for pronouns now. Yeah. Pronoun military contractor.

Just on the tack vest, you've got the pronoun patch as you're leaning out of the kind of up-armored suburban to like shoot into crowds for no reason. Yeah, maybe a guy who joined Blackwater back in the day, isn't that woke? Or maybe he's not even back in the way. It wasn't like 2017? Yeah. Yeah. I think he's definitely like, I would say, you know, currently he's, uh, he's woke, uh, probably,

I think, but I could see this guy pulling a fetterman, right? You know, fool me once, uh, shame on you, fool me twice. Um, they found a bunch of his, I can't vote. in Maine. They found a bunch of his old Reddit posts, which never post on Reddit, but in fairness, I wouldn't be stupid enough to run for office, and I mean ever, but if I did and they found my tweets, I couldn't be mad. They found a bunch of his old Reddit posts, a bunch of which were like, yeah, I wish I could

have fought- The Implications for the space program. Yeah, my God. Like, I wish I could have fought in like the US, like, secret invasion of Nicaragua, or some shit like that, where I'm like, man, what? I also found out he was, he was an instructor for the fucking, oh, what's the, what's the like, arm the left guys? What's it called?

The, like, the left gun people, I want to say socialist majority caucus, but that's a DSA. SRA, thank you. Socialist, the SRI, Socialist Rifle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was an SRA instructor. And if you've ever had a criticism of the SRA that they were kind of like politically incoherent, this here is your example number one as well.

So this is cool. People who belong to the SRA are very stinky. But most of all, most of all, I mean, we're gonna get yelled out for that, but it's like, man, I don't know, impose some party discipline or something. But most of all, the reason, the reason why we're laughing at this guy is because of his cool Celtic dog tattoo, which is a cover-up of his Wafn-N-S-S Tottenkottenk tattoo. Yeah, it was very, very much a Totenkov, and he seemed to be aware that it was. Yeah, of course he was.

This is one of things I could, I could understand if you're a stupid Marine and 19 getting that tattoo, but like, you know, you should probably get that laser off before you Iran for office. Right. Exactly. He said that he got it drunk on shore leave. Get the punisher logo, you fucking idiot. Well, that's cop coded.

And one thing you do learn from his Reddit is that he does authentically hate cops, which cool. But like, apparently he said he got this on shore leave in Croatia drunk, which I believe instantly. The problem is, yes. Collaborative city, baby. Of a Marine, getting a tattoo of an SS logo in Croatia, I believe that that's something you could do my mistake. I also believe that's something you would do on purpose.

So it's really much of a muchness to me, and then keeping it for the next, like, 20 years or whatever, is really sick shit. Yep. Yes. Yep. Also, since it seems again from the old Reddit post that at some point he became aware of what it was. Yeah.

Just having... Yeah. Yeah. Here's the thing. If I had like a Nazi tattoo on me and I became aware that I had a Nazi tattoo on me, I would count that day as probably one of the worst experiences of my life. And I would probably chop off my arm. I wouldn't wait for like, you know, for like, lasering off.

I'd be like, all right, we gotta, this is three. I'm drunk driving to the nearest tattoo. tattoo place, holding someone at gunpoint to make them cover it up. Give it your laces! Just like, yeah, also I wouldn't do any of this cute, like, Celtic, fucking runic shit either, you know? Especially if it was a Nazi tattoo. Knocking on the door, basically, yeah.

Just black it out, you sick, fuck. Like, um, but so, again, I would say, regardless of- heavy and strong there. Regardless of whatever. this guy's politics may or may not be, I would suggest that this shows a severe deficiency in judgment, the likes of which might be acceptable for a podcaster, but fucking not for a senator, Jesus Christ, he's ahead in the polls, last I checked. Yeah, he's ahead in the polls.

I mean, you know, I don't, I don't think this guy should be, you know, the great white hope of the left emphasis on white. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, because like, main localism, they've all fucking, you know, I don't fucking, they all have some kind of pre-on disease you can only get from lobsters out there. And so they're like, fuck yeah, give me, give me the woke stone banfura or whatever. And I'm happy for him to represent Insmouth in the Senate, you know? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, maybe we'll be proven wrong, but I don't think so.

I think this guy is gonna- We, I don't think we've ever been wrong on the show. This guy is gonna fetterman hard somehow. Yeah. No, it's gonna be worse, because at least Federman when we elected him was like, not I don't know. He wasn't that bad. Yeah.

We made a mistake. Oh, we made a mistake. I'll be the first to tell you, but like... Yeah. Well, I mean, here's the thing. We've always on Fetterman been like, okay, sure, he seems cool or whatever at the time, but Liam doesn't like him. So we were saved from total embarrassment by that.

So thank you, Liam. No, I don't think so. We were not saved from total embarrassment. Will we not? I remember us being like Liam doesn't like him. Fuck. No, I did like him. That's the worst part.

Yeah, I have a picture with him. Oh. Yeah. Okay. I ran answer to get it. That was before he went full fuck face. At least Zoran's always gonna be good. At least Zach Polanski's always gonna be good.

You can always trust all politicians to do the right thing always forever. Yes. Under no circumstances attempt to build like a broad-based party thing that doesn't rely on individual personality. individual personalities. Don't do that. Yeah, no, no. We need individual personalities. Individual action is how you do politics. That's right. That's, that's a factual truth. Right. You kind of wait until the counter ticks up and you generate a JFK. Yeah, exactly. Never build a broad-based movement. Just do individual action. Or I don't know.

You can, well, the weird thing about this guy is I keep hearing stuff about, uh, why is the left supporting this guy, and it doesn't really seem to be the left that's supporting this guy. No, he's weirdly a new generation establishment dem from like, like the pod save Johns, like the guys who, weirdly now aren't that for this motherfucker, aren't the establishment but want to be, so that they can, I guess, remold the Democratic Party in their image, which will be, God only knows how different, you know, I assume not very. They've been, they've been, they've been disestablished. I think that's wrong.

That's why I'm an anti-disestablishmentarianist. The Long Years in Exile for the Pod Save Johns. Did you see the Washington Post review of Karin John Pierre's book? Which was just like, I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys Shardin Freud, because her book is like, Biden didn't do anything wrong, Kamala didn't do anything wrong. Both of them were betrayed by party interests. And that's why question mark, question mark, question mark. And for once, she actually gets called on this stuff, and this review just takes the whole

thing apart in a way that's really, really satisfying to read. I'm sure it won't change anything. I hate these fucking people. Yeah. Speaking of individual action. The East Wing of the White House is gone. We've all got friends, we've all got mutuals for whom this stuff is meaningful, and who will genuinely be like, it's the people's house.

And I respect the strength of their convictions. However, do it again, Canada. God damn America with three Ks. God damn America. Finished off the rest of it. It's a terrible building anyway. The White House should continue to exist only as a hitman blood money level. That's not wrong.

But I don't know. I, you know, I just, I like, I like the architecture of DC by and large because I'm stupid at a rube. I do not. Demolish all the federal government bit, give D.C. local sovereignty, and then move the federal government to the central point of the United States, which is like a dirt field in fucking, I don't know where, Wyoming possibly, and build a beautiful modernist Oscar Niemeier style cap is all there. That's my opinion. Sure. It's going to be, it's going to be like Denver

or somewhere. No, so Donald John Trump, who is president of these United States. States of America has seen fit to demolish the East Wing of the White House. The East Wing being a 1942 addition to the White House, which was, according to some sources, largely built to conceal the construction of a bunker underneath the White House. Yeah, the East Wing hasn't been pulling its weight ever. It's where the first lady's staff is. Yeah, this is true. The East Wing was not, it was not a very good building.

I will say this I'm going to be honest I was talking to friend of the podcast June a while back about this before it was like it suddenly happened like yeah I think Trump has a few points about the whole tent situation

because we're both familiar with stupid real estate guys and you know okay he's demolishing it to put up this huge new stupid ballroom I didn't think it would happen so quick though I figured they would, you know, get through some kind of process and it would, you know, stall out, like permits or anything for it. They're just doing it, which does not bode well. My question is whether they, do they legally need permits?

I don't know. Um, because of federalism. I don't think there's, if it's, if it were the Capitol building, because I looked this up, I was like, surely the architect of the Capitol has something to say here. No, that's only for the Capitol. complex. Everything else, they can apparently just do what they want. I will say, no one's gonna get food stamps in November, so that does piss me off. I want the wokeest Democratic president to take that, to take that kind of knowledge that

the president can just do whatever the fuck they want to the White House and really get extra with it, you know? Yeah, go to town, yeah. But I mean, listen, the East Wing, I'm not historically attached to it, you have to be the kind person who cares about like First Lady history to, to care about that, or the kind of person who cares about the norms. I dread to think what Melania was using the East Wing for. Like, what kind of sick freak shit was going on in there, though?

Nazi clones. I wonder if that's where the Christmas trees were, although I think that was on the corridor to the West Wing. And then the corridor to the East Wing, I think, was actually historic. Most of that is gone. You go into the East Wing and all of a sudden it starts looking like the bits of control where the fucking Hess is really going. Yeah, I don't know.

Personally, I don't care other than in the sense that it kind of seems like there will not be free elections in 2028. Yeah, I would very much like people to get their food stamps, so they stop bothering me at work. Yeah, also that. sort of a symbolic situation. I mean, he did this during the ongoing government shutdown, which I don't know, at this point, maybe it's just be permanent government shutdown, who knows.

Yeah. Gone wants those Epstein files to get out. You know, so this is, I mean, symbolically, very, very disturbing, but also I think, factually, it was a shitty building, get rid of it. And I mean, in fairness, like, as we've seen, just. randomly adding or subtract or subtracting to the White House is just a kind of presidential whim historically, you know, like. Yeah, it's kind of funny.

