I have no familiarity with #2 so that's interesting to me-- do you or other people actually use uber/lyft to get to and fro work? Isn't that like $15-20 each way every day, thousands of dollars a year?
Note that a car also costs thousands of dollars a year once you factor in everything, Edmunds estimates the true cost of a corolla at $7k/year: https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2020/cost-to-own/
Let’s say $1k for new tires/brakes/oil changes/filters every 45k miles.
That’s $333 per year for maintenance, and the car lasts 13 to 20 years at 15k miles per year for 200k to 300k miles, so let’s say $2k per year on the high end, $1,200 per year on the low end.
Extremely high liability insurance is $50 a month or less.
Fuel is 10 cents per mile if you assume $3 per gallon and 30 miles per gallon, so $1,500 per year in fuel for 15,000 miles.
$1,500+$50*12+$2k+$333 = $5k per year on the high end.
Excluding insurance and fuel costs, you can push a reliable Toyota/Honda’s costs down to 5 cents per mile or less.
As someone who doesn't own a car, I don't have to worry about parking tickets, or de-snowing my car, car not starting in winter. I also don't have to worry about finding parking, or parking tickets, dealing with repairs and scammy repairmen, paperwork, my car getting stolen or damaged, etc.
I also don't have to worry about driving drunk. It's pretty freeing to go out with friends and just have a car drop you at the door, and another car pick you back up when you want to go, and never having to worry about parking, when your parking timer might run out, or drunk driving.
And all of this being said, as someone living in a big city, between public transit, bike rentals, walking and ridesharing, the total cost I pay is less than your stated 400/month.
uber and lyft later turned it into a service that was highly reliable (came, or at least told you if they weren't coming). It seriously enabled the use of taxis as a reliable part of a transportation solution, or eg to cover the 1-2 days a week you needed a car without having to own a car.
I think they're fine in the UK too. But they absolutely aren't in California, Uber was a godsend and far less criminal even considering all the stuff they have done.
If you know DC, I'm thinking, say, Van Ness to Eastern Market, H-street, or anywhere off-metro in SE over the river. Cabs here are infamously unreliable, and just don't serve many neighborhoods, to the point of illegally refusing to take you once you're already in the cab.
Before Uber, if you were someone who wanted to go out to eat or visit friends in other neighborhoods a few times a week, you had to live as close as possible to metro/bus hubs on the same lines as your social group. If you couldn't afford that, you got a bike and dealt with it being stolen 3x a year.
Now you can reasonably live a little further from transit and still take those trips. You still want to live somewhere that minimizes commute, but I'm no longer optimizing for commute AND social group AND restaurants AND groceries, which widens things quite a bit price wise.
I still took the bus for fixed commutes (to and from work) - when I woke up on time. But uber is very convenient if you're in a city - the population density makes rides near instantaneous.
Currently there's only one disadvantage to ride-sharing apps, you can't wave down a car if you see one. You have to open the app first to request a ride, and that car might have driven away by then.