The cities need to step up and set up their own ride sharing services e.g. https://www.metrolacampaigns.net/ in LA
Governments that actually fail tend to be replaced quite swiftly. Businesses can fail without being replaced (not filling an actual need is a common reason businesses fail.)
The above commenter was clearly not interested in having a discussion about what they value in order to see this evident superiority, though, so I didn't see any point in pressing the conversation further.
So all the spending is effectively zero sum. The real tax rate never really goes up or down very much, so if you want to do something, you have to find something else to not do.
All of the incentives then fall directly out of that. If you're getting money and nobody is paying attention to you then the most important thing is to have them continue to not pay attention to you so that you can keep getting the money. Meanwhile, if you want to get money for something, find someone else to make look bad so you can justify taking it from them.
Obviously this doesn't produce good results, but the problem is structural. The populist reforms made in the first half of the 20th century deleted all of the checks and balances on federal spending (compare how much of the budget of EU countries is the EU itself), which requires government programs to compete based on political power rather than merit because you can't just say that a program is worth the money, you have to find something else to displace whose advocates are weak enough to defeat because the trough is already full. Which has little to do with whether your program is better than theirs.
Imagine if we spent half as much money but the reduction came out of the likes of ludicrous military boondoggles and de facto subsidies for pharma companies.