Yeah, and people will be like, oh, well, they cut down fucking Chester A. Arthur's magnolia trees or whatever. And I'm like, okay. Well, they got rid of the, what is it, the Jacqueline Kennedy Gardens. That one does piss me off a bit in the sense of like, it's too ugly to, you know, it's ugly to like be allowed to continue to exist, which, you know. I mean, and also the gardens, they'll just probably replant them when they finish this project. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm turning the kind of like Rose Garden into, like not that I was hugely attached to the Rose Garden or whatever, but turning it into like this kind of patio seating thing where you can get like a chocolate lava cake or whatever. And there's a big gold statue of George Washington. Obviously, that was just a lawn, you know. Yeah, I've played by a shock, yeah. Yeah. They could put that back in like, you know, 10 days if they need to.

It's going to be going to be job number one for the kind of next woke president. That assumes we're allowed to have a work president. Well, that's going to be an interesting one. It's like, you know, hey, I'm the woke president. I'm going to come in. I'm going to make a lawn. I don't know. I don't know if that's good either.

know if that's good either. I, listen, I want the kind of, I miss the insincere kind of Democratic Party woke enough that if they wanted to come back into power after whatever kind of blood-soaked military coup and be like, okay, it's the Black Lives Matter pronouns Rose Garden now, I would be like, okay, cool, based. Oh, yeah, and then you replant it with like native swamp grasses to Washington, D.C. Oh, sick. Yeah, okay.

Yeah. We're selling me on this. And then you have like formal events there and you bring in dignitaries and they all get ticks. Again, I'm seeing the modernism. You take all of the shit in the walls behind those, like between those columns, smash that out, big glass windows, and you just do a kind of like fusion thing. It'd be cool. There you go.

All right. We have a plan for the White House now. Brilliant. Thank you. Elected our next, next woke president or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, depending on how it shakes out, hit my line, I will be the new architect of the capital. Get who wine? Yeah.

We're going to give every major world leader ticks. Yes. Oh, you're going to get that. We're all going to get that, that disease that you're all going to get that disease that makes you, it makes it impossible for you to eat meat. Mm-mm. It's going to be very funny if we can get that. that to Jordan Peterson.

All right. How was that? Was that good? It's good, yeah. What is a Jordan Peterson impression? That's probably how he sounds right now, yeah. That's probably how he sounds right now, yeah. Well, that was the goddamn news.

Okay, I wanted to add a disclaimer to start out. So, Microtransit, the sort of on-demand, of on-demand public transportation, there's good forms of this, like paratransit where, you know, they send out a bus for you to get around if, um, you know, seniors I work with rely on CCT to get around, the drivers are nice. Yeah, you see what community trust many vans that are adapted here for that. Yeah, scheduled the, uh, the rides or the seniors, then they go to the casino and then they lose all their money and they come to me and they say, give me your money and I get robbed

at gunpoint by my seniors. It's very unfortunate. So this is a cycle, really. Yeah, yeah, my upstairs neighbor also uses paratransit. God bless us, Venus. Yeah, there's also, you know, other like, we'll figure out this term demand responsive later. There's other systems like this, which are not, you know, the brainchild of, you know, idiots who think a bunch of cars with the transit system logo on them can replace buses. We're going to talk about the bad stuff.

Yeah. So anyway, yeah. Paratransit is good. Anyway, first we must ask a question. What is public transportation? What is it for? To move a lot of people very slowly through 18th and chestnut. Why does that train have one half of a pair of handcuffs on it?

Shut up. Okay. Why is that there? I never noticed that before. I expected you to have an answer. You know about this stuff. It's disconcerting if you're like... What the fuck is that?

Yeah. No. Oh, I was trying to be fully. God damn it. All right. We're doing great. No, but I have no fucking clue. Jesus.

I don't know what that is. If you know why this train is wearing one half of a pair of handcuffs, write in in the comments. Yeah. I didn't have to get it cut off with bolt covers. Yeah. Maybe this train's like a fugitive. Maybe it's like a bondage.

It's wearing a lot of chains up front as well. I was saying it's bondage gear. That was the joke I was aiming for. Yeah. Yeah. We're not aiming for the truck. Um, anyways,

Toy Story, right? Yeah. It's falling with style. Hopefully not on the, hopefully not on the broadshy line. You don't want to be falling with style. Yeah.

There's lots of ways to look at public transportation. It's a means of transportation, right? It gets you from near to point A to near to point A, point B, you know. Yeah. That's usually pretty good, at least for my purposes. You could say this is a jobs program, which is weirdly how I think a lot of democratic politicians look at it, right? Look at all the good union jobs we've created, bus drivers, mechanics, motormen, administrators, construction guys, so on and so forth, right? Yeah.

On the other side of the aisle, it's a welfare program, right, wherein we provide chauffeurs for poor people, right? That's what the Republican, Republican Pennsylvania state senators think. They can all kill themselves. Sorry. Yeah. We'll believe it. It's fine. Yeah. Sorry, Dev. 39 minutes, 36 seconds.

Yeah. So I think there's another interesting way to look at it through the lens of, of course, second wave feminism. What? Hell yeah, Justin. Brackets with a caveat. All right. Right. Hit me with it. All right. All right. I think there's a, there, there's a connection here. So, you know, women, especially, you know, stay at home wives do a lot of labor. A lot of that labor is

uncompensated, right? Yeah. Yeah, the third shift. Absolutely. Yeah. So in 1972, the international wages for housework campaign was kicked off in Manchester at the National Women's Liberation Conference by Maria Rosa, Dalla Costa, Sylvia Frederici, Bridgette. Okay, yeah, I'm aware of Sylvia Federici. Okay, so some problems with the second wave of feminism. Good things about the second wave of feminism. What if we did some Marxism? What if we thought about labor and wages and material conditions?

things about second wave feminism. What if we got really transphobic? What if we got really racist? But also in Sylvia Federici's case, specifically, what if we kind of made up a lot of history in a way that really set back a lot of study of like feminist history in order to advance that agenda? So yeah, I have Sylvia Federici and I have beef, also a turf, second way feminism. Right. Yeah. No, there's a surprise. problems with this movement, but there are some lenses in which, you know, I think it's useful to look at.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So you look at all this shit like cleaning, cooking, washing, drying, childcare, ironing, going to get their husband a beer from the fridge, so on and so forth. That's all work, right? Yeah. Work deserves compensation.

The, the, the title's all it creates. When I said the third shift, if you, if you don't. I don't get that. That is a phrase that second wave feminists and later feminists have used to describe what's now described somewhat trivializingly as emotional labor of, okay, well, you have to, like, if the household is exhausting. But then you also have to run the household, yeah, exactly. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, this is all. Getting the kids to soccer practice. All that shit. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I can barely run my own household and I have a fake job.

Tell me about it. Yeah. I'd say. This stuff's hard. Well, the good thing about being a lesbian is if you're struggling to run your household and you're all women, then it's like, okay, well, thank fucking Christ, there's no, like, sort of differential here, so we're all equally at fault here. Oh, there you go.

There you go. That is what it is. this this work demands compensation compensation would come from the government right because if you're in a situation where you can't do this individually right this is not going to work out for everyone to say well i need an allowance from my husband right that's back to the that's not always going to work patriarchy yeah yeah so you know this campaign it still exists right They've organized a few strikes, campaigned for better rights for domestic workers, sex workers, subsistence farmers, so on and so forth.

They're still around. I'm not sure if they've modernized too much. Yeah, well, I do want to say that this stuff is not something that kind of sex, sorry, I got into the feminist sex wars there and across a wire in my head. This is not something that second wave feminism owns necessarily, and it's also, I've been been a bit reductive about second wave feminism because it contained a lot of stuff, a lot of currents that were very negative, but like, those were never like uncontested, right? And there were trans second wave feminists.

There were second wave feminists of color, right? Like it's not like, there's a lot of stuff that I think became more exclusionary after the fact because of this process. Rewriting history of sex wars. Yeah. But yeah, absolutely. And like, I think if you're in any way a serious feminist, then yeah, you have to take this stuff seriously of like, yeah, there's a bunch of feminized labor that is not conceptualized

that one. Yes, yes. I mean, that's the crucial thing here. You know, I think conceiving of labor as, conceiving labor outside of the workplace as labor, right? Yeah. Labor is not all hitting the big eye beam with the hammer. No, sometimes it's hitting the child with the child care. Sometimes it's like hitting the dirty dishes with the like dish soap.

Sometimes it's like hitting the elderly with the elderly care. So yeah, there's a lot of things that you live. Yeah, I probably don't describe it that way if anyone asks what you do for a living. Yeah. Oh, I hit them with it. Oh, I hit the child with the child care. And all you have is elderly care, everything looks like an elderly person. So also when you think about labor, you can think about things like labor-saving devices,

right? I remember a distinct poster that said, don't kill your wife with work, let electricity help. Oh God. You know, in the case of labor that you're being compensated. for. Sometimes labor-saving devices are a little complex, but I think in the case of uncompensated labor, that's an unalloyed good. So we'll look at two machines here, the washing machine and the city bus. A lot harder to get stuck in a city bus, but not impossible.

Step, brother. What are you doing? Or should I say step busser? What are you doing? Yeah. So, what are these two things have in common? The washing machine. This is true. Both difficult to move by hand? Yes. I'm sure there are others.

Mine moves itself, much like a city bus. Not as quick, though. So the washing machine was one of the most important labor-saving devices invented in the 20th The labor, it saved, was uncompensated labor, right? Hours of a day that women spent washing clothing was now entirely, you know, free and clear thanks to this fantastic, hardworking device. This was now time that was open for leisure or self-improvement or, you know, whatever you wanted to do.

That was your own free time. It does not show up in, you know, like GDP reports because, you know, you know, You know, this labor, like, everything women did in the home was uncompensated. Yeah, GDP is a very limited metric for measuring an economy or measuring economic activity. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, it's always like, a disappointing GDP report from China this year. Also, they opened 40 new high-speed train lines. Imagine that.

