Poll: What would you pay for a SF SV Startup Shuttle?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3041545

by jhuckestein • 15 years ago

73 43 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

johnrob• 15 years ago

I bet a lot of companies would pay on behalf of their employees. That would be cheaper than chartering an entire shuttle.

earl2• 15 years ago

I may be taking a job in the valley, and I'd be willing to pay up to $15 / day, though obviously the cheaper it is, the more attractive it is. Also, having more than one trip each way is important, or it's too easy to get stranded if I miss the one and only return ride.

Anyway, maybe you should collect emails; everybody else, please make sure email is in your profile, and note that you have to put it in the comment area.

jhuckestein6• 15 years ago

Thanks, already putting together a form :)

jfb2• 15 years ago

As someone who commuted for two+ years from SF to Cupertino to work at Apple, the coach service they introduced was life saving. I didn't have a car, and Caltrain northbound in the evening is pants, so having the bus show up a block from my apartment (I got lucky) meant I could work out, shower, nap, eat a good breakfast, and be at my desk by 8:45am, getting shit done. It made the subsequent two years a lot easier to take. Plus, you'd occasionally sit down next to a VP, which was sort of cool.

If someone makes a go of this, it will make a noticeable impact on employee productivity.

jonmc122• 15 years ago

I ride Caltrain several times a week and think it does the trick. I've got t-mobile tethering pretty much whole way from PA to SF (only 3 spots where signal goes out temporarily).

Also, gadget charging not a problem on caltrain - on the old trains, sit upstairs in 7th seat from front. On newer trains, all tables have plugs.

No way a shuttle can compete with the commute time of a bullet train. But, I would pay about the same price as a caltrain ticket to ride a shuttle. One perk I would happily pay for is good food! It would save me the time of stopping to grab either breakfast or dinner.

jhuckestein6• 15 years ago

Interesting, would a fridge with prepackaged sandwiches do? (otherwise we could need to get all kinds of health certifications I think).

Do you live close to caltrain? One advantages shuttles usually have is that they pick up from multiple spots in the city

jonmc122• 15 years ago

A fridge with sandwiches and healthy snacks would be cool. Keep onboard menus of restaurants near the pickup/dropoff so I can arrange for food easily.

Yea, I live close to caltrain, its a 12min walk for me. Personally, I like the extra 3-4 miles of walking a day because its a change of pace, good exercise and good people watching. But, I'm probably an exception, most opt for comfort, convenience first.

joshfraser• 15 years ago

I'm always running draining my cell phone on that commute w/ tethering. Thanks for the tip on the outlets.

abbasmehdi2• 15 years ago

-You should target employers, not employees.

-Asking how much they would pay is not the same as asking how much would they pay at most. E.g. I would rather pay $3/trip but would pay up to $7.

-You don't describe the service offered: the nicer it is the more someone would pay if they were paying out of pocket (yellow school bus or an air conditioned coach with WiFi, power outlets, tons of leg room, very few stops, a toilet and fold down tables).

jhuckestein6• 15 years ago

Agreed with the phrasing of the question, although I think most people got the idea.

From what I hear in many cases employees have to buy caltrain passes and expense them. Having employees pay would directly replace that. Since most people in this thread suggested talking to employers, I might look into that, thanks.

The service offered would probably have all the amenities you describe (bathroom is a maybe, not sure about cost/benefit)

abbasmehdi2• 15 years ago

Great! FYI: I was commenting on the survey not on the service offered (I'm in no position to comment on the service, I live ~400 miles away).

listrophy• 15 years ago

IANAS, but you may be introducing bias by offering pre-determined choices for cost. Perhaps a Google or Wufoo form with free-form entry would reduce bias.

Sample questions: a) [radio] prefer one-way or round-trip? b) [radio] do you want wifi? c,d) [textfield] how much are you willing to pay for a wifi (one-way trip|roundtrip)? e,f) [textfield] non-wifi (one-way trip|roundtrip)?

jhuckestein6• 15 years ago

Seems like there's enough interest so this'll be a good next step.

latchkey• 15 years ago

Find a job in SF? Plenty of places are hiring.

pagekalisedown• 15 years ago

Is there an up-to-date list or site somewhere listing these places?

potatolicious• 15 years ago

That would be nice.

