Are we using these efficiently?

At CommuterPageBlog there is a post titled The Last Mile in which an Arlington resident who lives a little over one mile from East Falls Church Metro discusses transit’s inability to get him all the way home, and how that is a major detriment to his use of transit. The author, Steve Offutt, suggests PRT as a solution to the “last mile” problem, claiming that while PRT can’t replace transit’s “line hauls”, it could supplement transit on a more local scale.

BeyondDC isn’t optimistic about the practicality of PRT, but the question of the last mile did get us thinking. Is there a way to use existing infrastructure to accomplish Offutt’s goal? Cyclists will tell you they have the solution, and cycling should absolutely be made easier, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Of course there are buses, but low density neighborhoods can’t support enough of them to justify convenient headways. Taking a taxi every day is expensive, and only worth the time if you can hail one directly rather than call and wait.

But what if taxis worked a little differently? What if there was a fleet of taxicabs outside each Metro station that provided government-subsidized $1 rides anywhere within a strictly defined service area, perhaps a mile and a half in radius? Since such cabs would only be permitted to operate inside the service area they’d be making only short trips and so would circulate in and out of availability very quickly. Calling one for dispatch would be practical since the dispatched cab could arrive almost instantly. Since the service would be government operated, drivers could be paid a guaranteed salary rather than work off fares, which would eliminate the temptation to give preference to passengers looking for a high-paying long-distance trip. Such a system might also be useful to urbanites running errands to the grocery store, for example.

What sort of investment would this take from the local government? How many riders might such a system carry? Could this reduce car ownership in low-density neighborhoods as effectively as car-sharing does in high-density places? We don’t know any of those answers. This could be an awful idea. But a wiki search tells us that “share taxis” are common around the world, and that “dollar vans” operate in New York, so there’s some precedent for similar systems.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Has it been studied? Should it be? What do folks think?