So I think we need to apply this likewise to the city bus, right? one driver, one 40 seat bus, driving for an hour, that's going to save up to 40 hours of uncompensated labor that would have otherwise been spent by those passengers driving alone, you know, not to mention capital investment of 40 cars. Sure. If you think about public transit versus the highway system in terms of raw labor time and raw capital investment, transit clearly wins out. We've just offloaded the labor of driving and the capital investment of cars onto the

consumer, and sold it to them as freedom and a status symbol, and so on and so on. Yeah, and clearly this works, because everyone loves driving. Yeah, I, well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people do really love driving. It's frustrating. But if we bought everyone on the roads a car and compensated them for the live, labor of driving for all trips, except for those for pure pleasure. I don't think the economics of driving a car would be so rosy as they are now. So, you know, public transit is a labor saving device that frees us all from uncompensated drudgery. Um, you know, but we generally

don't think of it that way. You know, driving is just free. You can just drive anywhere at any time for free, right? Yeah, you put this in a city building game, right? Like you Godbuild roads, and you can put in as many, like, nice buses and trains as you can, but like, uh, by default- And they don't take that, motherfuckers. Yeah, by, by default, but if you don't have those, or if those don't work enough, people will drive. It just shows up. People just drive, yeah.

So anyway, I, I think driving is generally, like, you know, thought of as like, eh, it's free, you know, you just have it. You'll see how this mindset affects decision-makers later. I like this lens. The bus is a sort of tool of feminist emancipation. Yeah, I like this a lot. The bus, yes, the bus is the evolution of the bicycle. Also a tool of feminist emancipation.

Yes, literally. Absolutely. And the mailbox. Yep. Yep. So now we've got to talk about two problems in urban transportation, which are the last mile problem and the geometry problem. We'll talk about the last mile problem here.

These problems are in tension with each other, right? The last mile problem is that public transportation, right, it's an expensive investment, therefore is generally limited to high density and well-traveled corridors, which is not necessarily, at least here in the United States, where most people live, right, with modern suburban development patterns. So you can provide excellent service to some of the people, but not those who live, like, more than a quarter or half a mile from a subway train or bus stop, right? Right. There's a lot of ways to solve this problem or try to solve this problem, which we're going to demonstrate here at Franconia Springfield Metro Station.

Oh, boy. Okay. Is this like a known thing? I sense a recognition here. This used to be my metro station. Yeah, I was, I'm, I'm yearning for the Roz of your. Yeah, where are the roses of yestia? Where, where, for art thou, uh, Ross, tweeting furiously about the bus not working?

Yeah, well, I wasn't on Twitter back then. I didn't get on Twitter until, don't get on Twitter is my advice. Or I was on Twitter, I just didn't post very much. I remember your untapped account that all you did was to check it on yinglings, which I thought was pretty funny. yep it's beer so one of the ways you can um overcome the last mile problem is of course to run feeder buses right sure um as an example i used to take either the 18 r or the 18s from burke virginia both of those would come up here through old keen mill road and then down to the station um god every time i draw on this It resets the notes.

The 18S provided a direct route to the metro. Well, the 18R sort of meandered through neighborhoods and loopholesacs and so on and so forth. So it could cover more area and get people closer to their homes. You know, that was a slower bus. But, you know, sometimes I took it anyway if I was like really tired after rowing practice. I was like, I don't want to walk that at every distance, right? And it was not that much slower.

And so, like, generally in the evenings, you know, there would be like a dozen people on this bus tops. And when we got down to like three or four, the driver would just yell back, hey, what's your stop? And we'd tell him what our stop was. And he'd just drive there directly and skip a bunch of the route. Hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because no one was like taking this bus outbound beyond Franconia Springfield. At this point, right.

Yeah. This is a fixed route bus. but practically speaking, no one was boarding in the excerpts, you know, yeah, you could get away with this. Everyone got home faster. They were happy. I like an inefficient bus. I like a bus or a train that's like, statutorily has to be maintained and serves like three

people, you know? Yeah, and the guy's just like, where are you stopping? And it just goes there. It's very nice. I had that happen when I was taking the bus in, when I remember when I worked in King of Prussia and I had to take the 125. And a lot of times the bus driver would just skip just a whole bunch of shit and I'd get there in like eight minutes.

It was insane. On the, on the far north line in Scotland, there are stations that are, you have to hail a train. You have to like push a button and the next one will stop because there's so seldom. Spike stops, yeah. That like, why would you, why would you stop at everyone? And I really like that. Another option, you could see right here, you can have a parking ride, right? drive your car to the station and you park and then you get on the train.

Problem is you need a lot of parking, right? This is a pretty big parking is an enemy of the podcast. Yes, this is true. Walk, you motherfuckers. This is an absolutely massive garage. It's like six or seven stories tall. It has 5,000 spaces, right? And obviously, probably not everyone is driving alone to this train station.

5,000 spaces is going to yield about 5,000. 5,000 riders. 5,000 riders is not a huge number when it comes to subway stations. That's like five full capacity trains, which at rush hour is... That's 20 minutes of trains. Jesus, we gotta build a shitload more parking lots. Apparently, yeah, add like 10 or 15 more stories. Oh, they'll get on the tower. The tower of parked cars that just sits there all day.

I forget what the world's tallest parking garage is. Don't look it up, it'll be too depressing. Yeah, no, it's going to be depressing. We have another idea called the Kiss and Ride, right? Ooh, that asked me about my Friday night. And the Kiss and Ride, the idea here, the husband drives the car to the transit station, gets out to go to work, and then the wife drives the car back home. Gendered labor.

Yeah, gendered labor is still happening. Yeah, no kidding. I mean, it's a cute name for it, at least. Yes. And then, you know, have you had bike share, taxis, Uber's, hotel shuttles, office park shuttles, all go to the station and you get infrastructure for those things. You don't really have sidewalks around this station, right? You might be able to make it to the apartment complex across the Fairfax County Parkway. I think it's still a parkway on this side of 395.

I'm not sure. you could go and walk over to the TSA headquarters down here if you really wanted to. This whole neighborhood down here, I had a friend in high school who lived here who couldn't access the metro because they didn't build the connection until like a couple years ago. So yeah, this is one way to do these last mile connections. and you can see there's a lot of infrastructure required, right? It's got its own clover leaf over here, as well as this interchange is basically dedicated to the station.

You know, the big parking garage, the loops and bullshit, but that's what you have to do if you want to move a lot of cars and buses into a station like this, right? This is how you serve effectively a low-density area like, you know, Springfield, Virginia. And on the other hand, you have the geometry problem in urban areas. Building tight, straight, narrow. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, for good to chat. Gorgeous, gorgeous pair of buildings, though. This is... Oh, yeah, it's nice, don't it? Really, really nice. Oh, yeah, this is Juniper Street, and this is... The Wanamaker Building, and then I want to say this is... The Widener Building?

I don't remember this one, dude. I think so, dude. Yeah. Just huge fucking buildings. Anyway, imagine trying to shove all those cars down here. That's not going to work. People sure do try on a Friday. Stack them vertically.

There should be 11 lanes of traffic on this. But yeah, in cities, you're constrained by geometry. There's narrow streets. They can't handle many vehicles. Widening them is difficult because you have to tear down buildings to do that. As such, it's beneficial to transport people using. using large vehicles, and so minimize the amount of space required per person transport it, or go for alternate transportation, like, I don't know, bicycles, or, you could even walk

places. Some people don't like to do that. I would prefer to make all of the cars smaller and gayer and more European. Yes. That would be kind of funny. Everybody has to drive with their knees hunched up on their chest. I thought Trump was making the opposite happen. I want to peel P-50.

You have to drive a Sinclair C5 to work. Yeah, an old Fiat 500. I just like a scooter van. The 600 is like big. So, you know, it's good to use a large vehicle to minimize the amount of space required for person. So a subway train is more space efficient than a tram. Tram is more space efficient than a bus.

Bus is more space efficient than a car, right? Right. So yeah, you got to use the big vehicle. This is a problem in congested areas, but there's a lot of space, you know, you can see, here's the X, here's the Y axis. There's a lot of space on the Z axis, right? I was right. Stack lanes on top of each other, you should be able to lean out of your office window, through someone's car window, and take the drink out of the cup holder.

All that stuff is currently occupied by dirt or air, right? And that's something we figured out a while back. This may look like, if you ever seen any of those old-timey illustrations of this is what the city of the future will look like. Yeah. Yeah. So this is not the city of the future. This is the actual current configuration of Harold Square in New York City. Yeah, but when you walk through it, you're allowed to be like the way of the future. Yeah, this is true.

This is true. Well, okay, they got rid of the streetcars. They got rid of the L. Everything below ground is still there. Yeah. It's very difficult to beat the speed and capacity and space efficiency of heavy rail rapid transit, right? Heavy rail here being like a proper, a subway, right? You know, and back when we were serious about things, you know, you could build these four-track subways that could, you know,

transport people very quickly and efficiently places. We don't do that anymore because of reasons. Well, I mean, the thing about underground is, as I always say, that's where the pipes is. And once that's where the pipes is, and once you start putting in more pipes, gets more expensive. Hey, you know, utility relocation is less of a big deal than people make it out to be. I don't know. That's another episode. All right, get to work, Roz.

Yeah, let me, let me, you know, unless it's like, I don't know, we're going to, we're in a hot tap a 50-inch main or something like that. I understand that was done under Aramango Avenue recently, which is a terrifying thing to think about. Yeah, buddy. When I say recently, I mean like eight or nine years ago. That still counts as recent to me. I'd be thinking about that shit in my deathbed. Yeah, just continuing to think about, oh my God, they relocated that main while it was fucking, it was still alive the whole time. How did they even do that?

It's like one of the key, it's like doing bomb disposal, but you have, in order to do that, you disassemble the entire bomb part by part and rebuild it at a safe location. It's, yeah, I mean. Forensic bomb building. Yeah. I don't understand how, how, that's a part of like, engineering, I'm like, just astonish that you can do that, yeah. That's probably much more dangerous than a bomb, but yeah, so we did really aggressive public

transit skips back in the early part of the 20th century, limited part, to a limited extent, the second part of the 20th century, stuff like, you know, the great society subways and so on and so forth. And we had this sort of problem solved, but again, because of things we mentioned earlier, the accounting looks a lot better for highways. Right. Oh, well, that's way more important than stuff actually was. Yes. So ultimately, here in the United States, I mean, also Europe, also a lot of other places, that's what we invested in and started wasting everyone's time and we're still, you know, stuck in that rut, right? Right. You know, and today, you know, the accounting, again, looks so bad. He couldn't build something like this these days. You'd see

something with the transit demand like that. And you would, you know, say, okay, we're going to paint a lane red and say it's bus rapid transit, but, you know, only Monday to Friday from 7 a.m. to 11 am and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and a parking lane at other times. You have a press conference, cut a big ribbon, call it a historic and transformative investment. That's depressing, right? But that's fucking depressing. Jesus, right? And Cheryl Parker comes down to spell Eagles wrong. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it's the 21st century. We have technology, right? Oh, God. Some forward-thinking folks in the tech industry had another idea. This idea, this idea, macro transit, this is impossible to build, right?

