The Uber endgame: privatized public transit | Hacker News Reader

The Uber endgame: privatized public transit

theawl.com

102 pointsenkiv2152 comments

I got to the

" Uber’s re-direction of the political will of its base was its total victory over Mayor Bill De Blasio’s hapless and deeply stupid campaign to limit the company’s growth in New York City—some of the final blows coming from celebrities (and even some business journalists!) tweeting messages written by Uber on its behalf. Would it be crazy to wonder what would happen if those same people mounted a similarly forceful campaign to get Governor Cuomo to clean out and fully fund the MTA to, say, make the L train less terrible?"

Did the writer think for 5 seconds about this? Is the political will (or rather actual monies required) to spend 15 billion [1] on the MTA shortfall the same as not prohibiting a company from operating a tax service?

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/23/us-usa-newyork-mta...

Well, just to throw in this consideration, how much is Uber going to cost the MTA?

Aren't tickets subsidized? At least around here, every time the workers strike the company's balance sheet gets a boost.

Farebox recovery is somewhere in the 30% range, maybe a little less. That means somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the cost of operating Muni is a direct subsidy from the taxpayers, or that in order to eliminate the subsidy, tickets would have to cost about $8 (without loss of ridership). Most of that cost is due to the extremely labor-friendly CBA that's in place, but equipment maintenance and the negative effects of past deferred maintenance are significant contributors as well. It's likely that NYC's MTA is similar.

It would be far, far more useful for the current group of politicians to fix the conditions that cause the MTA to be the single least efficient entity on the planet when it comes to rail construction[1], than it would be for them to rustle up another 15 billion dollars for today's project de jure.

[1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...

>Is the political will (or rather actual monies required) to spend 15 billion [1] on the MTA shortfall the same as not prohibiting a company from operating a tax service?

It's not required that the two costs be identical for the writer's question to make sense. It's known that the Uber investment >||= the necessary criteria, but it's not known by how much. Maybe it was just about enough, or maybe it exceeded it by miles.

The supposition that Uber spent 15bio to lobby NYC to let it operate in the city is nonsensical.

Nevermind the alternative that it's not Uber's business to spend money on fixing the L train.

> The supposition that Uber spent 15bio to lobby NYC to let it operate in the city is nonsensical.

The question was what the effect of directing that sort of campaign towards urging improvements to the rail infrastructure would be, not what the cost of the rail infrastructure would be. They're related because the more expensive something is the less progress you're likely to make on it if you choose to approach it without looking at things like efficiency and labour improvements, but they're a long way away from being anywhere near the same thing.

Yes - and the answer to the question "what would happen if those same people mounted a similarly forceful campaign to get Governor Cuomo to clean out and fully fund the MTA" is no effect.

That's why his point is stupid - because that energy directed at funding the MTA would be a waste. It's like saying "instead of using your a/c to cool your apartment, did you consider putting it outside so that we could cool down the whole city block instead of just your private little space?"

Privatized public transportation seems to work in other countries. This particular plan sounds exactly like Hong Kong's minibuses. Also in other countries, private companies own competing rail networks, competing directly against the local government. (Tokyo is an example, compare Tokyo Metro and Toei. JR was once the government, but was privatized. Keio, Tobu, Seibu, Tokyu, etc. were always private companies.)

Meanwhile, the government-funded model of public transportation seems to be failing in the US. The MTA spent billions of dollars buying new trains and resignalling entire lines to run trains every 1 minute 30 seconds. But didn't actually schedule service that frequently, resulting in trains that are un-boardable during rush hours. (In fact, unresignalled lines have higher levels of service. The Flushing line runs at 33 trains per hour. The upgraded Canarsie line only runs 26 tph.)

Off-peak service is similarly abysmal, with trains running every 20 minutes as early as 11:00pm, that are often as packed as rush hour trains. They can't afford three more trains per hour to run them at 10 minute headways?

With more people using public transportation than ever before, it's a sad time for the government to be unable to justify expanding service to meet the needs of the new commuters. But they are doing a great job of being inept, so it would be great to see the private sector come in and fix things. I don't care who I pay to get to work, I just want to get there quickly and hassle-free.

It's important to recognize that public transit as a concept has major opponents in North America and cities are constantly having to fight to be able to build necessary infrastructure. Bafflingly expansion and funding of transit seems to need to go to referendums, where projects are frequently defeated (a yes vote in a referendum is very tough to achieve). In contrast other transportation infrastructure simply goes ahead as regular government spending.

Ideological Anti-Tax, special interest groups have put huge amounts of money and effort into discrediting and defunding public transit and turning public opinion against expansion projects that would benefit everyone. The most recent example of this would be the Vancouver transit referendum, where the Canadian Taxpayers Federation seeded the idea that the transit runner Translink was a woefully inefficient organization even though in reality by almost any measure it's the best performing transit system on the west coast of NA. In the United states the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity group has been pushing back against transit expansion and funding all across America. http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/03/koch-brothers-war-transit/

> major opponents in North America and cities are constantly having to fight to be able to build necessary infrastructure. Bafflingly expansion and funding of transit seems to need to go to referendums, where projects are frequently defeated (a yes vote in a referendum is very tough to achieve).

Its not working, so what can the US Gov do RIGHT NOW to implement a better system than Hong Kong?

I am not an American so forgive me if this answer is not viable due to the structure of American government, but the simple solution is continuous and steady investment in public transit detached from political tampering.

Many of these failed referendums were about creating a local tax in order to provide that dependable pool of transit funding for expansion and operating costs.

A solution would be for the government to take the initiative and start seriously funding public transit, considering it a first class citizen along with the road and highway network.

The roots of the MTA were in an agency detached from political tampering. It used the lack of political influence to raze entire neighborhoods to build freeways.

The MTA was mostly created to remove this power from Robert Moses.

Not to mention the massive subsidies for driving: roads, parking, trillion dollar wars in the middle east to secure oil supplies. None of these are questioned, but a couple billion for public transit takes giant fights.

Public transit doesn't work very well in the US but that's mostly a problem with the way US politics and government works rather than something intrinsic to public transit. France isn't exactly known for low labor costs but they can still build subways for roughly 1/5 the price per mile you see in the US. So maybe we ought to be doing more private mass transit in the US but that doesn't mean it's a good idea everywhere.

Where have you seen a packed train after 11? I think I've seen one once and that was on Halloween (IIRC) at West 4th Street.

Take the 2 to Brooklyn. Even at 2:30 in the morning it can be crowded.

Imagine the dystopic future where Uber then colludes with the legal/prison complex, and can track everyone.

