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Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

The central assumption of his whole argument:

> If you had to think what the transport systems would be on a sustainable modern city, I'm sure you would think that the solution would be a really good public transportation with buses and trains. I'm completely sure private cars or taxies would be discarted. (my emphasis)

is mere opinion. I like libraries and think the are great, but I still want my own books. There's no contradiction there.

Additionally, the title is inflammatory by calling people hypocrites instead of trying to understand why people use the services mentioned.

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All of this depends on the "size" of the picture we're looking at.

Certainly we're free to act in an individualist way, but we need to take into account the social and environmental factors, and especially the latter gets more and more stringent.

If you use a car, you're polluting my lungs and the environment. If in 50 years from now, cars will be emission free, well, great, but the situation now is what it is.

If you use a car, you're contributing to putting at risk bike users and children.

If you use a car, you are traffic.

So again, you're certainly free to do whatever you want, but we should extend the analogy with books, to a world where, say, paper is limited, and books wrappings are thrown into my private garden.

I understand the blogger concern, even if it's difficult to agree with such statements. It could be translated less angrily that it's disappointing that SF people are failing to take into account communal factors when thinking transportation, under the assumption (that he makes) that people in SF is supposed to be culturally more aware of them.

From another article on the front page of HN today[1]:

"I believe our unfortunate heritage with capitalism, and our steadily decreasing trust in other Americans, is exactly how we end up with these intractable tragedy of the commons-type situations, where no individual party is willing to be vulnerable enough to move toward cooperative solutions in lieu of safe, selfish solutions. The longer this cultural feedback loop persists, the harder it becomes for any one party to make any meaningful move toward a Pareto optimal solution without inviting an equal-but-opposite increase in skepticism toward the first mover. And it's been persisting in this direction for quite some time. This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves).

Essentially Uber and Lyft are moves toward a Nash Equilibrium solution, each person cynically and selfishly optimizing on the assumption that everyone else is cynically and selfishly optimizing.

[1] http://cjohnson.io/2014/tesla. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7886266.

I agree. I share the author's sentiment that public transit needs to be improved. And, my view is more radical that private vehicles need to be all but abolished (except for conducting work, like carpenters, delivery people, etc.). And, Uber and Lyft are deeply problematic organizations, built on an ask-later "disruption" model that bakes in all kinds of shoddy assumptions about safety, working conditions, and so on.

Yet, the author's view that Uber/Lyft = taxi is just plain false. The author asks us to "imagine" the future, and suggests that there will be no taxis. Not in my future! Insofar as there are still roads (perhaps this is 100 years in the future, not 1000 years), I would like to see no private cars (again, other than for work), but having vehicles for hire makes a lot of sense. The environmental savings of having occasional taxi use with predominant transit, bike, and pedestrian traffic would be immense.

Matthew Yglesias agrees with you:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/03/uber_and_lyft...

"If you could wipe the slate clean and make cabs and cab-like services cheaper and more broadly available in your Bostons and San Franciscos and Portlands and DCs and such, then you could imagine many more middle class people relying on Ubers and Zipcars for when they really need a car, while walking, biking, or riding transit the rest of the time. Which is to say that basically all alternatives to the dominant mode of private transportation—the one car per adult, drive yourself everwhere mode—are complements to one another. Uber makes much more sense in a city where lots of people don't own cars than in a city where everyone owns one. And not owning a car makes more sense if your city has some walkable neighborhoods and good transit lines. But conversely, the availability of private-cars-for-hire on demand makes it much more plausible to imagine not making the large up-front investment in a car that would lead you to rely on a car for your baseline transportation needs."

I'm confused. I agree it makes sense to have taxis available for hire occasionally, preferring them to private vehicles. How does this fact make Uber or Lyft unlike a taxi?

Unless, perhaps, your argument is that Uber is worse than a taxi, since the vehicle is still ultimately private?

Not everyone wants to ride in a bus. In fact, in my country people are stopping using buses, and doing some kind of car sharing, because it's much more convenient (available when you need it), they charge the same, and even though it's not much better space wise, a lot of people prefer riding with 3 others, than 20 others. This has been a growing trend, and I think it's inevitable that it will happen everywhere in the world.

Also, this is exactly the kind of service self-driving cars would offer in the future.

The funny thing is opinions like this are basically just fashion, they tend to change pretty quickly. For example, just fifty years ago in the US the new buses were viewed as a high-class affair and train travel was left for the lower classes. That position is basically completely reversed now.

Also, I find it hard to believe that a vehicle for hire could possibly charge the same as mass transit for a comparable journey. I don't know which country you live in but that's certainly not the case anywhere I've been.

Not as same, but relatively close:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888339

> Not everyone wants to ride in a bus.

Is this an example of society finding the Nash Equilibrium at the expense of finding the "Pareto optimal" solution?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888721

Terminology quibble, but not all Nash equilibria are prisoner's dilemmas. Indeed, some Nash equilibria are also Pareto efficient (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Nash_equilibrium).

Agreed. My statement ("at the expense of") assumes this not to be the case with respect to cars vs mass transit, at least if use of the former undermines development of the latter. I'm sure the ideal global solution is some hybrid, but I'm pretty sure the dynamics of individuals making locally optimal decisions results at best in a hybrid solution sub-optimally skewed toward cars. And that's only considering the economy and the environment. It best worse if you consider society and consider it a cost if it increases social stratification of the haves and have nots.

Car sharing is not always convenient. what if nobody wants to drive where you want right now? Buses have schedule where you can be fairly sure it will show up.

(If it doesn't, just raise your hand, gets you ad-hoc car sharihg :)

> in my country people are stopping using buses, and doing some kind of car sharing

can you share more details? it's interesting.

The author has a point: some companies affirm themselves as society problem solvers that will disrupt the (harmful) status quo. But most of the times they don't solve the core problems (in this particular case, public transportation), they only solve where there is a profit to be made. This is capitalism, for the good and for the bad.

The author probably is inflammed because of his (South) European point of view, he is Spanish as I can understand, where there is a soft Capitalism that sometimes (or most of the time) shock with the raw capitalism he found in US. Our politics are left wing oriented (I'm also south European): US Center-Left (Democrats) are equivalent to Center-Right in Portugal for example.

The problem with the title is much bigger than simply being inflammatory. The title makes a claim that is never established in the text. Nowhere in the text does the author make the case that people in SF engage in an activity that they criticize others for engaging in and/or engage in an activity that is counter to the espoused moral code of SF citizens.

The "classic 'white rich man'" sentence is truly bizarre.

At least he forgot "straight".

The title is a blaming statement, which are usually caused by someone in cognitive dissonance. You can think of cognitive dissonance as an argument between various agents in someone's brain. Arguing with yourself isn't fun. Occasionally bits of the brain attempt to resolve the argument by looping in other people's feelings. The fastest way to do this is for someone to accuse another of something they themselves feel partially guilty about. which then (hopefully) elicits a strong emotional response.

There's ALWAYS a reason someone make blaming statements. The trick is figuring out exactly why they are doing it.

Do you have anywhere that I could read up more on this? It sounds interesting.

Totally. You can start with non-violent communications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication, and then check out the HBR slick they just put out on Emotional Intellegence. Basically you listen to people, repeat what they said, repeat how they felt about it (only if they actually told you verbally or non-verbally), and tell them you hear them.

Notice the vote down I got. Heaven forbid anyone bring up emotions here. <--- blaming statement.

Examples: Most online discussions involving race, religion, politics, morality.

Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

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