It turns out that when you think you've been on a subway or a bus, you've actually been gaslighting yourself and you haven't. No, yeah, it doesn't work. Yes, that's, we should acknowledge and embrace that. That's because while these things move a hell of a lot of people very quickly and efficiently, look, this is old-fashioned, it's expensive, they don't respond to customers' needs, they don't provide an elevated riding experience, well, especially since we got rid of the L's. They're not using innovative technology to connect people to opportunities.

Oh, I'm gonna beat you with it. Okay, yeah, hit me with it. Worst of all, there's no app. Wow, there's the app, we can also tie this in. You can also tie this in with a bunch of, like, racist hysteria about public transport, where you're like, if you get the bus, MS-13 is gonna cut your limbs off with a machete. Yeah, we should be so lucky. You are going to be acid attack.

That's where the tattoo I regretted was on. So, you know, I... Thank you, OKMS-13 for cutting off my Nazi tattoo. Yeah. So, yeah, what do you do? We have to cast off this yoke of fixed route transit. That is transit that runs on a fixed line, whether it's a bus or a train or a ferry or I don't know. What else is public transit? Oh, just basically whatever. You could do it on a dirigible

if you arranged it, right? The dirigible, an airplane. Yeah, you can have a, uh, some kind of, um, some kind of, he's going to try and think of something quaint and dirigible was unfortunately off-scale quaint. Tandum bicycle. Tandum bicycle. Yeah. You know, we had to meet people where they are at any time, at any expense. What if transit was demand response? What if it was more flexible. What if you, the customer, you're a customer. Don't say passenger. You're a customer. What if you told the bus where to go? I do. That's why I ride New Jersey Transit. You ever taken that to Avalon? It's fucking weird. So we have to talk about demand responsive, flexible transit. Oh, God, must be. How's it going over there, drunkie?

Okay, sure, I deserve that. Let's keep going. Look, look, it factually, I am probably more intoxicated than November right now. Yeah, also saying that's on the point. Having like a court-ordered thing where we have to do a breathalyzer by the mix before we start recording. Let's do a breathalyzer. You have to be this drunk to ride the podcast. Yeah, yeah, I'm not drunk enough.

I have to shoot like a couple of us. He is in some shots before I start recording. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Take this Johnny Walker. We'll tell you when. Johnny Walker, Johnny, yeah, all right, hit me with it.

I'm good. So I talked about the 18R. The driver would yell back at the three passengers and say, hey, what's your stop? And then he would express the bus to those stops, right? Everyone got home nice and quick. Some people looked at a situation like that and said, where's the part where you go on your phone? I'm like, God, interaction with another human? Gross. With the human being? No, gross. Nasty. You know, so in the broadest sense,

demand responsive transit exists, right? Yeah, a football special is demand responsive transit. Yes, or you run more buses and trains at rush hour, yeah, for special events, so on and so forth, but not so flexible, right? You know, imagine 30 people are boarding a bus that goes this way, right? through this area of, I believe, Durham, North Carolina, right? But they're going to a place, which is a block out of the way, right? Fuck them, walk. Or let's say 300 people board the train at Franconia Springfield down here on the blue line, and they're all going to, oh, God, archives Navy Memorial Pen Quarter.

Right, yeah. Yeah, all right. They make the names of these stations too long. No. The Washington Metro has a very long, a very nasty habit of having very long station names. I believe actually U Street African American Civil War Memorial

Cardozo is the longest metro stop name in the world. Incredible. So anyway, if that happened, you know, 200 people needed to go here. Ah, obviously, okay, well, in the first case, obviously we should run the bus one block over to go to this other stop, right? Turn this whole shit around. Exactly, or we should run that train up the yellow line to serve the most people

most efficiently, right? So, anyway, what do you wind up in these two cases are, number one, that bus hits the 11-foot-8 bridge and decapitates everyone. Right. Okay, sure. And number two, that blue line train winds up at Mount Vernon Square and no one can figure out how to reverse it and delays everyone, right? None of those things work.

It's almost as if these things aren't really meant to be that demand responsive because they're meant to be timetable. Yes, they have to, you know, ultimately these sorts of high intensity things, you can't do root deviations, you can't, you know, change the destination of trains, you know, in some limited cases. That's socialism. If you think that the public transit system gets to tell me where it's gonna take me, then that's a limitation on my individual freedom.

Yes, that's true. You know, I should just be able to demand that the trolley go on a different route. It would be nice. Take me to Cuba. Take me to Cuba. So even this idea, it's so patently stupid, that's not where the tech guys started, right? Hmm. But it is sort of a goal, right?

I'm sure they're going to try and do it with some kind of like flying bus or whatever the fuck, you know? Yeah, you can't make a magic AI power dispatching algorithm for dynamically routing large transit vehicles. So the solution clearly is to get smaller, more personalized, more decentralized. Oh no. Less infrastructure, more technology, right? What we need is micro-transit. Live in the pod and eat the bug. Before you get to the pod, I put in a slide, just because I love talking about these things,

any excuse to. So I know this thing as a mahrotka, however, these have been invented many times over, basically every country has had them at one point or another. are typically a like, poor country thing. And they've, they've kind of developed any number of kind of incredibly vibrant expressions. You might know this as a share taxi. You might know it as a Grand Taxi, you might know it as a Taxi Bruce. You might know it as a Jitney or a Trot, or whatever the fuck it is, right?

These are all over the world. And the deal is, it's a bus, but not really for legal reasons. And so what it typically... In New York City, you got the dollar vans. Yeah. In New Jersey, they're jitneys, but they're actually regulated, which is kind of funny. In Hong Kong, you have a public light bus, which comes in two flavors, green and red, and is a kind of like smaller bus.

And the deal is all of these, typically the places that they serve, like the cities or whatever, already have public bus systems, but those are very limited in the routes they serve. to resolve that last mile problem, your smaller routes are catered to by these privately operated minibuses. This could be a big car. It could be a small van. It could be this kind of like Mercedes type B that's a minibus. This is a Russian one. There are plenty of others. And basically, the way it works is it's kind of a taxi, but it runs on a fixed route. And it only starts when all of the seats are full. Sometimes there's a guy who comes back and takes fares. Sometimes you just have to pass them forward. It's very informal. And these things

are great in the sense of like, yeah, there's a lot of flexibility to them. And they're a great example of like, I don't know, the fucking entrepreneurial spirit. And they each contain a bold, cultural, valence, or whatever. However, they will kill you. They're incredibly dangerous. And they're always, always mobbed up because this is, this is like a quasi-legal activity. and like any quasi-legal activity any attempt to organize it is organized crime and so you end up with why is the driver pointing a shotgun out of the window

at a competing minibus this is a problem people don't tend to like it when their commute is interrupted by a gunfight or trying to run a competing minibus off the road however they persist in a lot of the world

And so this is kind of, it's almost micro-transit, Wikipedia calls this paratransit, and actually I have, sorry. I don't know if I would call this micro-transit, because this is a better system. Yeah, it's just sort of like the thing, this is your actual default, right? In the sense that like, where a city builder game is like, everyone has a car and drives. Your actual thing, when the distance is too long to walk, what actually generates, what Spawns in is a mobbed-up minibus. And if you want to read more about these, I highly recommend the Wikipedia article,

Share Taxi, because that has an extensive list by location, and you can see all of the different forms that this has taken all around the world, which are remarkable, particularly enjoy the Moroccan ones, which is just a big Mercedes sedan, but they're all cool. I do not take them, you will die. I think another, like, interesting one in terms of, like, where this can go positively, which I didn't write in the notes, but I thought it's worth talking about, is the slug line. What's that? John.

So this exists in a couple cities as most prominent in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., because when they built I-395, they built it with a dedicated busway in the middle, and then people got mad, and they said, well, this is now a high-occupancy vehicle lane, right. You need three people in your car in order to use it. So after that, people would start going to shopping centers and say, you know, I'm going to park my car here in the parking lot. And then people would drive up to a designated spot and say, well, I'm going to Roslyn. I'm going to the Pentagon. I'm going to, you know, X and Y neighborhood of Washington, D.C. And they start picking up people so that they could take the express lanes, right?

Those people were known as slugs. And this became popular enough of a way of commuting that it became semi-formalized. My dad would slug into work a lot. He would drive his horrible 1980s Chevy Nova. That was supposed to be my car. Homeowners Association made him get rid of it. Fucking Nazis of the hole at the HOA, man. Yeah, that was a lot.

That was a lot safer to drive that car two miles to the slug lot, rather than driving it all the way into Roslyn. It was not a good car. But yeah, I mean, that's like one of these like spontaneously organized thing. It eventually became semi-formalized. And I think it's not only in Washington, D.C. now. It's in, there's a couple other places where they have high occupancy vehicle lanes. People do it.

But yeah, this concept of like, you know, I guess, this decentralized transit is not a bad idea. It's just that, you know, when you're doing it like that, it does not work very well if you organize it top down, which is what we're now going to discuss. And if you organize it bottom up, then what it becomes is a highly mobbed up form of transit. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or it's, you know, get my car, I'm going in the general direction you are.

Yeah. One of the wheels is about to fall off it, and it's like, whatever, man. Yeah. So if you want to do this kind of service, but you want to do it top down, obviously what we need is cars. Why does this look AI generated? I know it isn't, because the text makes too much sense. I don't think it is, yeah.

