An Unholy Alliance Against Public Transit | Hacker News Reader

An Unholy Alliance Against Public Transit

jacobinmag.com

40 pointsJaimeThompson25 comments

There's no evidence in this article or the cited articles that Uber/Lyft are seeking to subvert public transportation or are working with the Koch organization. It says they are partnering with public agencies to supplement mass transit. This might be part of a bigger scheme, but there's no evidence presented that they are lobby against public transit at all.

Yeah, I am no fan of Uber, but the article is contentless click bait.

Quote from uber

> “A portion of our trips can be a substitute for public transportation,”

And Koch is trying and succeeding to remove funding from public transit, that makes it easier for uber to replace public transit. So they are effectively working together.

But Uber/Lyft are not lobbying against public transit. In fact, in Denver, you can buy RTD tickets through the Uber app. There are plenty of reasons from a labor perspective to dislike rideshare companies but this ain't it.

> But Uber/Lyft are not lobbying against public transit.

Right but nobody claimed that.

It's the implication you and the headline are making. I have yet to see any evidence that Uber and Lyft are against public transport. They are competing with it, which is their right. That's massively different from attempting regulatory capture like the Kochs have done.

The article mentions that Uber hope to replace public transit miles, and recognize it as profitable to do so. There's a link to a Times article that elaborates on this claim. It is true that Uber on occasion enter into sort of last-mile "partnerships" with transit agencies, but we should all recognize how such a strategy can be a wedge for privatization-a sort of public service embrace-extend-extinguish.

There is no conspiracy or collusion with the Kochs alleged in this article. One tidy aspect of Marxist politics (Jacobin is a socialist magazine) is that it recognizes that wealthy people's actions aren't arranged through some grand and unlikely conspiracy, but rather by a shared material interest that causes them to tend to desire and work toward similar things. Thus the note that, though Uber and the Kochs have many superficial aesthetic differences, including preference of political party, they appear to often work toward the same political ends anyway.

Similar goals via duck typing.

Probably shouldn't put the word "Alliance" in the headline. This is just a case of coincident incentives. And yet still, there is no evidence Lyft or Uber are actually taking any steps to undermine public transit even if it is a possible outcome.

> And yet still, there is no evidence Lyft or Uber are actually taking any steps to undermine public transit even if it is a possible outcome.

Nobody said anything about Lyft. Uber itself said that they aim to replace public transit. I really don't understand why you would go to such lengths to make up bullshit.

The point of the article is that Uber is working with the Kochs to lobby against public transport. That is a lie. Uber are not lobbying. They see public transit consumers as a big market that they can take a piece of. They are currently using only supplementary strategy (ride back and forth to train station). Eventually, they may compete directly. If they offer a better service than mass transit and it drains riders, great. Job well done. Until they actually do something underhanded to achieve that, there's no story here.

A lot of "conspiracies" are just emergent behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

IT has baffled me why government continues to stand in the way of private mass transit. Sydney opened its system up to private lines and it has flourished, whereas the DC Metro system is just one more wreck from total collapse.

The problem with private corporations is they typically are after profits, and the best way to lose profits is to provide under-served communities with the same services you use for wealthier ones. If you want to make money, you need to focus on where the most people with the most money live, and let the poor and inconveniently located flounder in their ghettos of transportation isolation. Which is where we are today.

We already have private mass transit, in the form of bus and shuttle companies, and we had it in the form of trains. The trains collapsed and the government bailed it out as Amtrak. The buses basically only serve pockets of commuters who don't drive, and the companies may receive subsidies.

I don't see why you think the government is standing in the way. The way is just not profitable (or in the case of contracted companies, sometimes a little too profitable)

Governments should be heavily subsidizing public transit, it provides extremely good benefits to city growth, health and the environment.

I don't personally object to private mass transit, but it can't compete with a system that can be afforded to take a loss year after year unless:

1. The privatized portions are the high profit portions of the lines - so essentially the public is subsidizing these private companies by paying for the last mile coverage without the marginally profitable backbone.

2. Privatized transit companies use regulatory capture to hamstring public transit (i.e. Comcast and municipal internet)

3. The public company is so unbearably inefficient that a private company can make a profit through direct competition - as stereotypical as it is to think of government organizations as being poorly run this still usually doesn't leave enough of a gap between public funding and corruption to find a profitable region that the public company can't match.

So, I'm fine with private mass transit so long as the companies go bankrupt, in any other case I would suspect that some pretty massive corruption is happening either within the public corporation or of the private one influencing the government.

The UK stopped "standing in the way" of private rail, and the result was a royal mess (and an overpriced one to boot).

Information Technology has baffled...?

Hugely undesirable.

Competition is good for the consumer. And public transport is a competitor in a way

1. People are not just consumers. 2. Competition is not necessarily good, it has a lot of overhead. This is especially true when relevant resources are limited/scarce - e.g. land in an urban area. 3. Commercial companies often either form cartels or combine into monopolies, or just divvy up the market. It makes business sense - much more than competing.

The company continues to heavily subsidize per-ride costs to inflate its value to investors and undercut existing options, despite bleeding billions of dollars. “Uber is effectively a middleman for a money transfer from venture-capital (VC) firms to consumers,” writes James P. Sutton in National Review. Simply put, effectively supplanting the taxi industry wasn’t enough: Uber plans on undercutting public transit to finally turn a profit.

If Uber can undercut public transit, I'll be impressed. Fares tend to cover 30-40% of operational costs of public transit, and if you include capital costs, it will be even less. With the amounts of subsidies public transit gets from the taxpayer, even the venture capitalists can hardly compete.

My grandfather always tells a cheesy joke about a donut shop owner who, when it is pointed out that he loses money on every donut responds, "But I'll make it up on volume."

The article makes that passage sound sinister, but how will they ever make money? What are the chances that every other transportation option dies before Uber runs out of money and then literally no one decides to create other transportation options when prices start to go back up?

What are the chances that every other transportation option dies before Uber runs out of money and then literally no one decides to create other transportation options when prices start to go back up?

I don't understand the scenario you're proposing. The government can always decide to run public transportation. They are not constrained by supply and demand, as they can simply cover the cost from the taxes, like they do right now. If public transit was expected to pay for itself, you'd pay $15 for a bus ride. Because of this, Uber's entry to the market doesn't make a huge difference: it's already wildly unprofitable to run public transit, and VC money doesn't make it worse, because Uber even with VC subsidies is much more expensive than public transit with taxpayer subsidies.

Public transit also shouldn't be required to turn a profit as it's something that's been demonstrated to provide clear societal benefits. The loss that public transit suffers is helping to subsidize all sorts of local businesses.

These "societal benefits", while surely exist (e.g. improved access for poor or elderly, reduced congestion), are far from clear. I don't think anyone has ever considered any estimate of these when deciding whether to run public transit or not. We run public transit because we feel like it, not because of some cost-benefit analysis.

Right, I agree completely. I was saying that it doesn’t make sense for the article to spin this situation as sinister. Who cares if Uber undercuts public transportation? If they provide it cheaper, the public wins, if they don’t, there is public transportation, and the public wins. It seems like an unalloyed good to me that VC money is getting funneled through to consumers, regardless of how much market share Uber wins because Uber will never be able to raise prices enough to harm consumers.

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