But failing that, the answer to "who in SF is hiring" is basically "everyone".

Walk into any startup space, hacker space, or hacker-filled coffee shop (Summit?), announce your availability as a coder, and try not to get trampled.

usaar333• 15 years ago

In the spirit of equal snarkiness:

Find a house in the valley? Plenty of availability!

nabraham• 15 years ago

Add late night service from 2am - 4am!!

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

Sheesh, yeah. SamTrans 397 takes 2.5 hours (a whopping 14 MPH) just to get between the city and Palo Alto, so missing that last train at midnight really blows. And one night I learned the hard way that neither Caltrain nor SamTrans run past 9~10 PM (!) on Sundays, so I had to take a shuttle from SFO.

huffer• 15 years ago

I guess the OP has the MVP right there: start lean with one-two shuttles after midnight and if it works, expand gradually. Having a night-only bus narrows it down sufficiently and I think you can even find interesting marketing twists which can apply for the benefit and fun of both you and your night owls (err... customers).

pz• 15 years ago

if you work in palo alto then its roughly 40 miles from the city, 80miles roundtrip. assuming 30mpg, 2 2/3 gallons * $4/gallon > $10 in gas. + saving time. if the shuttle ran regularly enough and was comparable in time, then i think $10-$15 roundtrip is reasonable.

that said, caltrain is a smoother, cheaper ride.

juliana• 15 years ago

Very interested in this, but I just spent 4 years working for the transportation department at Genentech, and it's not going to be as easy as it sounds. Pickups, dropoffs, routing scheduling ... dealing with over and under capacity issues. Very curious to find out who's planning this and what's up their sleeve. This could be really fantastic, or a massive you-know-what-show.

renofwon• 15 years ago

Hey juliana, I'm not affiliated with the OP but I've been thinking a lot about transportation issues lately and would love to chat with you about your experience at Genentech.

If you're up for it, please drop me a line, my contact info is in my profile.

channelmeter• 15 years ago

I pay $8 each way for a Ferry from Marin to SF which has no wifi but serves an ice cold beer for the ride home. Anything less than $16 roundtrip a win. Another big win: be Clipper Card compatible!!

patio112• 15 years ago

All those $3 per ride people are employed by companies who value their presence at hundreds per day. a) Bill the company. b) Charge more.

staunch• 15 years ago

Right. Change the pitch from "how much would you pay?" to "would you lobby your company to hire us to provide shuttle services?", now it's 100% "yes" responses.

And I bet more companies would provide shuttle services if someone else handled all the messy details.

No reason each company needs their own shuttle either, so it's efficient and cheap. You can also allow individuals to purchase one-off tickets as well.

jhuckestein6• 15 years ago

This brings up an interesting question: Does this make more sense as an enterprise service? I guess that puts you in the ring with bus companies like BauerIT, but perhaps the democratic aspect of sharing a shuttle between companies can make us cheaper

rmc• 15 years ago

Don't talk to the employees, talk to the companies. "Would you like to give your employees a perk?". Perhaps give employees bonuses/referal bonus if they recommend you to their employers.

earl2• 15 years ago

Peoples' alternative is driving or caltrain, not being unable to get to work. Presumably this will go even less frequently than caltrain, so that's what you have to beat on value.

patio112• 15 years ago

You can get massages, dry cleaning, and dinner without taking a job at Google, too, but Google still spends millions on these things. (Plus shuttles, incidentally.)

dorkitude• 15 years ago

I love this. While I agree with other comments here that it would be good to target employers, I urge you to continue to invite individual members, lest this promising idea devolve into yet another "large(r) company has a shuttle and I don't" situation!

il• 15 years ago

Caltrain is usually pretty fast and reliable during rush hour. But I would definitely pay for a consistent shuttle from my neighborhood(Mission) to the SF Caltrain and back.

samgro• 15 years ago

This seems like the economies of scale would be too hard to make it feasible. Google/Apple have tens of thousands of employees commuting to the exact same place. Startups are spread out all over Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc. I'm skeptical that an economically feasible shuttle service could get me from the Mission to Cal Ave faster than bike + CalTrain.

kapitalx• 15 years ago

My main concern with a shuttle service is traffic. Caltrain is predictable most of the time and quite fast compared to a car.