No, it's not, but it- No one's seen a proper checker cab in ages. There's a particular kind of, ah, there's a quiddity to this one, like, I don't know. I hate that, I fucking hate AI, but one of the reasons why I hate it the most is that it makes me distrust my own eyes sometimes. Yeah, I hear ya, yeah. They made the same model of car until like 1990. Yeah.

It's cute. I mean, listen, I like this stuff. I like when it's idiosyncratic. I have a real weakness for the London cabs, the like black cabs, um, and the various attempts to like modernize them. And I'm always a bit disappointed when I have to get a cap in London and like a minivans shows up. And I'm like, no, I don't want this. I want the special one. So the idea of micro-transit, very simple. Rather than having a big bus that carries a lot of people, you have a lot of small

vehicles that carry fewer people. And rather than you waiting at a bus stop, you use your phone to call a car and it comes to you and drops you off somewhere. I've had this experience. One of the ways I've done that is by standing in the road. And this is a cool experience that you're decreasing getting, sticking your arm out and yelling the word taxi to summon one of these cars. Yeah, well, you should have used your phone is the thing. Yeah, I guess. Because cab drivers love it when you do that, because they, you know, get so much more money from, you know, when you book them with an app.

Oh, God, I've never successfully hailed a cab. I'm gonna be honest with you. It's a good time. Really? When you nail it, like it feels amazing. You feel like you're leveling up in city. Yeah. I have, the cabs don't really come to my neighborhood is the thing. I saw one, I saw one

yesterday and I was like, holy shit, I didn't know they were out here. I have, I have, I have like fond memories of like being, being in the city with my dad and him hailing a cab and being like, oh yeah, this is a, this is an adult skill, you know, like, yeah. Yeah. You know, when you're young and your dad seems like 20 feet tall to you, and it's like, yeah, you know. He was, he just shrank a little bit.

Yeah, he was, he was a 20 foot tall mawist. and the federal government were terrified of him. Yes! My dad was not as far as I know a Maoist, but he has other good qualities, so it's fine. So yeah, the thing I described, some people may recognize as a taxi, but no, this is a new idea because there's a phone involved. Oh, okay. And some people may recognize this as an Uber or a Lyft, but again, no, this is a new

idea because the transit agency runs it. Nationalized Uber. I mean, now we're talking, kind of. Like, it's a bad idea, but it's a less bad idea than just Uber, maybe. So as an example, let's take an infrequent and very messy suburban bus route. Like this is SEPTA Route 206 over here, right? Goes from Paoli Station, then goes all the way around. Uh huh, does that, yeah.

Yeah. It gets 86 riders a day, right? It only comes like once an hour or so and only in the peak direction. It's essentially a feeder route for the Paoli Regional Rail Station down here so that reverse commuters can get to, you know, horrible office park A, horrible office park B, and I think there's a horrible office park C or- Yeah, the Great Valley Corporate Center does sound like somewhere that would make me want to end my own life if I live. if I worked there.

You have to beep that as well. Yeah. I have not commuted on this route, but a very similar one that goes out of Norristown. It was. Oh, the hunted? Not the hunt. Oh, no. I took the hunted to the bus.

Yeah, done that. Which I then transferred to another bus in order to get to a job interview. Yep. Then there. And then I was like, even if they offered me the job, I was like. Fuck you. No. No, I'm not doing this commute.

So yeah, I mean, to run a bus service like this, which runs one way in the morning, runs one way in the evening, you know, there's a big off time in the middle. You have to do all kinds of bullshit with like layovers and split shifts. If you're the bus driver for this route, I would hazard to guess you're pretty low seniority because this would be awful to run. It's expensive to run. You know, if you're a passenger, God help you. If you miss your bus, you're waiting there.

your horrible office for another hour. But, you know, it needs to be there in our current situation, right? With micro-transit, you can get rid of it. It's the thing of the past. Yeah. You replace it with an area, right? In this area, you can order a taxi run by the transit company to pick you up and drop you off anywhere within this area, although practically speaking here, it would just be

Paoli station. Great. Just give me the mob guy with a shotgun and a minibus. Yeah, honest of God. I don't think they would make enough money. You know, so yeah, bingo bongo, all the problems are solved because driving is free. And it can happen, you know, that person is going to show up any time and can go any place through some kind of advanced dispatching system and dynamic.

which is a way to say the guy drives to a place, right? Yeah, and he's got like a GPS and he's got like some kind of software back end like Uber. Yeah, there's like guys something telling them to make a wrong turn. They do that now based on what I know of Septa's on-demand stuff. It uses a third-party app called Ridecoe and it is the most useless thing I've ever had just pleasure for it. So what we've actually done here is created a very small very geographically limited taxi company, which for all practical purposes has one origin point

and one destination point, which is Bayoli Station over here, right? This is actually kind of an advantage. We'll get to the more diffuse networks in a bit. This particular service has not been implemented yet. It's scheduled to be implemented as part of SEPTA's bus revolution, right, which is one of those revenue neutral bus network redesigns that transit consultant Jared Walker likes to do for a lot of people. I got some of the information from him for this episode. But, you know, he's a bit of a mixed bag, I would say to say the least. Somehow, despite it being revolution neutral,

SEPTA didn't have the money to implement it. So this has not been done yet. How does one, how does one, transit system not have zero dollars. Well, obviously it's gotten worse now, but this was supposed to happen like a year ago. That's Sean Duffy's fault, frankly. Yeah. They did buy the vehicles for this taxi service, though.

They were optimistic about ridership and they bought some of those Ford F350 bus conversions for this. Oh, hell yeah. I love those. Yeah. But, okay, let's look at an example of one, which is in service. which is just across the river, in Camden, right? In a dream.

Stealing on the names. Yeah. There isn't a cyber dog there, it's not Camden. So the Camden loop is the micro-transit in Camden, New Jersey. Not a loop, is it? And it's, no, it's not a loop, it has nothing to do with a loop. It's, it's, yeah, no, it's, stupid name. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I guess it's bounded by a loop.

in the sense that it's an area. Yeah, but there's a second loop you can go to. The Camden loops, then. The Camden loops. This is some kind of offense against mathematics. Yeah, but you can also go to the Cherry Hill station here at number one, so it's Camden loops at one point. How do you cross all of the bridges in Potsdam once or whatever?

Like, this is... I was Kaliningrad. Yeah, you're right, you're so right for that, and you did, yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry, he's a dead name Kaliningrad. Obviously not fond of the sort of current tenants, but they, you can't say they didn't earn it, you know? Well, no, it was, it was Konigsberg before, so you did not name it.

But I just did, shit. We are doing so good. Actually, you're Z-eer pronouns. It's not even what the fucking pronoun is. Anyway, tell me about this. German and Russian, which is worse, yeah. So this is, you know, micro-transit, in Camden. This was designed, you know, as like a service to augment New Jersey transit service

within the city of Camden. We can see some statistics up here. I copied this tweet from Alex Davis. I'm just going to trust his math. Averaging 140 riders a day with eight vehicles and eight drivers compared to a previous bus route, which averaged 452 riders per day with four buses and four drivers. This is... I like Alex's phrasing here of a half-hourly, stupid-looking, squiggly loop. Yeah, that's a stupid bus line, and yet, no, it worked better. It worked a lot better.

And so, like, this demonstrates a really serious problem here with micro-transit, which is it just doesn't scale, right? So it's stupid. Yeah, and it's stupid, you know. But it's a stop gap. And the gaps keep getting bigger, so you have to have more stop to gap them with or whatever. I mean, the previous bus was working fine. You actually created the gap that you had to stop.

You know, we call that consultancy. Market efficiency? So one of the biggest problems here is micro-transit does not scale, right? Yeah, bikers in the name, dummy. Yeah, that's true. If you want to move more people, you need more cars or more vans and more drive. which is one of the reasons why, like, taxis are not always very reliable. They don't scale very well because there's a limited number of taxi medallions, right?

Which is, you know, cities only allow a certain number of taxis to exist, or they used to. Uber and Lyft were able to get around this problem by ignoring it and doing illegal stuff. Yeah, because the biggest, like, sealing on taxi medallions or whatever was like city's own capacity to regulate taxi cabs, because they didn't want to scale that, because then the city government has to spend more money hiring more taxi inspectors, or whatever, whereas Uber is just like, yeah, what if we just don't get regulated in any meaningful way?

Also, like, taxi medallions were theoretically a traffic mitigation thing, right? You know, if you had, people realized, you know, 80 years ago, damn, we might have too many taxi, so we should probably limit these. And then Uber said, what if we were unregulated? Ha ha, motherfucker. Exactly. Without even creating a cool looking car that then gets to be in a bunch of IKEA, like wall photos of Manhattan, you know?

So then, yeah, Uber and Lyft, they get around this by just ignoring it and hiring massive amounts of drivers, paying them sub-minimum wage, trying to convince you that the reason they're so efficient is because of some kind of, I don't know, really, really high-tech algorithm that does dispatching better? No, they just have more drivers. And this situation is barely sustainable for Uber and Lyft. But doing this as a transit agency where you rely on like fair revenue and taxes as opposed to Saudi petro dollars completely unsustainable, right? Yeah, Uber's like, I remember it took them years to actually become profitable and still, it's like not great. Yeah, I don't I think they, I think, well, their finances say they're profitable.

Well, quite, yeah. I am, I am getting, I am skeptical of those numbers, you know, for a wide variety of reasons. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? the deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month

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Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash W-T-Y-P-P-Pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. But yeah, let's look at some other aspects. Here's the biggest micro-transit system in the country.

It's in Los Angeles. Boo. Fuck the Dodgers and fuck you, Noah. Antagonistic relationship with previous guests. Jays are going to bring it home. That's right, baby. America's team. America's team, the Toronto Blue Jays. Do it again, Canada.