Even if you don't use their services, their roving band of rfid/wifi/bluetooth sensing cars with cameras that read and recognize object like other cars, license plates, and other people in their environment will be observing everyone and everything, all the time.

Every vehicle, a subpoena-able bundle of sensors.

Watching.

Personally, I find that even scarier than the mass destruction of public transit.

You find government owned transit better in this regard?

It could hardly be worse, and there's the remote possibility of holding your government accountable.

Huh? You hold Uber accountable by not using their service. That's much more accountability than being 1 of ~150million votes.

Apparently 8 million people use Uber.

Being 1 of ~8 million isn't significantly better than being 1 of ~150 million, in terms of accountability.

But it's a faulty argument, anyway. It's not a single citizen that holds a government accountable, it's the masses, and the media, etc.

Even if it is the masses and media that hold the government accountable, they can still be more effective by pointing their power towards Uber than a government. The media's effect on Nike's labor practices in the mid-90s comes to mind as an example.

But not a particularly good example, as the labor problem was absolutely not solved by any of the bad publicity: https://rottenindenmark.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/we-are-not-...

Sounds like the bad publicity did help, but as the problems moved, the publicity didn't follow. It also sounds like local governments were more than complicit in allowing these new problems to fester.

Yup. And the changes in government seem to be sticking.

In the Netherlands you can get an "anonymous chipcard" to check in to public transportation. There are cameras pointed at every check in point, wouldn't really call it anonymous then...

Which you typically charge with your bank-card... And if it breaks and you still have money on it?

You need to fill out a form for reimbursement which asks EVERYTHING, including your gender!

In theory, even if not in practice, governments have limits that private companies do not.

And vice-versa.

A government is (in principle) accountable to its citizens. A private company is only accountable to its owners and shareholders.

In reality, governments enjoy low accountability compared to private companies that must compete for business. That is why failed government programs hardly ever get replaced.

I'm less afraid of unreplaced-failed-government-programs, and more afraid of unreplaced-successful-privacy-invading-companies, especially when they have government approval.

Private companies may be held more accountable, but they are done so by a much smaller group of people. I think its also fairly evident that when a private company harms the general public, the only thing keeping them accountable is the government.

Private companies usually do everything they can to defeat competition - not to engage in it.

s/defeat/remove

In reality, private companies enjoy low accountability compared to government because while they perpetuate the myth of a highly competitive market, it isn't so; they are generally inefficient small fiefdoms. And government isn't allowed to keep secrets the way private companies are; and is required by regulation to act in a certain fair and reasonable way. If someone asks you for every email you've sent in the last year and you're a CEO, you give them the finger and laugh. If you work at a government agency, buy a couple thousand reams of paper and start printing.

Are you familiar with the many abuseable exemptions in FOIA?

Once private companies have a FOIA of their own that applies to their internal communication I'd be happy to examine the exemptions in the two statutes and how they compare.

But for now it's so disgustingly false to claim that companies are less accountable than government that it's hard to believe such a claim is not intentionally dishonest.

First, that's not any claim of mine, so please be nice.

Second, my point was that FOIA doesn't bring as much transparency as you might hope.

Third, the question of accountability is two-fold: to whom and to what extent? Governments and companies are accountable to different groups and to different degrees. But just as the government of Brunei is not accountable to a randomly selected American, a company of which you are neither customer nor shareholder is not accountable to you. Given that companies rely more on consent that governments, the degree of accountability to shareholders is perhaps greater.

Thus I submit that measuring accountability purely in degrees is... incomplete.

Florida's Sunshine Laws [1] do provide a very high amount of transparency, and are a model that should be replicated across the US.

[1] http://myfloridalegal.com/pages.nsf/Main/DC0B20B7DC22B741852...

It wasn't directed at you, I'm sorry if it came out that way: my claim about transparency was a relative one and not an absolute one and in fact I agree with your perspective that transparency even in government isn't as good as it could be in an absolute sense (in some cases, of course); it just doesn't have any bearing the point I was responding to, which is a direct comparison between public sector and private sector.

And very few top-level employees of very large publicly held companies consider themselves accountable to a very tiny elite group of wealthy shareholders. I don't think that this is what people mean when they use the word 'accountable' though. If you want to stretch the use of the word that far, you could say everyone is equally accountable because they are accountable to themselves, or religious people are more accountable because they consider themselves accountable to God while Atheists don't. I think it's fair to assume when someone uses the word 'accountability' in this context they mean to society as a whole.

I would also reject the notion that companies rely on consent more so than governments; they are dictatorships run top-down by generally a single manager who commands his underlings. Companies and governments are enormous bureaucratic organizations which have enormous impact on the societies in which they operate and the people that live in them. Government has checks and balances and voting and are required to publish information about their operations and are open to being changed by the general public (through voting). Companies are secret private dictatorships which do as they please without regard for the wishes or needs or desires of the general public (only when those wishes happen to coincide with a profit motive; a rare happy accident) and publish nothing about their operations by design.

I think it's quite fair to make the claim about relative transparency/accountability, that governments beat companies always; governments are required to try, companies do not even pretend to try (in fact the most profitable companies actively refuse to try). I think you have a very good point about how transparent this minimal transparency is in government, but the fact that it even exists means governments beat companies hands down every time.

Companies rely on the consent of employees and the consent of customers. Many governments are not so nice about this. The dictatorships of companies are ones that people voluntarily subject themselves to. That is consent - to maintain otherwise is dadaist absurdity.

Beyond that, how do you define "society as a whole"? Where do you draw the line? Is Joe's Local Coffee Shack accountable to random fishermen in Indonesia? Is WalMart? To what extent should a country that you are neither a citizen of or a resident of be accountable to you? How is this different from shareholders and non-shareholders?

Governments are not required to try. Many don't. Publicly traded firms pretty universally are required to provide a degree of transparency to everyone. They also provide greater transparency to shareholders and are very directly accountable to shareholders... who can and have organized takeovers of companies.

Perhaps you say "accountable" and mean "I, personally, have power over whatever organization is convenient"?

No, companies rely on forcing obedience from their employees through the threat to remove healthcare and livelihood. They rely on forcing compliance from their customers by hiring a team of highly trained psychologists who specialize in propaganda and brainwashing to try and subconsciously trick people into purchasing your product. They rely on anticompetitive business practices: forcing out competition, or competeting so hard that margins are so thin for everyone that there is no choice but "the lowest cost in dollars" which generally comes at the highest cost in social good or human rights. You're describing some utopia where people work for a company because they want to and have many choices of employer. This isn't the case for the vast majority of people. Saying a company gets your consent because you continue to work for them is like saying a rapist gets your consent because you didn't punch him hard enough when he assaulted you. It's not dadist at all, it's honest and practical. The alternative dishonest -- to perpetuate the myth that draws a hard line between 'consensual' actions -- those which are forced by our economic system -- and 'voluntary' ones like which brand of a product do I purchase -- those which don't matter.

