Wanting to be at work on time without allotting an extra 30 minutes for public transit shenanigans is hardly the epitome of privilege.
Addendum: this is a private company that technically speaking does not have to adhere to any schedule and isn't liable for various things (according to the TOS posted in this tree), so if anything you're more likely to be on the wrong end of things compared to an organized public transit system.
There are two sides to on schedule performance - what the bus does, and what the schedule says. You are probably right that the bus can't move any faster just because it is private. On the other hand, I bet a tech savvy company can do vastly better at predicting what the actual bus schedule will be as well as communicating any deviations from the schedule in real time.
It's mainly traffic issues, or a single wheelchair/baby carriage clogging up the exits and requiring more time than anticipated. It's hard to make useful predictions for that.
> as well as communicating any deviations from the schedule in real time.
The municipal public transits in many European cities already have real-time schedule updates (and replacements) delivered via smart phone apps and digital signage posts at the bus stops. Big IT (I think Siemens, e.g.) has been offering and deploying solutions for this for years now.
The problems in Toronto result in 30-60 minute waits for a bus or a streetcar in the wintertime (during -20°C weather too). Then you will get about 5-10 in a row, all within a few seconds or minutes of each other.
This happens because Toronto does not schedule its transit very well (or at all). So everything is late and miserable.
If Leap schedules things correctly, in part because they are a private company and have incentive to do so, they may be able to beat public transit solutions - in terms of reliability of service - without breaking a sweat.
Again, I don't know how much this info is relevant here or for SF. But there are multiple ways that a private company can improve on the timing and scheduling of existing public transit.
In Seattle the buses have posted times on a schedule at each stop and they pretty much nail it in my experience. If a bus is more than about three minutes late people start looking around and checking their watches.
I don't know what you think the TTC does all day, but it's not sit around and say "if only we had competition, we'd make the busses better". It may not be possible to schedule to avoid busses bunching up during peak times, if that's how traffic behaves. The only way to fix it might be to run an excess of under-utilized busses, which cuts into profit margins. Which is something a private company with higher rates might be able to do, but the TTC is limited because service has to be accessible to everyone.
The risk of a private company like this showing up is that it'll decide to focus intensively on the 20% of routes that yield 80% of profit. This bleeds the public transit service of funds needed to run less profitable services at off times that are used by people without 9-5 jobs, or people in less privileged areas. So the rich get better bus service, and no longer subsidize the service for the poor.
It's worth a shot. I like seeing experiments like this that public transit can't do, even if it ultimately ends up failing.
I simply don't have time to fight with professional bureaucrats when something sucks, and the professional bureaucrats know it.