That's right. They're going to have to rename it the Gulf of Canada after this. So Metro Micro in Los Angeles, right. Metro, micro. They have nine micro transit zones around the city, which bring you to various light rail stations because Los Angeles went all in on light rail. They get something like 2,300 riders per day on this whole system, which is a little less than half the goal of this pilot program about the same ridership as a single,

mediocre suburban bus route um incredible work boys yeah yeah it was about like a very heavily used bus route might have you know uh 10 or 15 000 riders a day you know there's some which are crazy and they're like 50 000 i was going to say you know like the 42 gets or something yeah 42 gets i looked up the 23 and i think it's 15 000 that makes sense okay i'm not sure no that's fine i was i was just thinking about what's a big bus route yeah but Well, you know, I would have to have looked both because they used to be the same route. Anyway, the operating subsidy on these taxis is something like $23 per rider. You're kidding.

As opposed to $8 for a comparably underperforming bus route, according to Streets Block. I'll link that article in the description. I assume the city of Los Angeles has that kind of money to splash around, right? Well, you know, they're the only people still aggressively expanding transit, so, you know, but also, no, this is a terrible return. It's awful. I mean, you know, okay, I guess it's good because theoretically low income people could use this because you're paying a normal transit fare for this, but also, you know, for reasons we'll get into later, that's not who's using it. And also, that's a lot of, that's a lot. That's a lot. a lot of subsidy. It's a lot of subsidy, yeah. Yeah, when you could have something a lot easier. So this is financially unsustainable. So rather than ending this pilot program and saying, wow, guys, I don't think this worked that good. You know, we tried, we failed, go on to something else. Going back to regular fixed route transit, they're going to try outsourcing the drivers

to a third party so they don't have to pay benefits. Oh, what if we made? It made it more like Uber by treating the drivers way worse. Subhuman, yeah, exactly, exactly. We need more vectors for extracting profit, which is weird for a publicly owned transit agency. Now your tax dollars go to exploiting drivers. Yeah. I don't know, maybe they could go and get some like funny money from Muhammad bin Salman too. You know, this is another one of those, like it's like everything these days.

It's all a scam to get around labor laws, right? Sure, yeah. The only kind of innovation you're still allowed to make. Pretty much, yeah. It's the last frontier, you know. You know, when they extract the last dollar out of the last worker, then they can finally go to Mars. But yeah, fundamentally, to some extent, this is a convenience problem, right?

If I have to order a taxi from the transit agency to get to the train, Why don't I just take a taxi the whole way there? Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, micro-transit is going to be cheaper than the taxi. But, you know, you're trying to cater to the sort of clientele who want convenience more than they want things to be cheap. You know, the so-called choice riders who choose to use transit as opposed to captive riders who were forced, poor people who were forced to use transit, right?

This is not, this is not for those people. It doesn't, it does not make sense. It's kind of, none of this makes sense. It's, it's stupid. It's not as classist as it's supposed to be, you know? Yeah. So then, how have some other cities implemented this? Other cities, other locales.

So. Oh, I tell you what this is. This is a subsidy for graphic designers. Yeah, apparently. So up here is Iris. in Kansas City, right? They, they, they ride co, you motherfuckers. Yeah, Rideco does, I think, a lot of the back end for all of this stuff.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Worst system I've ever used in my life. So, uh, in Kansas City, they, uh, they wound up buying just cars for the service. Um, a lot of people get vans, they just got cars. I mean, at that point, you're sort of admitting defeat and being more honest about the ride capacity you need, right? This is probably one of the reasons why they had to end free fairs in Kansas City was paying for this bullshit, you know, but they have, they have a pretty wide service area in Kansas City

for micro-transit. They have their own cars with their own drivers, but apparently sometimes if you call in, or if you, you go on the, the Iris app, it just forwards it to Uber and an Uber picks you up. Incredible. That is the market at work, baby. Yeah. The iris have lost result. So they were a little bit more optimistic here in Montgomery County, Maryland, right?

But they got a big service area with these micro-transit vehicles, which you can see are small like buses, right? This tiny transit buses, right? You know, so you have relatively diffuse, like origin and destinations, right? And it turned out, this is according to amalgamated trusses. transit union. There's fairly limited opportunities for people to efficiently share rides if they're going from lots of different places to other lots of different places. That makes sense. In a suburban context. So these buses run with a single occupant or less 90% of the time.

Wow, that is the thing I said about liking inefficient buses when they're like this. And this is also according to Amalgamated Transit Union, I'll link the report in the description. Ottawa, Ontario found a fun economy when they started their micro-transit system. What if you take the paratransit buses that are reserved, you know, largely for disabled people, right, and use them as micro-transit buses? Yeah, because those disabled people, they've had it too good for too long, right? I was going to say, exactly, yeah. What if we saw using these news for real people who mattered, you know? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And so you can book a really inefficient bus system, and all it took was me throwing all of these useless wheelchairs into a garbage. You can book, I think in limited areas, you can book one of these paratransit buses in minutes with an app, and it will show up within hours. Oh, that's British ambulance response times. If you need paratransit outside of the normal areas, but inside the normal paratransit area, you gotta book it a day in advance still. That is...

Finally, you too, able-bodied person, can experience the joys of disability accommodation when we make the whole service as bad. Spoiler alert, it sucks. No, no. We made the service for able-bodied people worse, but we made the service for able-bodied people worse, but we made the service for disabled people much worse. No longer exists. Oh, great.

Fantastic. That's called equity right there. So I think another aspect of this is you might be asking, okay, but, you know, what if we just get autonomous vehicles? How's that doing? Shut up. And this is a callback to an earlier episode where we had Marcus on to talk about. Oh, the Jacksonville, the ultimate urban circulator, right?

And if this is all autonomous vehicles, right, it's going to be the labor costs we talked about earlier would be irrelevant. The subsidy would be much lower. And then, you know, I don't know. Maybe it's easier to do an autonomous car than an autonomous bus, maybe sort of, I don't know, because from everything I've talked to with bus drivers, bus driving requires very defensive driving and the best defense is a good offense. that's right

or as I've also hand down man down as I've also heard drive it like you stole it autonomous vehicles are not capable of that right now

see I'm I think we're all autonomous vehicle skeptics I yes Waymo still hasn't like released waymo doesn't really exists it's just guys

yeah but they've announced that they're coming to London anyway yeah they're supposed to I'm going to do stuff to a car that hasn't been seen since Burnout Paradise. They have not released, to my knowledge, statistics about how often humans take over driving their cars, which I, yeah, they probably- They're autonomous.

Do you remember the guy who got stuck in a Waymo that was just going in circles and he couldn't even get into the front and like, take control of it? I think this is a beautiful technology in terms of comedy. In terms of the kind of slapstick quotient of our cities, I think it's going up a lot. Like, you get another good round of riots and some things are going to happen to some Waymo's, the likes of which we've never seen before. In terms of like being a good idea to have a round, absolutely not. No, well, what if the transit agency was in charge of it, and that's where we have

to talk about the ultimate urban circulator in Jacksonville, which is intended- intended to, yeah. We talked about this a while back, there's a whole episode about it. It's open now, right? Oh, is it? So here's the ultimate urban circulator, which is this Ford Transit van. Oh, that's depressing. It's beautiful.

Yeah, here's a shot from the inside. It looks like an ambulance where they don't treat you. They just kill you and throw you out the back. Just dump you out, yeah. It's one of those Chinese mobile execution vans. Well, you hate a call an ambulance and the execution van shows up, and you're just like... Well, I guess it's here quicker, but... Is it...

Is it that bad? So note first, here's the large brain box that controls the whole thing, right? Some of the time, right? You've got like a wheelchair lift over here that presumably has to be manually operated, because these are high floor vehicles. Note also the brain box that also controls the thing, which is there's a driver in this. That's not ultimate.

That's just an urban circulator. At least you have someone to operate the wheel chalet. And how else is true, yeah. It's important to note that the people move or this is designed to replace was actually driverless and automatic. But this is sometimes, this is sometimes autonomous, which is better somehow, right? Okay, cool.

God, the future's so fucking stupid. They've given this thing a dedicated lane, you can see here. It looks like it's had about 20 years of road salt put down. We're in Florida. What the fuck? Yeah, and also it's brand new. I don't know how they manage that. There's already like mud all over it.

It's like sinking into the ground. Incredible. I'll link Marcus's article. below. I got to take notes on what I'm saying. I'm going to link below. Um, the ride is apparently so jerky that you need to wear a seatbelt. You should probably wear a seatbelt regardless, man. When I go into a transit bus, you don't wear a seatbelt? I don't have to ride, wear a seatbelt. I was just thinking for a van. Yeah, but for a transit bus, there's no, you don't need a seatbelt down. Point taken. Yeah. Um, apparently the, the drivers have to take over pretty frequently because

the route is really janky. It's the autonomous software cannot handle crossing four lanes in one block. You're in Florida. How can you not handle that? It's just bad root design. In the couple months that this thing has been open, it's carried about 60 people and has managed to override the safety driver in order for it to crash into a light pole. But, you know, okay, this autonomous technology, right, clearly this is-

Any day now. Any day now, no, it doesn't work well yet. So when we have real micro-transit, obviously we're gonna have pods. Yes. Live in the pod. Drive the pod to work. Eat the bug. Yeah.

Look at all these pods. For a while, these were gonna be the replacement for the canceled rail link from Glasgow to Glasgow airports, and then they canceled that too. So we can't even get pods. I mean, because they don't work, is the thing. Well, we could have had something that didn't work, and instead now we don't have something that can't work because we can't even have something that doesn't work.

So if you look at the van that was in the previous image, right, what if we change the body work? No crumple zones. Yes, no crumple zones. It is at least low floor, so it would be easier to get a wheelchair in there. It does have fewer seats, however, but that's fine because it's a pot, right? Also, easier, but not easy.

You have to ollie the thing. Like, yeah, yeah. And if the thing doesn't work, there's no attendant there. I mean, in practice, there would have to be an attendant there. I'll get to that in a few slides. You know, but when you show these pods to like decision makers and people go, you know, bananas for them. It's incredible.