Society is defined exactly in the way that you know it should be. Asking whether or 'society' for Joe's local coffee shop includes Indonesian fisherman is simultaneously saying you understand what society is and that you refuse to admit you know what it is. It's intentionally misunderstanding others for a rhetorical purpose, i.e. arguing in bad faith and you know it. Cut it out.

Western democratic governments are required to try. You're right dictatorial regimes operate more like large corporations and can do as they wish -- they are possibly even worse because they tend to include death camps as well. So if when I say 'government is generally more transparent than private industry' your response is 'what about the Syrian government', well, fine, you've made my point.

Publicly traded firms (a minority of 'industry') are "accountable" to a tiny group of the wealthy hyper-elite in that they have to publish very specific technical details about their accounting. That's quite a stretch.

You refuse to define your words, claiming that the meanings are obvious and that I'm dishonest for asking you to offer your definition. You define consent as impossible because incentives are possible. You change your positions as you go while simultaneously claiming you have not. Enough.

I wish you luck with your rhetorical games, but I shall not be playing them with you any longer. Perhaps someday you'll stop and wonder why the revolutionary change you wish for hasn't happened. If you've become wiser, you'll realize that the answer is that the revolutionary is you.

Uber has competition?

What about its customers? Again, in principle.

A corporation is not accountable to its customers save through the government (and its courts). And zdw's scenario makes them eavesdrop on non-customers anyway.

Customers only matter in traditional scenarios. In Uber's case, they're only accountable to their VCs and other funds pouring money into their (legally questionable) operations.

Are you saying that the consumers are irrelevant to the funds that VCs are willing to dump on Uber?

Depends entirely on the burn rate and how much dumb money is flowing into Unicorns. You don't have to be a viable business, you just need to appear to be viable under certain circumstance.

And having users isn't necessary to appear viable?

Users =! Ongoing revenue stream.

Snapchat. Twitter. And to a lesser extent, Uber if they're unable to reach profitability once its determined they'll have to recategorized drivers as employees.

Stupid money can make quite a few bad decisions before it catches up, even worse if it effects public policy in the process.

You said that consumers don't matter in this scenario. I'm denying that claim, since consumers can simply leave the service/platform to force the VCs' hand.

Whether the company is profitable is irrelevant here.

You forgot about the most powerful economic actor, the consumer.

That's because it isn't.

But the future imagined was only dystopian because the government used that Uber-gathered data to lock people up.

In real life:

- a private company is accountable to its customers, otherwise it will die (assuming there is choice of service providers).

- government's customers (citizens) have NO choice - they are stuck with the same people, despite elections. So the government's "accountability" is for the birds.

Well, in the ridesharing space, how much of a choice is there? Lyft is barely holding on in the face of the Uber juggernaut, despite an existing public perception of Uber as vaguely sinister and evil (at least after last year's scandals).

Knowing that Lyft (or whoever) may quickly replace them if they turn expensive/unreliable will keep Uber on their toes. This is not the case with the government - you can't just start using another government service if the current one sucks.

Ah, but you can vote it out.

For the price of a police helicopter police departments can continously monitor a 10 mile wide area from the sky. That is a lot better than waiting for cars to recognize stuff, subpoena all of them then work on the very hard problem of pieceing it all together.

I think you are vastly underestimating the cost and complexity of tracking everything/everywhere. It's not just a matter of mounting a couple of go-pros on a chopper and putting it in the air. Heck, even if that were all it took, that's very expensive.

Actually, you can look find cases of this already. Complete neighborhood-wide monitoring of every car down to the license plate, and every individual's basic outline are captured by surveillance planes.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/mysterious-planes-over...

Well yeah, that's why you use much smaller, cheaper, and quieter drones instead of helicopters.

The existence of this system is rather odd then:

https://youtu.be/QGxNyaXfJsA

Not that the level of surveillance that's becoming possible (and even expected) isn't deeply repugnant, I'm just not convinced it's quite as cheap as you make it out to be.

What about Uber free states then? Islands of liberty.

Your vision necessarily needs coercive governments to make sense.

Imagine the worst possible future with the system I dislike.

Then imagine the best possible future with the system I do like.

My system is clearly superior!

While I get your point, I don't particularly dislike Uber.

The point is that, like arguments for backdoored crypto, imagine when Uber hits some political roadblock it's had trouble overcoming, and uses the described "eyes everywhere" idea as a way of selling one of their already gathered externalities as a public safety benefit.

Basically, it comes down to what kind of sci-fi you like - are the baddies evil corporations, or evil government. I just happened to conflate/combine the two...

I mostly second this thought (our potential dystopia resulting from some combination of corporate and government misbehavior).

I'll just add that it isn't exactly science fiction. I think it's happening already, case in point, the frequent: NSA +- AT&T, Google, [corporation recently accused of collusion]

Imagine a system where the subways are used as mandatory transportation to forced labor camps. Government trains transporting citizens to government factories, where they are forced to sing the national anthem before another grueling 14 hour shift. And if there are any problems, well, the subway is deep underground and out of sight.

A truly sinister system of subterranean socialism that stands in stark contrast to the red-blooded freedom of the open road.

That's almost scarier to me than Uber bans.

</sarcasm>

I can't imagine a system like that, because the American taxpayer is already unwilling to pay enough to barely support a passenger train system as it is, much less some sort of efficient totalitarian government train system. And digging subways? As if this totalitarian government will be able to get its contractors to do that on time, and fight off the complaints from the totalitarian EPA.

Uber isn't a ride-sharing service - it's a ride-hailing service. The only thing that makes people want to use Uber over a Yellow Cab is that with Uber I open an app, click "Request Uber," the app shows me where the cab is, gives an accurate time of their arrival, and gives me information about my driver. You want to compete with Uber? Those are fairly straight-forward features to add to existing cab-hailing apps. Uber's technological advantage can thus be nullified easily, leaving it only to compete on price. Plus, taxis have an advantage because of the heavier regulation around taxis making them (theoretically) safer.

The sooner the world's cabs companies beef up their technology infrastructure the sooner this upheaval will stop. There will be no further privatization of public transport assuming the taxi companies realize this soon. Oh, and cab medallions are already privately owned.

