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Comment by tyxodiwktis | Hacker News Reader

The core issue is that ridership data is a key piece the cities need to craft a tax on ride-sharing, and to tailor the tax to help their financially challenged public transit entities. Uber knows that if they give up scooter use data the city will immediately request it for ride sharing as well. The privacy question conveniently aligns with Uber’s position, but I doubt that this is Uber’s core concern vs avoiding every major city banging on the rideshare piñata to fund the gigantic debt service payments and generous benefit programs for their underutilized public transit systems.

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You are talking about the city that has half its space dedicated to free street parking and a bunch of highways cutting through it as if it's some sort of modern mobility policy paragon just trying to correctly price out externalities.

No, whatever Ubers goal in not doing this, I'm sure the motivations of local L.A. politicians are forever more twisted. These people wouldn't know public transport if a bus ran them over. Which is unlikely to happen, given their average speed of 9 mph.

1.2 million ride LA metro a day.

And many many many more don't. It's the second largest city in the US.

You have the dynamic correct but the values backwards. Cities are defined by their physical and social density and their long-term investments in physical capital. Uber lacks a sustainable business model. Transportation within a city features many "natural" monopolies (i.e. train tracks), and the promise of an emergent overarching monopoly: providing one-App entry into multi-modal transportation. If Uber can capture those monopoly rents it has a chance to survive as a permanent parasite. If it doesn't, it's doomed.

> Transportation within a city features many "natural" monopolies (i.e. train tracks), and the promise of an emergent overarching monopoly: providing one-App entry into multi-modal transportation.

I don't understand what you are saying here, can you elaborate? What are you saying about Uber / monopolistic rideshare companies?

Related, I don't understand why cities/governments allow Uber to exist considering the reality that, as you point out, "Uber lacks a sustainable business model". Is it not transparent to all relevant parties that Uber could not and cannot maintain the price it has set to gain market share, and that down the line it had a clear goal of building monopolistic market share in order to effectively price fix against the interest of the consumers? I don't know enough to reflect on public transport and taxi companies of old, but how did we get to present day without consumer protection regulations sorting things out?

I see parallels with Amazon, and I have the same questions. Why are they entertained in this destruction of local economies by the entities which should protect those economies (in the US, local and state gov)?

I wonder if Barnes and Nobel's effect destruction of local book stores had a period of growth with lower prices then settled down and raised prices? If so, is this not against the interest of the consumer? If not, well I'm not sure. Maybe Barnes and Nobel is not comparable to these internet based companies.

As I understand it they are predicting that a single app will come to be used for all public transit in a major city or on a larger level. If Uber is able to play a role in this project they can have a income stream that doesn't require heavy subsidization. Without that they will at some point fail as they require more input value then output value is produced.

> The core issue is that ridership data is a key piece the cities need to craft a tax on ride-sharing,

Can you explain how the real time data can be used for that and why not some aggregated anonymized data, or data gathered by the government observation themselves?

I can't really tell your opinion, so I guess this is for other readers: the government can be entitled to regulate an activity but at the same time not be entitled to any means of actually enforcing that regulation. A prime example is anti-sodomy laws.†

In the earlier US laws would be enforcement tested and disposed of if they were intractable to actually implement; unfortunately now it seems like laws are made, and a regression of rights is accepted so that the laws may be enforced. The intent of the constitution was the exact opposite.

† You can argue private sexual relations (in general) are not an appropriate target of regulation and you would be right. However accepting this argument in every case means many things can not be regulated. Perhaps this was the original intent.

Can someone downvoting this person's post explain why?

At some point it looked like people were following my account and downvoting it. Everything I'd post would get to -2 or so. I think it stopped?

Apparently some twitter uses do not like HN, it is/was not just myself, someone else told me about it.

I believe that Uber and Lyft already share data for car rides with the city of LA.

Edit: I've been trying to find a source and can't, so that may not be true. They only share detailed data with a few places, like NYC. LA only gets data on regular taxi rides, and it isn't realtime.

The collection in LA does include some car services, although not necessarily ride share yet. The collection protocol is designed for multimodal surveillance beyond scooters.

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