It's the future. It's inevitable. This is what we have to do, right? We're going to get rid of these big, clunky transit bus. you know and and you know that that's that's that's old what we need is a pod it's going to be a pod of some kind right and it's just a fucking van it's just it's just a van yeah but it's a futuristic looking about yeah ross it's a future brought to you by ride co those motherfuckers but yeah i in terms of what you just said november about like using these for the glasgow

airport link because these things most of them are limited to about 25 miles an hour. That's it, that's a, that's a, that's, that's, that's, well, if I remember, it wasn't going to go from Glasgow to Glasgow airport, it was going to go from the airport to Paisley, the city like southeast of Glasgow where you could then get a train and they were going to build like an overpass for them. This was also stupid. You've just built a golf cart, congratulations.

Yeah, you would get on the kind of golf cart overpass that would take you over a bunch of fields and stuff to a train station where you could then get a train. like 20 minutes into the center of town. It's a golf cart with an air conditioner and a computer. But yeah, these pods are particularly insidious because people, you know, unlike a van, people see these as a serious replacement for a lot of transit services. Even like high ridership bus lines, even though it's a van, right? It's just a van.

I think they're supposed to do like some kind of magic stuff like platooning. that's where they can all, you know, get up close to each other at speed on the road, right, thus saving space. But in practice, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a disassembple, it's a deconstructed bus. It's a play on a bus. We're doing molecular astronomy, but with trans. Yeah, that was the word I wanted.

There we go. You guys see the menu? It's going to be like that, but with tires. Yeah, no, that this, this bus comes with expensive foam. That's from the fire suppression system. But yeah, in practice, at least this one in this image is an actual production vehicle that exists in a few places, and it's limited to 25 miles an hour, as I said, and it runs on a fixed route.

It's a golf cart. You know, it's usually like, well, this is a shuttle from one building to another. Cool. Yeah. The future's so goddamn stupid. But yeah. This is a kind of fantasy project for your tech campus. yeah pretty much i don't know maybe we could fix it with other stuff uh more expensive infrastructure

um how's the loop doing uh oh yeah i love when you get to i love when you get to taunt people so yeah that the we've had an episode on the las vegas loop a while back it's not doing any better now than it was back then um at least not on non-convention days um i there was a a good video that um city was it city no it was the other guy wait no i forget if it was hold on let me double check this real quick i want to you tell we've been drinking folks yeah right it is city nerd i forgot if he was the same guy i was like okay yeah but he he just rode this in a uh it did a youtube video about it um hold on let me get back to the notes here um so i understand what i'm talking about um so the loop if you've been living under a rock which sounds like a great idea right now yeah yeah

you know this type of micro transit where there's cars in tunnels right and you go in the car and it goes somewhere else in the tunnels right which you know right now they still every car has a driver um they don't go very fast in the tunnels all this kind of other stuff um it's just another kind of microtransit. I mean, granted, this is privately owned. So other people, the Saudis are losing money on this one. Yeah. You know, that's how Petro dollar recycling works. That's so good at investment. Yeah. So they call Mohammed bin dollars. Yeah. So they, this is just, you know, the same bullshit, but add a bunch of tunnels. They claim very high ridership numbers on this thing. I think they fudge the numbers. There's, there's got to be something. But, you know, a lot

of these, you know, even the private sector can't invest in this properly because a good chunk of the expansion to the Las Vegas loop since they built the convention center section has all been single tunnels, right? Which means each segment of the loop can handle on average a little less than one car at that time. Hell yeah. Beautiful. So yeah, this is, this is, I think the ultimate manifestation of microtransit is we're going to spend a lot of money to build the worst piece of infrastructure possible. I mean, you know, when we put in the Soviet time capsule that, you know, our ancestors will look at in the future, we'll be like, it's not going to be like, we address you,

it's not going to be like, descendants who do not know what a bus is. Yeah, no, we address you, comrade descendants. We apologize for being such morons. We tried to warn them, please find and closed on this thumb drive, a bunch of episodes of our podcast, and then a bunch of our bits leak forward into the future. But yeah, so in conclusion, the fact is here that nearly every single case imaginable microtransit just doesn't work. That's crazy.

What? Yeah. It sounds cool, though. People who run transit agencies like to drive cars. Very few of them take transit to work, at least in the United States. We are forced to conclude that not only is car bad, but van bad. No, no, you'll never have it from me. Rideco bad, though.

I'll get on board with Rideco bad. So everyone sort of forgot that driving cars costs money, right? And ordering a car is, at least in my opinion, much less convenient than where waiting for a bus. You know, these things are, they're expensive to run. They do not attract many riders. They cannot attract riders, because if they did, you couldn't scale it. Like, if they became popular, they wouldn't work.

And they're essentially providing the same service as a taxi or an Uber or a lift, but in limited areas, right? A big bus that can carry a lot of people is always going to be cheaper to run than several cars that only carry a few people just in terms of raw labor hours. You know, maybe you can pay the car drivers less, but, you know, it's unethical. Maybe the cars will become autonomous. They probably won't. This thing doesn't scale.

It doesn't make any sense. Well, that doesn't, that's not going to stop anyone in a position to decide from trying to make it happen. Yeah, yeah, that's the problem. I also doubt that autonomous vehicles would change this balance too much because even if they did work as well as advertised, you're still running a public service, right? So you probably have like a van or a small bus, which means you have to, you know, you have to cater to disabled people, right? Which means you need a wheelchair lift and an attendant to run said wheelchair lift and, you know, strap in a wheelchair and so on and so forth, You know, public safety is also a concern.

Having an attendant or, you know, a bus driver is a nice deterrent to anti-social behavior, generally speaking. Yeah, stop MS-13 from hacking off all your limbs or whatever people are worried about this week. Yeah, unless it's a limb I want hacked off, obviously. Because it's not a tattoo. Actually, for Ross, it's just a tattoo that says H-T-R. What's that? Hail to the team, the slurs. Oh, I see, I see.

This is novel to me. Okay, whatever. Don't worry about it. The Washington football team. Oh. You used to be called something else. Sure, sure. Yes.

The Washington Glee Club. And also, this is to say nothing of the other goals, you know, reducing pollution, reducing vehicle miles traveled, you know, that's the fancy statistic for all the cars on the road. better to have fewer them and not more, right? Reducing the overall amount of labor that a society must perform, which I think is a laudable goal. People should have more leisure time. Hell yeah, I should.

Micro transit fails on every one of these accounts. It doesn't make any sense from like any aspect. It's a bad idea. It's time for everyone to dump it. But, you know, because we live in stupid world. Of course, transit agencies are forging ahead anyway. Yeah, they got to funnel a bunch of money to consultants to come up with a cute name for it and put a vinyl wrap on a Mercedes Vito or whatever.

Yeah. And then make Liam's life worse with Rideco. That's right. Well, I mean, what is the future, if not people saying, we must make Liam's life worse? And then there's nothing to do about it. Well, what do we learn? Burn it. I think, I don't think we learned anything.

I think this is a lesson for other people who have also learned nothing, but for different reasons. Your, uh, your credit certificate is in the mail. If you are the sort of like, a person in a transit agency who gets to decide on this stuff, just don't fucking do this. Give us money. Bus. Run the bus.

Run a bus. Run the bus. Bus is good. I like bus. Maybe if it's crowded, I don't know. Make it a trolley bus. Make it a tram. Ooh.

Articulated bus. You know. Ooh, articulated bus. Those things, yeah, well, those things caught fire a lot and also killed a few cyclists, but, you know, in principle. I like a bandy bus. I also like a bendy bus. Yeah.

No bandy bus ever killed me. It would have to be well out of its kind of normal habitat, for one thing. Oh, we got bandy buses. Did you? Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do. Oh, okay. Yeah, they're on like the 17.

I have no idea how they go around the corners. It's insane, dude. 48 just hauling ass and those guys are miracle workers every septa driver is a fucking miracle worker I'm surprised when the rapture happened a few weeks ago they didn't all go to heaven well that's what the Republicans were counting every one of them is a saint

but yeah well we learned nothing we learned same as always no we're here to educate you that's right this is a lecture not a discussion anyway we have a segment on the spot called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. Hello, Justin, Liam, November, Devin, Gareth, Victoria, Joe and June, among others. This cast is getting too big. I don't even remember hiring some of these people.

No mention of Sam, that's terrible. Yeah, what the fuck? Yeah. My tale of woe! Oh, all right. ...from my childhood growing up in the small, Central American country. of Costa Rica. It's supposed to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I want to go very badly. This is a story of child endangerment, school-sponsored spulunking, and broad mismanagement.

So I think you'll be okay, Liam, so long as you don't go in a cave. Yeah, don't go in a cave. I wasn't, not in a million years. As the story is from my own childhood so long ago, some of the details are fuzzy, and I do not have pictures of the events themselves, but the trauma remains deep within me, and I do have pictures of the fucking cave, so I know in my heart, my experience was real. What do they do to this child? Yeah, good God.

A little background. Costa Rica is a small Central American country bordered by Nicaragua and Panama. It has no army and amazing nationalized health care. It is 30% protected rainforest. The rest is also rainforest. There's some of the best mooters in the entire world. Hugling Costa Rica immigration. I understand it's very easy to immigrate to Panama.

at least. It is some of the best beaches in the entire world. And when I remember those parts of my childhood, I genuinely almost forget the bad. But there is the bad, as we will see. My family moved to Costa Rica to escape the oncoming Great Recession and live there for about five years afterwards. While there, we attended a small private school out in the jungle called Homeschool Beach Academy. I attended the first day the school was open, and at that time, the entire student body consisted of me and three other students in a large home in the middle of the jungle that had been renovated into a school. The school did expand rapidly, though, and by the time of our story, the student body was around 150, between the ages of 8 and 12.

Hang in there, bud, you're almost done. Yeah. I will spare you a long diatribe about the many peculiarities of that school to cut to the point of today, the field trips. Oh, okay. This is where the cave, they go in the hole. Oh, yeah, Ms. Frizzle shows up with the magic school bus, and you're like, oh. God damn it. Because now it's a microtransit. Yeah, now it's a magic, magic micro-transit bus. Brought to you by Ridecow.