We have a cab firm in my city that pushes the technology (as well as offering incredible service compared to others) I'd use them over Uber even at a somewhat higher price purely because I trust them in terms of safety and vehicle maintenance more than I do Uber.

Ahem: http://gocurb.com/

The problem is that current technology is making this new model for mass transit realistic. When everyone has a cellphone, and we can have tons of sensors on vehicles that communicate in real time (and might eventually be self driving), the old model for transit (fixed routes, pickups at fixed times, etc.) doesn't make sense anymore.

Many socially disadvantaged people would especially benefit from such a modern form of public transportation: if a single mom working a minimum wage job can go to her workplace in 20 minutes rather than 1h30 for the same price, her quality of life would dramatically improve.

If you subscribe to the view that the government should provide a set of basic services to all of its population (eg basic food, shelter, education, healthcare, transportation), then what should really happen is that the local public transportation agencies (SFMTA, NYMTA, etc.) should be the ones experimenting with new models and offering incrementally better services to citizens as technology evolves.

But that's not how it works, because these agencies are bloated, ineffective, and the complete opposite of innovative. In countries where public transportation is in a better shape (e.g. a lot of western european countries) and the government is more left leaning (ie has no qualms making Uber illegal), services like Uber are a bit slower to reach the mass they are in the US, but it's still going to happen in the long term.

We can't have it both ways. Either we go full capitalist, and in this case privatized public transit the Uber way seems inevitable in the long term, creating a 2 tiered public transit system: one privatized that works really well for the higher social classes, and the regular public transit system that will further languish and deteriorate as only poorer people use it (an outcome which I personally hate and find absolutely dystopian). Or we need to figure out a way for local governments to provide those basic services to their citizens, growing and changing them as the technology matures. That's much more appealing, but I'm not quite sure how to get there in a way that benefits all citizens equally.

The "same price" caveat of your example is a pretty darn big exception. Quality of life would dramatically improve if we could get there, but for now, the fact that you can get across 20 miles of NYC sprawl for $2.50 is an unbeatable deal. Would any private company settle for as thin (or no) margins as any MTA does?

What the MTA charges and what it costs the MTA aren't related. They receive massive subsidies (though amusingly the biggest subsidies go to the LIRR for people commuting in from the suburbs).

http://www.wnyc.org/story/283927-mta-suburban-passengers-get...

> the fact that you can get across 20 miles of NYC sprawl for $2.50 is an unbeatable deal.

Also, the people who need to travel the furthest in NYC tend to be the ones who can afford it the least[0], which makes the flat price incredibly important.

Let's not forget that one-third of all subway stops in the US are in NYC[1]. Unlimited travel between any two of these costs $116/month. That's an incredible deal indeed!

> Would any private company settle for as thin (or no) margins as any MTA does?

Absolutely not; the MTA itself barely 'settles' for it. They're robbed blind every year by the state legislature, because most of the folks in Albany don't care about public transit in the city. Every year, the MTA is the perennial scapegoat for the state's budget issues, and they end up having to pick up the slack and take the public heat. No private company would ever stand for this, and the MTA only does because it literally has no other choice (being a highly regulated entity).

[0] This is not always true in some other cities, where the people traveling the furthest by public transit tend to be coming from the wealthiest areas and working the highest-paying jobs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

For sure. And NYC is a bit of an outlier, given that it probably has the best public transit infrastructure in all of the United States. That being said, I don't see why a potential future "Uberized" public transportation system couldn't offer flat rates, or even lower rates to people with lower incomes.

Because the "Uberized" system (at the moment) will still rely on individual vehicles. There is simply no way to compete in price with this set up.

The true stupidity of the pro-Uber flock is that they are accepting Uber's "innovative" business as the solution instead of looking at what the real innovation would be: a decently funded public transit system in the USA.

I think we'll see governments doubling down on rail/subway (where possible) and leaving bus services (probably minivans in most cases) largely to private enterprise.

> But that's not how it works, because these agencies are bloated, ineffective, and the complete opposite of innovative

That's quite a blanket statement that sounds a whole lot like ideology. Data seems to point to a high usage in several cities[1] and usage continues to grow over time. If this was such a horrific service as you describe, I think we would see little to no ridership.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...

Please be a bit more pragmatic about actions that will effect around 100 million people.

I don't know if the comment to which you are answering is right, but you did not provide any data points to refute what he's saying.

You simply said that there is 'high usage' - but it could be just as well along with the systems being 'bloated, ineffective and not innovative'.

Have you ever taken public transit in Baton Rouge, Houston, Detroit, or any similar city with enormous income disparity? I have, and calling it "public transit" is doing it a very big favor.

Linking to the wikipedia page that lists the US cities with highest transit usage does not strengthen your argument, because by definition those cities are likely to have better transit than the others.

When a lot of people do not have any other choice than public transit to get around, using high usage and growth over time as metrics for success seems misguided.

I live in Orlando and our "public transit" is definitely "poor people with no other option transit." When I visit places like Chicago, New York, or DC I'm always jealous of the quality of public transportation there.

> If this was such a horrific service as you describe, I think we would see little to no ridership.

And people would do what instead? Walk? Ride a bicycle 15 miles in subzero weather? Buy a Benz?

Many pub-trans systems are horrible precisely because their bulk of their ridership are poor people who have no other options to get to work. They're over a barrel and they have no leverage to demand improvements.

In the US, public transit can't make major changes, in big part, because they're very beholden to the unions.

Here in the Philadelphia metro, tickets for the train are sold by SEPTA ushers (cash only) who walk up and down the aisle of the train. It's been shown numerous times that a major portion of the cost of running the trains are these ushers, but the union blocks every attempt to move all sales to ticket kiosks.

In fact, labor costs now make up $898,340,000 of SEPTA's $1,259,764,000 budget, but time and again any move to lower that cost is blocked outright.

I used to commute from Wilmington to Philadelphia on SEPTA. It's fucking insane. The infrastructure is actually pretty nice. Good new trains, express tracks, etc. But they don't even have ticket vending machines like Amtrak/Metro North/etc. You have to wait in line for a human cashier.

This anecdote says more about Philadelphia than it does about American public transit in general. The metro system here in DC, for instance, has automated ticketing kiosks that allow payment both by cash and credit card, as well as smartcard commuter passes that can be reloaded at stations or online. My experience with NYC's subway is more limited, but it seems to offer a similar range of conveniences.

Philadelphia is particularly bad in terms of labor costs and DC is particularly good. Most US subways don't do ticketing the way that Philadelphia does but they do often put more people on trains than they need.

DC Metro is still crushed under the weight of their (~10,000 person strong) staff.

