" Uber’s re-direction of the political will of its base was its total victory over Mayor Bill De Blasio’s hapless and deeply stupid campaign to limit the company’s growth in New York City—some of the final blows coming from celebrities (and even some business journalists!) tweeting messages written by Uber on its behalf. Would it be crazy to wonder what would happen if those same people mounted a similarly forceful campaign to get Governor Cuomo to clean out and fully fund the MTA to, say, make the L train less terrible?"

Did the writer think for 5 seconds about this? Is the political will (or rather actual monies required) to spend 15 billion [1] on the MTA shortfall the same as not prohibiting a company from operating a tax service?

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/23/us-usa-newyork-mta...

Meanwhile, the government-funded model of public transportation seems to be failing in the US. The MTA spent billions of dollars buying new trains and resignalling entire lines to run trains every 1 minute 30 seconds. But didn't actually schedule service that frequently, resulting in trains that are un-boardable during rush hours. (In fact, unresignalled lines have higher levels of service. The Flushing line runs at 33 trains per hour. The upgraded Canarsie line only runs 26 tph.)

Off-peak service is similarly abysmal, with trains running every 20 minutes as early as 11:00pm, that are often as packed as rush hour trains. They can't afford three more trains per hour to run them at 10 minute headways?

With more people using public transportation than ever before, it's a sad time for the government to be unable to justify expanding service to meet the needs of the new commuters. But they are doing a great job of being inept, so it would be great to see the private sector come in and fix things. I don't care who I pay to get to work, I just want to get there quickly and hassle-free.

Even if you don't use their services, their roving band of rfid/wifi/bluetooth sensing cars with cameras that read and recognize object like other cars, license plates, and other people in their environment will be observing everyone and everything, all the time.

Every vehicle, a subpoena-able bundle of sensors.

Watching.

Personally, I find that even scarier than the mass destruction of public transit.

The sooner the world's cabs companies beef up their technology infrastructure the sooner this upheaval will stop. There will be no further privatization of public transport assuming the taxi companies realize this soon. Oh, and cab medallions are already privately owned.

Many socially disadvantaged people would especially benefit from such a modern form of public transportation: if a single mom working a minimum wage job can go to her workplace in 20 minutes rather than 1h30 for the same price, her quality of life would dramatically improve.

If you subscribe to the view that the government should provide a set of basic services to all of its population (eg basic food, shelter, education, healthcare, transportation), then what should really happen is that the local public transportation agencies (SFMTA, NYMTA, etc.) should be the ones experimenting with new models and offering incrementally better services to citizens as technology evolves.

But that's not how it works, because these agencies are bloated, ineffective, and the complete opposite of innovative. In countries where public transportation is in a better shape (e.g. a lot of western european countries) and the government is more left leaning (ie has no qualms making Uber illegal), services like Uber are a bit slower to reach the mass they are in the US, but it's still going to happen in the long term.

We can't have it both ways. Either we go full capitalist, and in this case privatized public transit the Uber way seems inevitable in the long term, creating a 2 tiered public transit system: one privatized that works really well for the higher social classes, and the regular public transit system that will further languish and deteriorate as only poorer people use it (an outcome which I personally hate and find absolutely dystopian). Or we need to figure out a way for local governments to provide those basic services to their citizens, growing and changing them as the technology matures. That's much more appealing, but I'm not quite sure how to get there in a way that benefits all citizens equally.

With Uber, those occasional necessary car trips can be contracted out cheaply and easily. When you aren't FORCED to own a car to survive, many people simply won't buy one. The fewer people that own cars, the more heavily transit and bicycles will be used for daily trips. Ride-sharing is perhaps the most important blow ever struck against American car dependency.

Now that Uber is available in Wilmington, my wife has started using it heavily. That's great for her, not so great for all the low income people who actually need to use the service. And ultimately it's not Uber's fault that they're offering an alternative to the dysfunctional public transit system. The municipal government is supposed to be the ones offering poor people a safe and convenient alternative to walking through downtown Wilmington at night, and they fail at their job miserably.

again: > every eight minutes and only costs $2.25

If only we could remove the stigma an bigotry associated with riding the bus, so many issues with public transit would be cured.

The graph also implicitly makes the assumption that there are an infinite number of users and Uber has competitors. In reality as the number of users increases Uber looks more and more like a monopoly and the price approaches whatever maximizes Uber's profits as opposed to "free". The bigger Uber gets the more they become the government they're fighting against.

In a healthy free market price will approach marginal cost, but Uber isn't fighting for a healthy free market. It's the last thing they want.

> While zero car ownership will undoubtedly and unremittingly be a net social good—can’t wait until driving is something one does for fun, ban cars!

Can't tell if the author is for or against regulation.

[0] - http://cdn.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/price.jpg

In addition, in the SF south bay, mass transit infrastructure suffers from a chicken and egg problem. Density isn't high enough to support transit, so it would be unwise to waste tax revenue in elephants, but without the build-up, the environ for mass transit isn't stoked.

Personally, I don't care who comes up with a financially viable solution, public or private. Having seen what public delivers, I'm optimistic private can compete and deliver something meaningful in under three decades of studies, agreements, bonds issuing, lawsuits, etc. Overseas, private mass transit delivers at least on par with public mass transit. Moreover, the NYC subway system was borne from originally private systems.

I guess autonomous vehicles like uber's are likely to win out over the ideas by united technologies' "people movers". Still unsurprising that in the end the ideas to get to efficient mass transit tend to merge.