Dirty motherfuckers, I hate those guys. They neoliberalized the magic school bus. They took the magic school bus, and they scrapped them in the same scrapyard as all those engines from Thomas the tank engine. So do, no. All right, get on with that. Take the acetylene torch of the magic school bus. They show up next day. The magic board transit fan.

okay um you fucker it's painted yellow at least oh my god they killed it with his eyes open homeschool beach held one field trip a year and each was its own kind of both amazing and harrowing experience our main story is the very last one i went on i'll recount the others to the best of my ability number one going to see a parade where a random drunk guy ran from his car into the parade directly in front of my school group. The last thing I remember is my six and a half foot tall, normally placid, surf instructor slash gym teacher, charging at the crash car and pulling the driver out of the pavement through the window of the car. Number two, loading dozens of children onto tour boats that didn't have handrails and touring around a

beautiful mangrove swamp that was visibly full of crocodiles and large carnivorous snakes. Good. Did you die? Yeah, did you? No, you didn't, asshole. No, you're fine. Number three, going to see a lab developing plasma rockets, then walking four miles along a dirt road, swim at a waterfall, then walking four miles back in the heat,

stopping for 30 minutes to pull out a Jeep that had been nearly swallowed by a part of the road. I got to be honest, this sounds like paradise on Earth, and the state healthcare system funds hormones, so I will be moving to Costa Rica. All right, cool. You'll still have better internet somehow. Yeah.

But the last field trip I went on was a trip to the Barra Honda National Park and Cave. Nope. Seen here in images I managed to find on the Google. Our story begins at the top of the hour, 8 a.m., unlike the previous field trips. The parents had badgered the principal into allowing them along to chaperone. I want to accompany my child into the cave to die. So in total, about 15 children. children, six parents, and at least three teachers.

I dimly recall some ineffable scheduling fuck-ups and buses getting lost along the way to Barahonda, but the details have lost me. All that means is we actually arrived at the park hours later than intended. Barahonda itself is set in a beautiful mountainous jungle. The walk to the cave at the time, the walk to the cave that at the time I did not know was our destination, was a blur of the normal amazing jungle scenery. you get used to when you live in Costa Rica. But I still-

You can't open this by being like, yeah, I'm from this shithole named Costa Rica, where everything is fantastic, by the way. Again, beautiful. You fucker. I still recall enjoying it, the various critters we saw. Yeah, I'm sure you like, I don't know, befriended a leopard or something. Yeah, congratulations, dickhead. And then we got to The Cave.

As a child, the cave mouth seems so much larger than the images I have here, but if you you all have an ounce of scents in your heads and plainly see that is an open hellmouth right into a deep cavern. Yeah, I'm not getting into this. I'll be honest with you. So far, Paradise on Earth, not hitting that ladder. Yeah. A poorly welded, rusty, and moistened by the jungle humidity.

God forsaken metal ladder extended, nearly horizontal for part of the way, then dips down, down straight some 40 feet into the cavern below. Fuck that. No, absolutely not. Yeah. Actually, that's not a terribly long ladder. Well, I don't like how it looks like. Fuck you, Rod. Costa Rican cuisine is generally not spicy. Okay, it's another big tick. Yeah.

What none of these pictures will show you is the one and single piece of safety equipment afforded to interpret it afforded to climbers, right? A small Costa Rican man with a bungee rope tied to a tree, tied to a tree, stands by the pit. While there were some complaints by the parents at this point, the derangement field of Costa Rica apparently prevented anyone from stopping the proceedings. And it's got a derangement field, better still. Yeah, that makes your podcast better, yeah. The order of the day is this. The small Costa Rican man has a slip knot in his rope.

He will wrap that rope around you before you begin your harrowing descent, and as you climb, manually feed the rope down after you. Did I mention, I have a fear of. Heights. No. It's fine. You're underground. It doesn't matter. Yeah, your altitude is actually negative. It's actually negative, yeah. I think the only reason anyone went there went through it was because it was nearly impossible to see how deep the hole was from where we stood around it. The long process of being lowered or climbing repeatedly for each child, an adult took absolutely ages, and I was near the middle of the pack. The ladder, again, is made of partially welded,

old scrap metal and partially of old hardware store ladders which had ended their life being recycled into a child endangerment device in a cave. All of it was wet and slightly slippery. The worst part was the rope guy. The small Costa Rican man with the rope does not know or really care how fast you were climbing down. He has a set speed. He is lowering the rope down through his slip knot to you. If you go slower than him, the rope falls onto you and that means any fall will be worse for the drop. If you go faster than him, it's worse, because the way the rope is tied around your chest. It tightens painfully as you attempt to navigate a giant fucking rusty cave ladder. There was a harrowing spot on the ladder where the cave fully meets it on a thin, welded metal rung, leaving

about two inches of space to place your feet as you climb down. Then, of course, the rope runs out before the ladder does. The safety rope runs out about four to six feet before you reach the end of your journey, meaning in the case of the children climbing down, you needed an adult to help you climb the last few wettest steps onto the slick cavern floor. The fact that no one was injured in two hours it took to get the whole group down, that fucking hole was a miracle. Once inside, the cave was quite nice as they go. While quite slimy, the cavern's mouth is large enough to be well lit, and even while we were corralled into a smaller area, we could see plenty of interesting rock formations. Then we went a little deeper. Oh no, no, no.

Nope. Our second hellmouth of the day presents as a dark, wet hole, a little smaller than a normal manhole. It's the only way to go deeper into the cave, and it's just a little too small. Not only know, but fuck now. It's just a little too small to carry a decent light source down with you. I do not precisely remember the instruction shouted at me as I clambered down, but it involved a precise sequence of hand and foot placements on natural and extremely wet handholds to navigate four feet down onto another ladder, so would a second place. Let's sweat the next four feet down. This part of the tour has some really cool-looking stalagmites and stalactites, which is

picture six, I didn't number these. I don't remember which one I put where. Please, when you are sending in your safety thirds, WTYP pod at gmail.com, remember they are the thing we will do last and we will be sleepy. And also kind of drunk. Exactly. Yeah. And also, don't, don't send weird formats of pictures.

I had to resave a bunch of these in Irfan Beale in order that I could get them in here. Anyway. I feel great. And also a part where the cave guides switch off all their lights so you can experience true and complete darkness. Then you have to climb back up. I don't want to experience true and complete darkness. And I especially don't want to climb, well, I do want to climb back.

up in the sense that I want to be out of the cave, but I don't want to climb the fucking snakeies. I don't want to be in a situation where I have to climb back up because I, you know, it's like, it's like an escape room. I've already beaten all of them because I have to go anything. Yeah, I feel good. Yeah. As I understand it, the tour was meant to go on for longer, but it didn't because my own mother

finally put her foot down. It had taken us so long to get everyone down and it was getting late. The children were already getting tired. No one but her apparently thought. But climbing up the big stupid ladder was going to take longer. And we ran out of water down there, which quickly became its own problem. And so up we went. Even with the dim assistance of gravity, climbing up that fucking ladder was torture.

Remember the rope guy, the way you'd have to keep pace with him or he dropped the rope down after you? Now you were climbing up. He doesn't know or really care that a dehydrated and exhausted child is down at the bottom a fucking pardorous. He's pulling his rope up until he feels it stopped. The climb down is hard enough with the fickle assistance of gravity, but now the children must fight up 40 fucking feet of rusted-ass ladder while having the life squeezed out of them.

I was crying my eyes out halfway up. Oh, Jesus. The invocation of another miracle prevented any injuries here, too. And because I was obviously distraught and severely dehydrated by that point, me and a few other students got to ride a truck back to the start of the trail instead of walking back, which is my last real memory of these events. The fact that I do not have a phobia of caves or some kind of panic disorder about these events in my childhood is honestly astounding. They never held another field trip in the time I was at homeschool beach, which we might

imagine is for the better. I do not know if the school still exists, as I have checked and never found it online. It's a good sign. Yeah, it's part of the better. The past is a joke and we can't see the punch. The past is a joke we can't see the punchline to and misery does not make us stronger people. Peace me with you all from Leaf. Thank you, Leif. Thank you, Leif. Yeah, I'm not seeing any evidence that suggests some to go in the cave from this. Don't go in the cave. No, no. Yeah, well, that was safety third. I guess that wasn't a workplace, uh, in Although, I guess, hold on, is going to school a workplace? Well, then we're getting into, like, other forms of labor again, right?

So... We don't have time for that. Yeah, I'm gonna, I don't know, fuck homework. Hate that shit. It's pointless. Anti-bedtime action, let's fucking go. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, to be fair, this podcast kind of is anti-bedtime action, and that we routinely keep me up until like 3 a.m.

Yeah, that's true. That's because you were out drinking. That's not my fault. It is 14 minutes past midnight, which is to say that the world has been nuked a lot, and I am ready for bed. Speaking of nukes, our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yeah, stay tuned for a special announcement.

Yeah, and stay tuned for that. Yeah, special announcement will be coming. A couple of them, actually, because like, I've been thinking often in my life that I really want to hear about buildings more. Oh, yeah, yeah, well, that's gonna be- about that that's going to be a whole thing we're working on how to do that it's going to be that's not going to come out for a while because that's not a podcast that's a that's it's something i'm really excited about it ross yeah so um yeah um also i i i want to put out this call just because uh

this is not immediately important but um because of the way united states uh immigration law works um if there were hypothetically another live show obviously with the current political climate, it would be very difficult. But the next Democrat is also not going to fix these problems. It's very difficult to get Nova over here. It's true. I keep saying things like God damn America, and I keep spelling America with three Ks, and I keep posting memes of J.D. Vance with the propeller hat. So, yeah. But even then, one of the things we do need for that to hypothetically happen in the future is for journalists to write articles about us. If you are a journalist. If you are a journalist, please write some articles about us. I'm going to, so

anyway. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, we make a lot of money. We have no press. We're a sleeper hit. We're your favorite podcast, favorite podcast. Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're like the Velvet Underground of podcasts. Much less heroin use. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some dark stuff in there. That's all right. Uh, yeah, uh, end this so I can, I can have my nice bourbon. All right. Good night, everyone. Good night.

That was fucking fun as hell. I was nice. It was a good time. That one.