DC Metro, while having an annual total ridership of 115 million less than the Philadelphia system (330.1 million vs. 215.3 million trips), has a personnel cost ($1.3 Billion of their $1.8b total operating cost) greater than the total cost of the Philly system (with 9,000 person staff).

You're missing the point if you're only looking at the specifics of ticketing kiosks.

> if a single mom working a minimum wage job can go to her workplace in 20 minutes rather than 1h30 for the same price, her quality of life would dramatically improve.

That's a big honkin' if. Here in New York, you can get an unlimited metrocard for $116 a month; that's probably a week's worth of Uber rides.

Mom's not going to benefit much from that 20 minute ride if she still has to get up an hour earlier and work for two more hours to pay for Uber.

> We can't have it both ways. Either we go full capitalist

Also, this is a problem. If we go full capitalist and kill all government public transit, we end up having ONLY the upper classes use transit. There will be no reason to lower rates, there will be no subsidies. Is Uber going to build me a train to get me across town for $2.25? Absolutely not.

A city can afford to lose money on a public transit system because it gains that money back in having a tax base and an economy that's fueled by the people who use it. A private transit company has absolutely no reason to lose money per ride, except in the very beginning when they're trying to establish a user base. After that, their interest in the local economy is not as high as the municipal government's.

> Mom's not going to benefit much from that 20 minute ride if she still has to get up an hour earlier and work for two more hours to pay for Uber

If she's saving over an hour on each end of her shift, she won't have to get up earlier. Also keep in mind she's probably paying a good chunk of her wage on daycare, so cutting 2 hrs off that would help a lot too.

Heck, just having an extra 2.3 hours a day to spend with your kid is way more valuable than anything else I could think of...

> If she's saving over an hour on each end of her shift, she won't have to get up earlier.

But she will be having to pay a lot more to get to work. Which means she'll have to work more. Which means she'll have to get there earlier, or leave later. Which means that all the time she saved by not taking the bus is now spent at work.

And sure, 2.3 hours with your kids is great. But making sure your kids can have dinner is better.

>That's a big honkin' if. Here in New York, you can get an unlimited metrocard for $116 a month; that's probably a week's worth of Uber rides

Sure, if she just got a regular UberX ride, but that's not responding to the GP's point or the article, which discuss the possibility of Uber setting up its own transit lines, somewhere in between UberPool/Lyft lines and a municipal bus line, in which they could get fares down closer to bus rates with more direct routes.

You're right that it's a big "if", but it's not responsive to compare a monthly pass to the current non-bus-ified Uber rates.

Oh for christ's sake. I am a major proponent of public transit and walkable cities. Anyone who shares my support should be cheering wildly at Uber's expansion. Uber is the greatest, and perhaps the only, threat that we've ever had to American car ownership.

With Uber, those occasional necessary car trips can be contracted out cheaply and easily. When you aren't FORCED to own a car to survive, many people simply won't buy one. The fewer people that own cars, the more heavily transit and bicycles will be used for daily trips. Ride-sharing is perhaps the most important blow ever struck against American car dependency.

To this point, I am a car guy, I was a car salesman for many years, and always had a nice car. A few years ago when I moved to Seattle, I decided to take a chance on public transit and Uber and decided to only have a single car for my family of four. It worked out! I actually can't stand to even drive anymore, and when my wife and I go out we try to avoid driving ourselves whenever possible. We still need the vehicle for long trips and for things like going to home depot, but it gets driven far less. I've also found myself taking the bus to destinations I normally wouldn't because the bus stop is a few miles from where I want to be, knowing that when I arrive I can get an Uber for the last little leg of the trip.

There is theoretically a public bus in Wilmington for $1 that makes a frequent trip past where my wife works (in the heart of the CBD) to the Amtrak station (about a mile and change away). Except it's never on time (in a small city with no traffic to speak of), and drivers decide to just randomly end their trips early and stop picking up passengers.

Now that Uber is available in Wilmington, my wife has started using it heavily. That's great for her, not so great for all the low income people who actually need to use the service. And ultimately it's not Uber's fault that they're offering an alternative to the dysfunctional public transit system. The municipal government is supposed to be the ones offering poor people a safe and convenient alternative to walking through downtown Wilmington at night, and they fail at their job miserably.

> It is telling though that Constine notes that one of Uber’s Smart Routes runs “up Fillmore St. from Haight St. to Bay St. in the Marina, which the Bay Area’s BART service doesn’t cover,” when the route is directly covered by the SF MUNI 22 bus, which runs every eight minutes according to Google Maps

again: > every eight minutes and only costs $2.25

If only we could remove the stigma an bigotry associated with riding the bus, so many issues with public transit would be cured.

I think this stigma and bigotry is an SF Bay Area thing. Or at any rate, I have never seen it here in Seattle. Plenty of well-off Amazon employees on the bus every morning.

I wonder if it has to do with the Bay Area being so spread out and car-centric, that only quite lower-class people don't have cars. Just a hypothesis from an outsider.

This stigma is why General Motors invented the school bus.

Whatever you are driven around in as a kid you will hate when you grow up. The bad smells, bullying, getting puked on and feeling of being an effect rather than a cause that you get from riding the school bus will translate to you hating busses as an adult and wanting to get your own private car just as soon as you can.

Nobody ever talks about Generation X, but one thing about us is that we grew up in minivans so that the thought of driving a minivan is like putting your hand in a toilet.

Seattle is a fantastic counterpoint. Of all the cities I've seen, Seattle has managed to have excellent service and ridership using a primarily bus oriented public transit system. It's a great example of how the stigma of buses is one of the largest obstacles public transit in the US needs to overcome.

I don't think people are taking Uber over the MUNI because of "stigma" or "bigotry". For sure there are some Uber users who are too good for public transportation, but I don't think that's a majority.

The real reason not to take the MUNI is speed. The MUNI is really, really slow. First of all it's a bus in SF traffics so it's a natural disadvantage except where it has a preferred lane. Second, the MUNI stops way too frequently, which adds many minutes to travel time. Sometimes it stops at every block [0]. So a ride on the MUNI that would be about 40m will be 20m in an Uber because the Uber will stop only 1-2 times depending on how many people you're sharing the ride with. So the MUNI is $2.25 and the Uber will be about $6 (in my experience). If you add in the convenience of hailing the Uber with your phone and getting to track it with GPS, you can see why people with extra money would use this.

However you should not take this as an endorsement, it's simply an explanation. I find it pathetic that the best SF can offer me to get from the north part of the city to downtown is a 45 minute jam-packed bus ride. It's only 3 miles! I'd love to see public transportation get more effective. Until then, I'll pretty much always ride my bike or take a Lyft Line.

