Uber wants to privatize public transportation
“Innovators” are really just robber barons. The tech that people in our industry can create could do so much more than what it’s currently used for. https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/
48 hills
I dont see the big deal as long as they aren’t actively lobbying against public transportation. If cities decide to allow this, or replace their existing public transportation with something a company offers, its probably because they’re in the position to save money (either administrative or the cost to actually build the infrastructure - see literally every city in Southern California) If they take public funds to do it i would be against it, i would rather it be fully private than take city or county money, but whatever, shit works itself out. Places with established public transport i feel wouldnt be so eager to allow more buses on the road, think its more targeted to people like me in places like the place im in, where buses come every hour (if you’re lucky)
Except transit in the US started out as private and was a disaster leading to confused and congested routes, accidents, and receivership for most of the large monopoly-like companies that ran transit.
It's usually not because the city saves money. It's usually because the politicians want more tax money to be sold for their own benefit.
Homeless vagrants can’t use Uber, so I’m all for it. Come ride public transit anywhere in California and you’ll understand why. Gladly looking forward to clean, bum-free, crackhead-free autonomous Uber buses.
Uber benefits public transportation by solving last mile problem. So much easier to use train if you can get to train station easily.
The core tenant of your argument is that public is better which you haven’t proven and probably can’t.
In general, private is better for a few people to make returns, public services that are services (not underfunded) are better at providing the actual service. For transit specifically, public service is historically proven to be better as transit started out private and lead to monopolies (transit requires high overhead, large-coordination, and has low returns which mean monopoly or government are the more “efficient” ways to handle it.) However the transit monopolies had high profile accidents and mostly went under so cities had to pick up the tab and municipalize them.
“public services that are services (not underfunded) are better at providing the actual service.” Examples please The VA? The DMV? USPS?
Better than burning tax money on useless public transportation.
... and forcing everyone to use it without an alternative or competition!
Privatization is a good thing
You're contradicting yourself. If public transportation is indeed superior, then Uber won't stand a chance. But more likely private will just have its niche, especially in areas underserved by public transit.
If public transit had decades of investment like Europe and other countries and we ignored all the losses(see Uber), we'd have a lot of innovation in that space too. Instead, we cut off public transit at the legs through lobbying from big Auto and heck even airlines(Southwest lobbied against bullet train in Texas back in the 80s due to potential competition for short haul market)
Public transit is not incentivized to innovate because they have monopoly and no competition.
Bus systems don't make any money. That's why they're heavily subsidized. They probably just want to rip public transit out and replace it with a worse system. This has happened before.
I mean it makes sense public transit is overcrowded and extremely dirty and inefficient where it exists in the US. See BART, The.
Yep all for it Make it more efficient and profitable
Uber isn’t profitable. Maybe politicians should run public services at a loss like Uber and just tax the companies who receive a large faction of their workforce each day via public services.