They already have a bus system built from scratch (as well as some metal parts, I assume). It's too costly: "Council considered the options for fixed-route bus service during the 2016 Budget deliberations ($270,000 annually for one bus and $610,000 for two buses), but it was determined that they would be too costly for the limited level of service that they would provide"

But now you're saying they should buy vehicles, hire drivers, hire an iOS dev, an Android dev, a back-end coder, an ops team to watch the servers 24/7, a coder to handle payment back-end, a general manager to run the whole thing, pay AWS or GCP or a bare metal hoster for the servers, hire customer support to handle issues, pay Google (or Bing) maps commercial license fee, cover gas, maintenance, tires for all of the aforementioned vehicles and still have a lot of money left over from that fat $610,000 check to justify this project?

Quite a few of those items can be eliminated or reduced.

I think people suggesting "build it from scratch" mean build a local Uber-like service from scratch, which like Uber would not own vehicles itself or pay for gas or maintenance. That gets rid of the buying vehicles, and covering gas, maintenance, and tires.

Dispatching drivers could be done with pairs of text messages to the driver, of the form "pick up <NAME> at <ADDRESS>" and "drop off <NAME> at <ADDRESS>". The driver can tap on the addresses in those text messages to open them in the driver's smartphone's map application. That gets rid of the need for a commercial map license.

I don't see any need for a payment back end. The town can require drivers to accept payments directly using one or more specified methods (such as Square).

It probably doesn't need native iOS and Android apps. A web-based application should be sufficient.

They already have a website. They should be able to add the back end stuff to that, so no new costs for ops or hosting. (That is assuming that they have access to the code for their site and can make changes. Their site is run by Pathfive.ca, which seems to be a company that specializes in building and hosting websites for educational institutions and local governments. It may be that the town only supplies content to fill in templates).

You're describing a business model that (in theory) has a massive built-in cost advantage over Uber (whose model sounds bloated and inefficient compared to yours). The start-up costs are lower, the operating costs are lower, the maintenance and keep-up costs of a single Web site are lower.

Why hasn't anybody executed on that strategy (in practice)?

Forget the government affiliation, someone could be minting money either by competing with Uber on cost or just strategically choosing smaller markets that are not yet covered by Uber.

Why aren't they?

> $270,000 annually for one bus

For comparison, in an average German town, a bus costs annually $80'000, including maintenance and driver. From scratch or rented from a company offering bus services.

how does the accounting work out for the driver's health care and retirement pension?

a typical California city must contribute quite a significant sum so that the bus driver can retire at, say, 70% of their highest salary level. (e.g. over the past year, about 20% of Los Angeles's budget went to paying for the retirement of past employees.)

how does Germany do it?

The employer pays 9% of the monthly wage directly into the federal pension insurance, 7% directly into the federal health insurance. Roughly 1.5% into unemployment insurance

The rest is handled by the employee.

Pensions are paid by the employees pension insurance, and the federal pension insurance, not by the employer.

Note that this is different for certain kinds of civil servants (so-called Beamte). A rule-of-thumb for a typical public entity is that about 10% of the budget go to health and pensions of those public servants (but the exact number varies substantially between different entities), with rising numbers.

There was a distant time where some bus drivers were also appointed Beamte but that practice was done away decades ago, so there are only very few such drivers left.

this. There are so many costs to operating a service like this.

The first person you fire in that scenario is the person who thought all of the above was needed to dispatch a small number of cars to pick people up. I'm going to go out on a limb and imagine that that person is the general manager. After that I would fire the ops team, the ios and android devs as the entire solution could be handled a very simple non flashy website running on cheap web hosting.

Sounds like someone somewhere should be able to run with this idea and commercialize it at very competitive costs. Not necessarily to compete with Uber head-to-head (although this sounds appealing), but maybe to help out a smaller town that's not served by Uber or Lyft.

So what are the most successful examples of non flashy websites running on cheap hosting you'd recommend?

What about situating a small number of operators in an existing office with existing phone lines and communicating with a small number of drivers using smart phones?

Do operators' compensation packages, phone bills, office rental, equipment expenses and utility bills add up to an amount above or below $610,000?

that's not true - the government has the responsibility to use the least costly qualified bid. if the government of innisfil feels they aren't qualified to build their own uber competitor (and they probably aren't) then self-building isn't an option on the table.

I think you're almost right. If the federal government built it and amortized the cost across every town/city in Canada then it could very well be cheaper. I think siblings are correct that a one off would be a mistake though.

> If the federal government built it

Things working the way they do, the government could not build a system that even approaches a service like Uber.

Anyone can build Uber. The hard part is their business model of convincing drivers to lose money working for you.

Governments indeed have the requirement to use the least costly bid. I wonder if that's actually part of the problem.

Although, I really don't know how to make the rules better.

Anyway, from personal, anecdotal experience, I have hired building contractors, first time around I took the cheapest offer, then two years later I needed the same work done for another room and then didn't take the cheapest offer (the one I took was about 25% more). The result could not have been more different. The cheap room has cost me more than 2x the original price, because I've had to redo most of it during the last 7 years and the second room shows no signs of needing any more work anytime soon.

So, taking the longer term view, sometimes it's better to pay more upfront to get more quality. Except that quality in this sense is really hard to quantify and put into rules.

>In this example, that’d be cheaper.

I'm no particular fan of Uber. But the idea that some small city government could create a more economical mobile taxi app seems unlikely to me.

Now maybe this should be some shared local government infrastructure app but those sort of things aren't that common. I know I use checks to make various payments to my town because the online service actually costs me an incremental fee.

>a government has the task to always use the least costly bid.

lolno

A government has the task to provide the best service for its citizens with its budget. We've seen what least costly bid leads to: degradation in quality of all public services impacted.