0 - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are...

This is very noticeable in the Bay Area, but not an issue in either Toronto or NYC. For example - in Toronto - while most people would generally prefer the subway or streetcar there's no stigma against buses (well - unless you consider the Vomit Comet).

The price vs. users graph[0] is hopelessly wrong, dangerously wrong even. So wrong I can't take anything the author says about economics or markets seriously at all. I think they're trying to make the argument that Uber will achieve economies of scale but that would be cost vs. users, not price. Price and cost are different things.

The graph also implicitly makes the assumption that there are an infinite number of users and Uber has competitors. In reality as the number of users increases Uber looks more and more like a monopoly and the price approaches whatever maximizes Uber's profits as opposed to "free". The bigger Uber gets the more they become the government they're fighting against.

In a healthy free market price will approach marginal cost, but Uber isn't fighting for a healthy free market. It's the last thing they want.

> While zero car ownership will undoubtedly and unremittingly be a net social good—can’t wait until driving is something one does for fun, ban cars!

Can't tell if the author is for or against regulation.

[0] - http://cdn.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/price.jpg

For me the main problem with infrastructure heavy mass transit, which the author seems to prefer, is that the horizons are in multiple decades. I've forever been frustrated by mass transit going not where they are needed.

In addition, in the SF south bay, mass transit infrastructure suffers from a chicken and egg problem. Density isn't high enough to support transit, so it would be unwise to waste tax revenue in elephants, but without the build-up, the environ for mass transit isn't stoked.

Personally, I don't care who comes up with a financially viable solution, public or private. Having seen what public delivers, I'm optimistic private can compete and deliver something meaningful in under three decades of studies, agreements, bonds issuing, lawsuits, etc. Overseas, private mass transit delivers at least on par with public mass transit. Moreover, the NYC subway system was borne from originally private systems.

I guess autonomous vehicles like uber's are likely to win out over the ideas by united technologies' "people movers". Still unsurprising that in the end the ideas to get to efficient mass transit tend to merge.

Same as Amazon, Google, Github. Basically technology monopolies, or technopolies as I like to call them. They have become so powerful that they are the de facto government in certain areas. Thrn they get in bed with the government and its hard to say where one stops and the next begins.

The endgame is for America to become the next China.

> One of the more subtle underlying issues with the rise of Uber is the company’s slow siphoning of the political will to fix existing—or build new—public transit infrastructure in major cities.

I don't think this is really true, at least in the short run. Uber fills the gaps which previously prevented me from completely getting rid of my car. Now that I'm completely car free, I rely on public transportation for trips that are well supported by our infrastructure and use Uber for trips that aren't, so I care a lot about our public transportation infrastructure, and usually support improvements, unless they are very poorly budgeted or misguided.

So, I guess Hacker News is focused more on the tech than the political, but, still, I'm kinda taken aback by the comments here. The Uber "endgame" is a super-small fish in the bigger ocean called "neoliberalism". It's not just a tech issue, but technology does accelerate the issue.

It's a very deep concept, and fairly complex. It includes related disciplines such as Neoliberal Jurisprudence. Before anyone goes all "you don't know what you're talking about" on me, I concede I'm no expert. It's a very deep concept, after all. My exposure to the issue is largely via my wife and others in her cohort, studying at one of the US's top political theory grad programs. They are heavily studying/working on neoliberalism, taking it very seriously.

It's worth educating one's self about it. Both in general, and as an IT/Tech professional. It's already a thing, most people just aren't aware of it yet.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.... http://inthesetimes.com/article/17533/how_to_sell_off_a_city http://www.popmatters.com/column/194010-neoliberalism-is-cha...

So they've invented low-capacity, very expensive buses?

More like on-demand buses that adjust their routes automatically according to where people need to go.

And filter the riders to not be obnoxious, violent, unhygienic, racist, etc. And have real, working location status updates. And are clean. And won't tell you they are coming even though they are at capacity.

As you can tell, this bus analogy irks me.

Uber really only has two things in common with public transit: cars and buses both have wheels to go places, and the services are both paid.

{1} On-demand vs. scheduled

{2} The given number of cars in the field sets a harder upper limit on number of riders. With buses, it's basically always "pack more people onto the bus, no matter how crowded" (i.e. the bus is forced to approach closer to "theoretical" carrying capacity of vehicle's physical volume - compare this to how much Uber is used for single riders.)

{3} Anti-"troll" filtering (I mentioned elsewhere that this works for the same reason it works on web forums - you eliminate the irresponsible elements.)

{4} No routes with Uber: go where you want. Normally this flexibility costs you at the rate of a taxi.

Etc.

That's not a full pictures of their current offerings. UberPool/Lyft lines are already closer to public transit on the continuum, with respect to the distinctions you made:

1: Pool/Lines add a lag to search for a match, so it's a bit less on-demand and more favorable others' schedules.

2: Pool/Lines increase the riders/vehicle.

4: Lyft Line hotspots reward you for picking start points at special locations, and ending within a zone, so it's somewhat route-constrained in return for a lower price.

The article's prediction (and Uber's upcoming initiatives) simply go further in that direction: more constrained routes, more constrained times, lower prices. It's not the sharp boundary you suggest.

Oh, I see. Thanks for the correction.

A better analogy would be jitneys, or perhaps airport shuttles that aren't restricted to the airport.

I think they'll eventually be quite affordable.

If they're partly on-demand and on a more convenient route, even a higher cost may be worth it. And ultimately anyone is free to ignore the offer if costs are too high.

That "fire" drivers very quickly in response to passenger feedback and ban passengers in response to driver feedback. Doing so solves a significant subset of the problems with public transit.

>Doing so solves a significant subset of the problems with public trans

'Bad' passengers and 'bad' drivers are a significant problem with public transit? Huh?

I don't know about drivers, but if you've ever shared space with someone going through cocaine psychosis, you'll believe in bad passengers.

Well said. This is what makes Uber so good: this mechanism for keeping out the people who aren't responsible[1] enough to use the service fairly/follow the rules.

It's the same reason a web forum with firm moderation and anti-troll policies will have higher-quality discourse.

That actually kinda makes me more worried. As a passenger, removing the crazies sounds great, but in this scenario someone who's going through a hard time and makes a couple of bad decisions can get permanently banned from their only means of getting to work (assuming Uber succeeds in completely privatizing public transit). It's basically a No-Fly List on the ground.

