Congestion pricing for use of city streets would quickly solve any problems due to increased use.
Space on the street is a valuable, limited resource, especially at peak times. And it should be priced accordingly.
We also need competition in bus service, not government-run, subsidized monopolies. Then we'd see many more transportation options.
We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries. Or all of the innovation we had here in the US when cars first became practical, before the cab monopolies were established.
While some regulations make sense, those that establish monopolies, fixed supplies, and shortages should be avoided. These inevitably lead to waste, corruption, more crime and terrible service.
No local transportation system in America covers its operating costs using fare revenue. Most local bus agencies in America only cover about 20% of opex with fares; the best agencies (e.g. BART) might get to 70%. This doesn't even consider capital costs.
Good luck getting a private entity to run a charity service. Local transportation is not a profitable endeavor and never has been.
> We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries.
Hint: it's not because the great Euro and Asian cities have competition. Only a handful like Tokyo have competing systems.
My argument is that the US had plenty of competition in transportation before it was regulation squelched it.
If people are making a living driving ONE person around, how is it that they would be unable to make money driving MULTIPLE people around?
It certainly can become unprofitable if government decides to operate large inflexible vehicles that are often empty and that stop constantly. Or whose driver's compensation is not justified by the volume of customers served.
You can take any ordinarily profitable enterprise and find ways to make it unprofitable. But you can only sustain that if you can subsidize it with revenues from other activities, like collecting taxes.
Trying to compete with someone that doesn't need to make a profit is also very difficult.
Cities in Europe, for the most part, do just fine with public transit. It's all publicly-run. And they have solved the problem with a way that would be seemingly unacceptable in the US: Segregated rights-of-way for buses and trams, an extensive metro and regional rail network, and depending on the city, sometimes heavy subsidies. And that's fine, because if public transit is run as a public service, it's not all going to make money.
The real answer is to fix the horribly broken mass transit system across the nation. Only NYC and Chicago, maybe Boston and DC have a halfway decent system (and all four are horribly antiquated by any modern standard).
Then you would, however, have so little traffic and so many users that transit could be made nice.
But these things are politically impossible, and never really attempted.
https://www.ft.com/content/40774fc6-76b5-11e6-bf48-b372cdb10...
The upshot of this is its far cheaper to park outside and get a taxi from outside the zone than to drive all the way in, despite not saving on congestion. The reason it didn't used to be as easy was black cabs are an archaic unreliable form of transport. Uber in the other hand is more convienient than driving and parking.
Honestly, at this point your criticism is about a decade behind the times.