Originally Posted by
Moderator2
Uber was quoted in the LA Times recently that they believe they need twice as many slots at the new lot then what has been allocated. There are something like 74 Ride Share spots available in the lot, and Uber has half. Lyft up to now hasn't publicly commented, but by association probably has been allocated 37 spots too.
This is going to be ugly without serious dispatch oversight. Many times I've been waiting for a car at the pickup between TBIT and AA, and there has been probably over 50 people loitering around waiting for their car to arrive. Add the other five existing pickup locations (which anecdotally seem less crowded) and at peak times there might be ~175 people waiting for cars at a given moment.
If you do the simplest possible estimate and assume that the need for rides (13,500/day) is distributed uniformly over 16 hours of the day and that the rate limiting step is the ability to load the passengers into an Uber, get that Uber out of the space, and get a new Uber into the space, then there's about 5.5 minutes for those activities per ride. At PDX it takes much less than that to move a vehicle in, load it, and get it out, though it's just a straight line queue rather than slots. There will obviously be spikes and lulls, but the rough estimate says it shouldn't be disastrous. It would be interesting to see a discrete model using real data all the way back to aircraft arrivals to estimate the likelihood of choke periods when the system gets completely overloaded due to multiple banks of flights arriving at once and things like that.