("Get a bike" is not a universal solution; bikes cost money, and the kind of winter wear you need to ride across town in a cold climate without getting frostbite costs more money, and a lot of people don't get paid enough to have that much squirreled away even before their life went to shit.)

No, they had been invented in many places before eg the dolmuş in Turkey [1], or the pesero in Mexico [2]/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmu%C5%9F

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesero

Lyft Line is a low-capacity, slightly more expensive bus.

Uh no, the end game is autonomous logistics; getting someone or something from point A to point B. More automation is good, we're sorely lacking in automation.

The real issue is distribution of profits. If the money gained stays at the top levels and doesn't move around much, you get stagnation and a poorer standard of living.

If a small group of people gets rich off of Uber's solution (eg via stock), while everyone else gets to benefit from the drastic improvement in the taxi or transport system - it's everyone else that is getting the extreme majority of the benefit, as with nearly all similar scenarios.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have given me an extraordinary benefit to my life. I've maybe given them a few dollars over the years. It's clear who got the most out of that trade. They got $30 billion total (much of which will no doubt go to charity), the world got how much in benefit from what their search engine can do and how well it can do it? The same will plausibly be true with Uber in concept.

You make it sound as though Larry and Sergey personally created all the content on the internet that you consume.

I think adventured was referring to the value created by Google search, in itself, being so good at what it does - and not to the actual contents of its results.

And I am suggesting that the value created is much lower than the value captured.

I think the documentary Taken for a ride(1996) [0][1] which showed up

on /r/Documentaries [2] is perhaps relevant to this discussion.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236785/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/3iflv6/taken...

Remember UK rail system. Used to be publicly owned, privatized and now a disaster.

Jamaica has had this system for years. You stand next to the street and point if you want to go up or down, and you get a ride for $1. It's pretty cool. 7 people in one car at times.

Lebanon has a similar thing. Stand by the highway, get in the next private bus/van that comes by, pay the driver $1-$2 when you get off at your destination. You can go anywhere in the country for $2; it's amazing.

The author writes "One of the more subtle underlying issues with the rise of Uber is the company’s slow siphoning of the political will to fix existing—or build new—public transit infrastructure in major cities."

This seems quite logical, and is a common argument that's been tossed around for a while now, previously in reference to employer-funded transportation for employees (popularly, "the Google bus", though there are many). The only problem is that it's deliberately ignorant of the past. Since the author mentions SF Muni by name, we should recognize that Muni has been a total disaster since at least the 1970s. If there has ever been political will to improve it, it's been thwarted. The agency has never met any of its legally mandated service requirements, despite numerous (successful) ballot measures throwing money at the problem and setting policies giving it a high ("the highest", per Prop A) priority. So it's pretty difficult to pin the blame for that on something that's existed for only a few years.

It's no secret that I have no love for Uber, or that I consider it just another taxi service that should be regulated as such (which doesn't necessarily mean it should be regulated the way taxi providers are today). But claims that Muni's failure are Uber's fault are simply laughable. Muni was a worthless pile of garbage before Uber's founders were born, and it wasn't on an improving trajectory that Uber came along and trashed, either.

The other angle, which the author did not explore, is that private mass transit is very common and popular, as it once was in the US, in many of the world's poorer countries. It's ubiquitous in Asia and Latin America, and while it won't win any awards for speed or comfort, it is cheap, effective, and capable of operating profitably without direct subsidies. This seems at odds with the author's lament that those left to suffer the indignity of public transit in the US are those with no other choice. Clearly that is a product of a political system that champions public funding of mass transit, not some inevitable outcome.

There are many ways to make transit (public or private) better. I don't believe Uber is one of them, but nothing the SFMTA has done suggests that it's part of the solution, either. And it's been failing without Uber's help.

I live in DC. Our public transit is regularly late or broken, and is on fire often enough that people feel the need to check before their morning commute [1]. If the future of public transit is Uber, then I can't wait.

[1] http://www.ismetroonfire.com/

Given how shitty public transit is here (and has been for decades) and how good Lyft is, this is an endgame I welcome.

Ever since I started using Lyft, I stopped taking the local public transit (except on certain special routes, like going straight downtown when I'm near a train station) because it's better.

This sounds a bit like a scare piece given that dollar vans [1] already exist, they just aren't smart phone enabled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van

Honestly that sounds more like spin than anything. They are working on self driving cars which is going to be a much more profitable business than privatizes public transit.

I believe this is probably more likely to be an attempt to change public perception.

Take ideology off the hook for a moment, and if you are a supporter of lots of government support for mass transit, ask yourself, do you really want government agencies to engage in extremely, extremely speculative development [1] of millions of dollar's worth of software, radical new ways of organizing mass transit, and experimenting with a brand new way of providing services that have never been seriously tried before, and by all rational measures, at the outset of the project the most likely outcome can only rationally be considered failure?

Honestly, if this wasn't an ideologically-loaded "private industry vs. government" issue and we were all wearing our rational thought hats instead of our politics hats, we would vigorously condemn any mass transit authority that prioritized such a risky venture at the risk of dropping actual services to poor people! That's not their job.

This isn't a private vs. public story. Let the private industry prove out the model at their own risk and their own expense. Let them recoup the expense and pocket some profit for the risk at the expense of those who can afford the service. (The poor are not actually hurt by not having access to Uber, anymore than they were hurt by not having access to it 10 years ago.) Let the government come in behind and work on providing services based on the risks taken and the lessons learned. Perhaps even by contracting out to Uber, or perhaps more likely, a yet-to-be-founded mass-transit-focused competitor, when the model has been derisked enough that the poor aren't at high risk of being boned by the vagueries and vissitudes of Silicon Valley unicorns.

This would hold true even if all the city governments were models of efficiency, and all had highly trained and skillful staffs of programmers on staff who could easily write all this code. But come now, even you promoters of government, let's all be honest with each other, this is not the case. And, again, that's not least because it would be unacceptable for a mass transit authority to hire all that talent when it should be using money to provide service.

Government can't be good at everything, because there are something things that it can only be good at at the expense of other things it is supposed to be doing instead. Wildly risky experimentation certainly sounds like a good candidate for that category to me.

[1]: By contrast, to be clear, I am fully behind incremental advancement, exploration, and development by governments. It routinely happens and it should. But in general, it is not their job to do moon shots with social programs. (Note the "moon shot" and "the bomb" and all the other really experimental stuff that you might want to name are not social programs. A line of military research coming up dry does not directly harm the poor. (Especially under progressive taxation where "the poor" pay either very little or negative taxes in the US, so you can't even really complain about their tax load.))

