Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
wired.com
wired.com
The gameplan is clear. Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise. Then you’re free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be.
Hardly a conspiracy theory to think Uber might be trying to undercut their competitors and put them out of business before raising their prices when they have an established history of doing exactly that.
The problem is that public transit has to serve a lot of unprofitable lines and by having a private competitor putting pressure on the only parts that actually make money, the overall economics of public transit become much worse.
FedEx/UPS can also be very picky about which services they offer to who. I've had plenty of FedEx/UPS return shipments that they refuse to pickup due to service level agreements on different shipment classes.
USPS you can literally click on their website for them to come pickup a stupid $8 shipment from your door. They'll drive to your house and ring your doorbell to pick it up, incredible.
There is no home mail delivery at all in our town, nor in much of our county. Each affected home gets a free PO Box.
What's preventing them from properly pricing their services? The whole implication in this line of discussion seems to be that Amazon is taking advantage of USPS, and they're somehow hapless to prevent that from happening.
> The Postal Service shall provide a maximum degree of effective and regular postal services to rural areas, communities, and small towns where post offices are not self-sustaining. No small post office shall be closed solely for operating at a deficit, it being the specific intent of the Congress that effective postal services be insured to residents of both urban and rural communities
The purpose of private enterprise is to make money, and you can slice out a business that serves the most price insensitive, high margin, low maintenance clients.
The purpose of public services is to.. serve the public. For example, public safety net programs are always going to have more waste than a private company, because if your program is there to prevent citizens from starving, you give the benefit of the doubt on eligibility.
A private company doesn't need to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, they provide a service to paying customers, and are generally OK losing customers due to payment friction vs giving away services free.
While Uber competes with public transit the price they’re able to charge is limited by that competition. Once that competition is gone (and siphoning off a segment of its customer base is certainly a way to make that happen) the company is less constrained in how much they can get away with charging.
Uber doesn’t have the obligations a public transit authority has, they’re free to pick and choose the most profitable routes to compete on and ignore the less profitable ones. Uber doesn’t have to deliberate engage in nefarious practises to destroy a transit system, they just have to do what works for them.
In other words, the high value, richer customers are already not riding the bus.
If:
- America solved its mental health crisis
- Americans became cleaner
- Americans became better behaved in public
Then Americans who can afford not to take the bus would reconsider it.
But this meta question is not why I don't ride the bus. The structural inconvenience of it, and the odors inside are.
And there is not a chance to get any compensation for hospital bills, because dog never attacked before (haha), and "first bite is free"!
Passenger cars-- heck, even coach buses-- are engineered for passenger comfort and convenience.
City buses are engineered to secure the driver against passengers, to be simply maintained and hosed out as needed, and to accommodate overcrowding standing-room-only discomfort. Seats are hard, leg room is deficient, shoulder room is deprived, and that's even before we talk about trying to time an irregular arrival or departure time on a wobbly bus schedule.
You only ride a bus if you're indifferent to personal inconvenience, have firm principles, or have no choice.
Imagine the bus smelled like detergent and was spotless.
Piss, the occasional feces and I have to celebrate profane graffiti calling for cops' death as art.
A bit more money can find more cleaning, as well as giving places for the mentally ill to go other than riding around all day.
Ya know, as long as we're making up fantasies. Americans are not noticeably different on our levels of mental illness, but no power on earth will compel us to spend money that might help someone other than ourselves.
I think Uber is attempting exactly this.
Richer customers don't pay more for public transit. It's not like clothing, where they buy a better product and produce most of the profit.
Removing some customers from bus systems doesn't have much of an effect. Bus systems are very flexible in changing routes and times to meet demand. It's not going to cause a "complete demise".
Also, if private buses are profitable, they invite competition. Private buses are an incredibly easy business to start. So no, nobody's "free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be".
I suppose that in New York and London richer people use the subway to escape traffic jams. They can tell their politician friends (or bought politicians) to keep subsidizing it.
In Europe privatization of public transport has been a disaster. Routes are cut, the trains don't run on time, etc.
And in New York at least, truly rich people take a car service. Subways are for the normal people. The truly rich want their own private space and they want sunlight.
In any case, nobody's talking about the privatization of public transport, which is the conversion from public to private. This is about alternate private options becoming available. The public option stays. And it's not about subways, it's about buses.
The argument here is more like Canada's public/private healthcare: anyone able to will opt out of the public side. If you don't keep the funding for it in place it will be comparably worse. I would expect it is much easier to cut funding to public transit with less riders, which this will definitely cause.
But yes, if you want to talk about the middle-class, which is what you seem to actually be referring to, let's.
In most cities, they've already dropped out of buses. They take their own cars. A more expensive bus service like Uber's probably isn't going to taking much ridership away from public buses, but rather give middle-class people more options, so maybe they don't need a second car.
And again, bus systems are remarkably scalable. Unlike things like subways and light rail. Routes and capacity are extremely flexible. Just because there are more transportation options, doesn't mean there's going to be a demise of city buses.
No kidding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43980845
Okay, but if their customers where not taking the bus before, it's still better. What I think Uber gets right is that these are probably smaller than your regular busses, which makes them more appealing, bring a bigger sense of safety to some users.
Uber and Lyft are still weird, wasn't the whole point of ride sharing that you'd jump in a car with someone going in the same direction as you? Not that people would operate their own cars as a taxi.
Why should anyone pay extra from their income, if private companies are going to profit from providing a service to the public which was intended to be built using taxes by the government?
In my city, it's to pay interest on debt, overly generous pensions to retirees, and settlements to police lawsuits.
Definitely a weird choice for the presentation: the best-served part of the best-served city in the US for public transport. Why not pick literally anywhere else?
I think they are much quicker, flexible and localised than larger buses.
Also, dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43985861