(I commute from Sunnyvale station into SF everyday.)

jhuckestein6• 15 years ago

Thanks for all the great replies so far. Looks like I should look at employers next. Anyone got any leads? What are some companies that area reasonably large but too small to have a shuttle service?

At the point of this writing more than 180 people have indicated interest in the project with an average price/ride of around $5. It might be possible to break even with this, but it'll be difficult without buying the bus. I have some data on this, drop me a line if you're interested in that stuff.

I put together a wufoo form on the subject at http://jonashuckestein.wufoo.com/forms/startupshuttle-survey... . I'll post it on HN tomorrow morning, I don't know if it's a great idea to post it at night (then again, I have no idea about when to best post things on HN)

floatingatoll• 15 years ago

I would pay 2-3x the cost of gas for the 90 mile trip, for a reliable shuttle service with seats for wide-shouldered folks and enough room to use a laptop for the ride.

rb2k_• 15 years ago

Call it "Enterprise Service Bus" and companies might just start throwing money at you :)

yardie• 15 years ago

Honestly, this is one of those questions that is going to be impossible to answer until you have something up and running. As long as a cheaper alternative already exists (Caltrans) people will assume the cheaper alternative is good enough and tell you $0.

Most people didn't think they wanted or needed an iPad until Apple put it in front of them. And according to Thomas Watson the world only needed 5-10 computers. At the time, these were reasonable answers. Honestly, people don't know what they want until you show them a better way.

henrikschroder• 15 years ago

Being from a place in Europe where there's excellent public transportation, this entire discussion is absolutely hilarious.

See, if all of you that expressed interest in this idea instead actually took the caltrain, the bart, and the samtrans buses and whatever local bus lines there are, then the companies operating those would see that there is increased demand, and the increased revenues would go to making the system better.

There are already people around whose job it is to handle the messy details of moving groups of people around the valley, why make yet another company in parallell?

What annoyed me the most when I tried the public transportation in the valley is how fractured it is, there's lots of different companies, no unified payment method, no unified ticketing system, no unified timetables, no unified maps, etc. Figuring out how to get from point A to point B is really hard because there's no coordination at all.

And into this mess you want to introduce yet another form of transportation? Madness.

slewis• 15 years ago

Its appealing simply because a compute by bus is generally faster.

You're right that the public transportation situation sucks, but wrong that people shouldn't want a new solution that works for them personally.

eru• 15 years ago

And more competition can only help. The argument that a fractured industry needs less competition seems strange.

jfb2• 15 years ago

Because the public transit companies are not fully rider supported, they receive heavy subsidies from the various municipalities they service. Thus, they are in many ways constrained from operating optimally; in addition, they are riddled with politics and empire-building -- why do you think that I can't buy the equivalent of an Oyster or a Carte Orange stored value card that will let me take e.g. the Alameda ferry to MUNI to Caltrain to VTA?

Let me also remind you that the distances and population densities are very, very different, even in a relatively dense area of the US like the Peninsula.

adamtait• 15 years ago

CalTrain is a pain, and as a government service, seems to constantly fighting to be recognized. It seems that few who live in the valley care about their only public transit artery. And, those that do are not commuters themselves or have little involvement in the tech scene. The CalTrain service must highly inefficient at the moment. I've lived in many major cities around the world, and never have I seen a regular commuter train being run by full locomotives. Since the cargo isn't heavy, I can only imagine what the fuel costs to run a CalTrain service are. That might partially explain why CalTrains run no more than once an hour.

The Google shuttle works well because there is one focal point - everyone is going or coming from the Googleplex. Optimizing routes would be harder for anyone trying to open a similar service to the public, since employers in the valley are spread out.

There is also a sorely missing off-hours service. Even at Google, I know several times that friends would have stayed for an extra drink/game if there was a shuttle that left later than 10pm. And, how many have you been caught in SF after just missing the 10:20pm and having to wait for the 12am? Or, had to cut a night short because you had no way of getting home after 12am? Brutal.

Poll: What would you pay for a SF SV Startup Shuttle?

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