I like your point on public/private risk/reward, but you're too quick to say that wealthy people switching from public transit to private rides doesn't hurt poor people: the public transit systems will suffer from reduced frequency of routes and diminished funding, and the community will suffer from a wider class divide.

I think Peñalosa did a good job advocating in favor of public transit for all in his talk in which he said "An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport" (https://www.ted.com/talks/enrique_penalosa_why_buses_represe...)

I want to agree with you but unfortunately the system you're proposing isn't really feasible.

The poor actually are hurt by not having access to Uber as it becomes more and more popular and ubiquitous. We all are in fact. It's a stratification of society; there's one transportation scheme for the rich, Uber, and one transportation scheme for the poor, government-funded mass transit. And mass transit is barely funded in the United States as is. Once the rich have alternatives how long do you think it will take for people to whine "why should I pay taxes for a service I don't use? I can afford Uber I shouldn't have to pay for busses for poor people". Three months? Six? Maybe a year? If people use Muni every day they're willing to support it. If not, well... Then the wealthy with all of the political clout will push to defund our 'inefficient' public transit and it will become unusable.

I think that it would be really nice to let private industry test things like this, but their tests are completely worthless from the perspective of providing actual mass transportation. They will find ways to take wealthy affluent people from places where wealthy affluent people live to places where wealthy affluent people work. The government isn't allowed to cater only to the rich in the pursuit of profits so unfortunately the results of the experiment will always say: hello government, if you stop taking care of those pesky poor and disabled and old citizens, you could have a very efficient system and reap great profits. Too bad you aren't legally allowed to throw people under the bus.

"I want to agree with you but unfortunately the system you're proposing isn't really feasible."

It's the system we actually have.

I suppose that isn't proof of "feasibility", because people's definitions vary.

"The poor actually are hurt by not having access to Uber as it becomes more and more popular and ubiquitous. We all are in fact. It's a stratification of society; there's one transportation scheme for the rich, Uber, and one transportation scheme for the poor, government-funded mass transit."

If you want to define "harm" as "one day, a new thing pops up, and only the rich have access to it because it's very expensive, and now the poor are more harmed than they were yesterday because there's a thing they don't have access to that didn't exist yesterday", that's your decision. It is consistent and perhaps not wrong.

But I don't care much about that sort of "harm". You've defined yourself up a definition of harm that can never be fixed, by definition. There is no way in theory or in fact to move things instantly from brand new and expensive to "affordable to provide to the poor for free or high subsidization". And problems that don't admit of solutions, even in theory, aren't ones you should spend a lot of time worrying about.[1]

Far more interesting is the question of how to harness what has been created to help the poor. And there will be a time delay. It can't be helped, only at most minimized, and economics being what they are, you can blow a lot of money that really ought to be helping people now trying too hard to push that date forward beyond what it naturally "wants" to do.

If that reality bothers you... well, good, you're human. But that doesn't mean you can change it. Things like this can only start at the wealthy end of society and flow down. Deny it to the wealthy in a fit of pique and you only create a situation where the poor don't get it either! If we accept that the poor are harmed by not getting these sorts of services we are ethically constrained to consider that a bad choice.

[1]: "But if people just accept this, it'll be true!" Tell you what, you create a concrete solution where innovations can generally be instantly introduced to the entire world and I'll happily, gleefully, joyfully recant. In the meantime, this is the world. The rare examples of successful rebellion against some small part of reality puts a heavy survivors bias on our view of that sort of struggle; in general, this sort of reality is not fixed by wishing really hard it wasn't true.

Interesting points. I think the harm that's being caused is not in the existence of a new service, but in the transition to a system where our resources are split: the notion that funding dedicated to general transportation is a zero-sum game and pushing resources towards a private solutions that helps only the wealthy takes away resources from the public, universal service -- hurting them.

It's worth noting, also, that the public subsidizes services like Uber especially when it gets to the point where private cars are replacing busses and larger public transit: cars on the road generate risk of accidents and injury, pollute, generate wear and tear on the road and transportation system, generate traffic which harms everyone, etc. Having the poor subsidize a private service for the rich so they don't have to ride alongside the riff-raff on a bus is pretty unpalatable.

We don't have to take away resources from public universal solutions and transition them over the private, wealthy-only solutions. So far we haven't, and it's certainly possible that we won't, and this private system will work concurrently alongside the public one in happy concert. I am just concerned that this will not happen.

And I'm inclined to agree that the time-delay is necessary, but I'm not so sure about your assumption that the effects of this transition will eventually "trickle down" to the poor at all.

I'll concede to your point that a two-tiered system doesn't necessarily cause harm to the poor just through its existence; you're right and your point is very well argued. But the remainder I think remains a valid concern.

I agree with the spirit of your comment. As a counterpoint, the NYC subway began as a private enterprise. A big point missing from this comment thread is that we may be conflating "private business" with "private (personal-ish) vehicles," where personal vehicles obviously can never have the capacity of, eg. the NYC subway. Personal vehicles are just plain all around bad for moving large numbers of people. I'm not sure Uber with its motto "Everybody's private driver" is the right private enterprise to deliver privately operated mass transit that is healthy for our cities.

fat chance in hell. as soon as uber makes money by raising prices, paying drivers less or both, many others will jump in, quickly destroying the returns on investment.

I see uber as a giant bulldozer that is paving the way for future competitors. Once they realize there's no way to keep people locked in unless they form a cartel like the traditional taxi industry, investors will panick.

An Uber cartel is the least possible outcome because they do not own the roads, the car, the people. Do I ride the bike to work or hitch a ride? Do I use Uber or just take a taxi that's parked right across my building? Do I use Lyft or Uber if Lyft is offering cheaper ride? Is there any noticeable difference or do I even care, I just want to go from A to B and pay the least amount of money.

This is the endgame for Uber: enable future competitors to reap the returns on it's investment because they are focused on monopoly in an industry that won't make it possible.

With very few exceptions, public transit in America sucks. In the cases where public transit is run by a private company (usually contracted out by the local government), it is much better. I for one welcome private involvement.

[Citation needed]

I think OP lives in a post-war town and is extrapolating anecdata.

Baltimore ;-)

Thirty years ago my small hometown had bus service to the closest big cities. Three private companies supplied round trips from one downtown to another several times a day.

Now there is only a shuttle, which costs twice as much, runs only three times daily, and doesn't go anywhere but the airport. If you are car-free in this town, whether by choice, poverty, or disability, you're going nowhere unless you have friends to drive you. So I was excited about what Uber or Lyft could do for the rural car-free...until I remembered how the private bus companies left us high and dry. What's to keep Uber from doing the same?

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