The endgame is for America to become the next China.

I don't think this is really true, at least in the short run. Uber fills the gaps which previously prevented me from completely getting rid of my car. Now that I'm completely car free, I rely on public transportation for trips that are well supported by our infrastructure and use Uber for trips that aren't, so I care a lot about our public transportation infrastructure, and usually support improvements, unless they are very poorly budgeted or misguided.

It's a very deep concept, and fairly complex. It includes related disciplines such as Neoliberal Jurisprudence. Before anyone goes all "you don't know what you're talking about" on me, I concede I'm no expert. It's a very deep concept, after all. My exposure to the issue is largely via my wife and others in her cohort, studying at one of the US's top political theory grad programs. They are heavily studying/working on neoliberalism, taking it very seriously.

It's worth educating one's self about it. Both in general, and as an IT/Tech professional. It's already a thing, most people just aren't aware of it yet.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.... http://inthesetimes.com/article/17533/how_to_sell_off_a_city http://www.popmatters.com/column/194010-neoliberalism-is-cha...

The real issue is distribution of profits. If the money gained stays at the top levels and doesn't move around much, you get stagnation and a poorer standard of living.

on /r/Documentaries [2] is perhaps relevant to this discussion.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0236785/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/3iflv6/taken...

This seems quite logical, and is a common argument that's been tossed around for a while now, previously in reference to employer-funded transportation for employees (popularly, "the Google bus", though there are many). The only problem is that it's deliberately ignorant of the past. Since the author mentions SF Muni by name, we should recognize that Muni has been a total disaster since at least the 1970s. If there has ever been political will to improve it, it's been thwarted. The agency has never met any of its legally mandated service requirements, despite numerous (successful) ballot measures throwing money at the problem and setting policies giving it a high ("the highest", per Prop A) priority. So it's pretty difficult to pin the blame for that on something that's existed for only a few years.

It's no secret that I have no love for Uber, or that I consider it just another taxi service that should be regulated as such (which doesn't necessarily mean it should be regulated the way taxi providers are today). But claims that Muni's failure are Uber's fault are simply laughable. Muni was a worthless pile of garbage before Uber's founders were born, and it wasn't on an improving trajectory that Uber came along and trashed, either.

The other angle, which the author did not explore, is that private mass transit is very common and popular, as it once was in the US, in many of the world's poorer countries. It's ubiquitous in Asia and Latin America, and while it won't win any awards for speed or comfort, it is cheap, effective, and capable of operating profitably without direct subsidies. This seems at odds with the author's lament that those left to suffer the indignity of public transit in the US are those with no other choice. Clearly that is a product of a political system that champions public funding of mass transit, not some inevitable outcome.

There are many ways to make transit (public or private) better. I don't believe Uber is one of them, but nothing the SFMTA has done suggests that it's part of the solution, either. And it's been failing without Uber's help.

[1] http://www.ismetroonfire.com/

Ever since I started using Lyft, I stopped taking the local public transit (except on certain special routes, like going straight downtown when I'm near a train station) because it's better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van

I believe this is probably more likely to be an attempt to change public perception.

Honestly, if this wasn't an ideologically-loaded "private industry vs. government" issue and we were all wearing our rational thought hats instead of our politics hats, we would vigorously condemn any mass transit authority that prioritized such a risky venture at the risk of dropping actual services to poor people! That's not their job.

This isn't a private vs. public story. Let the private industry prove out the model at their own risk and their own expense. Let them recoup the expense and pocket some profit for the risk at the expense of those who can afford the service. (The poor are not actually hurt by not having access to Uber, anymore than they were hurt by not having access to it 10 years ago.) Let the government come in behind and work on providing services based on the risks taken and the lessons learned. Perhaps even by contracting out to Uber, or perhaps more likely, a yet-to-be-founded mass-transit-focused competitor, when the model has been derisked enough that the poor aren't at high risk of being boned by the vagueries and vissitudes of Silicon Valley unicorns.

This would hold true even if all the city governments were models of efficiency, and all had highly trained and skillful staffs of programmers on staff who could easily write all this code. But come now, even you promoters of government, let's all be honest with each other, this is not the case. And, again, that's not least because it would be unacceptable for a mass transit authority to hire all that talent when it should be using money to provide service.

Government can't be good at everything, because there are something things that it can only be good at at the expense of other things it is supposed to be doing instead. Wildly risky experimentation certainly sounds like a good candidate for that category to me.

[1]: By contrast, to be clear, I am fully behind incremental advancement, exploration, and development by governments. It routinely happens and it should. But in general, it is not their job to do moon shots with social programs. (Note the "moon shot" and "the bomb" and all the other really experimental stuff that you might want to name are not social programs. A line of military research coming up dry does not directly harm the poor. (Especially under progressive taxation where "the poor" pay either very little or negative taxes in the US, so you can't even really complain about their tax load.))

I see uber as a giant bulldozer that is paving the way for future competitors. Once they realize there's no way to keep people locked in unless they form a cartel like the traditional taxi industry, investors will panick.

An Uber cartel is the least possible outcome because they do not own the roads, the car, the people. Do I ride the bike to work or hitch a ride? Do I use Uber or just take a taxi that's parked right across my building? Do I use Lyft or Uber if Lyft is offering cheaper ride? Is there any noticeable difference or do I even care, I just want to go from A to B and pay the least amount of money.

This is the endgame for Uber: enable future competitors to reap the returns on it's investment because they are focused on monopoly in an industry that won't make it possible.