" 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?
It would be far, far more useful for the current group of politicians to fix the conditions that cause the MTA to be the single least efficient entity on the planet when it comes to rail construction[1], than it would be for them to rustle up another 15 billion dollars for today's project de jure.
>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?
It's not required that the two costs be identical for the writer's question to make sense. It's known that the Uber investment >||= the necessary criteria, but it's not known by how much. Maybe it was just about enough, or maybe it exceeded it by miles.
Privatized public transportation seems to work in other countries. This particular plan sounds exactly like Hong Kong's minibuses. Also in other countries, private companies own competing rail networks, competing directly against the local government. (Tokyo is an example, compare Tokyo Metro and Toei. JR was once the government, but was privatized. Keio, Tobu, Seibu, Tokyu, etc. were always private companies.)
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.
It's important to recognize that public transit as a concept has major opponents in North America and cities are constantly having to fight to be able to build necessary infrastructure. Bafflingly expansion and funding of transit seems to need to go to referendums, where projects are frequently defeated (a yes vote in a referendum is very tough to achieve). In contrast other transportation infrastructure simply goes ahead as regular government spending.
Ideological Anti-Tax, special interest groups have put huge amounts of money and effort into discrediting and defunding public transit and turning public opinion against expansion projects that would benefit everyone. The most recent example of this would be the Vancouver transit referendum, where the Canadian Taxpayers Federation seeded the idea that the transit runner Translink was a woefully inefficient organization even though in reality by almost any measure it's the best performing transit system on the west coast of NA. In the United states the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity group has been pushing back against transit expansion and funding all across America. http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/03/koch-brothers-war-transit/
Public transit doesn't work very well in the US but that's mostly a problem with the way US politics and government works rather than something intrinsic to public transit. France isn't exactly known for low labor costs but they can still build subways for roughly 1/5 the price per mile you see in the US. So maybe we ought to be doing more private mass transit in the US but that doesn't mean it's a good idea everywhere.
Imagine the dystopic future where Uber then colludes with the legal/prison complex, and can track everyone.
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.
Imagine a system where the subways are used as mandatory transportation to forced labor camps. Government trains transporting citizens to government factories, where they are forced to sing the national anthem before another grueling 14 hour shift. And if there are any problems, well, the subway is deep underground and out of sight.
A truly sinister system of subterranean socialism that stands in stark contrast to the red-blooded freedom of the open road.
For the price of a police helicopter police departments can continously monitor a 10 mile wide area from the sky. That is a lot better than waiting for cars to recognize stuff, subpoena all of them then work on the very hard problem of pieceing it all together.
Uber isn't a ride-sharing service - it's a ride-hailing service. The only thing that makes people want to use Uber over a Yellow Cab is that with Uber I open an app, click "Request Uber," the app shows me where the cab is, gives an accurate time of their arrival, and gives me information about my driver. You want to compete with Uber? Those are fairly straight-forward features to add to existing cab-hailing apps. Uber's technological advantage can thus be nullified easily, leaving it only to compete on price. Plus, taxis have an advantage because of the heavier regulation around taxis making them (theoretically) safer.
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.
We have a cab firm in my city that pushes the technology (as well as offering incredible service compared to others) I'd use them over Uber even at a somewhat higher price purely because I trust them in terms of safety and vehicle maintenance more than I do Uber.
The problem is that current technology is making this new model for mass transit realistic. When everyone has a cellphone, and we can have tons of sensors on vehicles that communicate in real time (and might eventually be self driving), the old model for transit (fixed routes, pickups at fixed times, etc.) doesn't make sense anymore.
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.
In the US, public transit can't make major changes, in big part, because they're very beholden to the unions.
Here in the Philadelphia metro, tickets for the train are sold by SEPTA ushers (cash only) who walk up and down the aisle of the train. It's been shown numerous times that a major portion of the cost of running the trains are these ushers, but the union blocks every attempt to move all sales to ticket kiosks.
In fact, labor costs now make up $898,340,000 of SEPTA's $1,259,764,000 budget, but time and again any move to lower that cost is blocked outright.
> 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.
That's a big honkin' if. Here in New York, you can get an unlimited metrocard for $116 a month; that's probably a week's worth of Uber rides.
Mom's not going to benefit much from that 20 minute ride if she still has to get up an hour earlier and work for two more hours to pay for Uber.
> We can't have it both ways. Either we go full capitalist
Also, this is a problem. If we go full capitalist and kill all government public transit, we end up having ONLY the upper classes use transit. There will be no reason to lower rates, there will be no subsidies. Is Uber going to build me a train to get me across town for $2.25? Absolutely not.
A city can afford to lose money on a public transit system because it gains that money back in having a tax base and an economy that's fueled by the people who use it. A private transit company has absolutely no reason to lose money per ride, except in the very beginning when they're trying to establish a user base. After that, their interest in the local economy is not as high as the municipal government's.
> But that's not how it works, because these agencies are bloated, ineffective, and the complete opposite of innovative
That's quite a blanket statement that sounds a whole lot like ideology. Data seems to point to a high usage in several cities[1] and usage continues to grow over time. If this was such a horrific service as you describe, I think we would see little to no ridership.
The "same price" caveat of your example is a pretty darn big exception. Quality of life would dramatically improve if we could get there, but for now, the fact that you can get across 20 miles of NYC sprawl for $2.50 is an unbeatable deal. Would any private company settle for as thin (or no) margins as any MTA does?
I think we'll see governments doubling down on rail/subway (where possible) and leaving bus services (probably minivans in most cases) largely to private enterprise.
Oh for christ's sake. I am a major proponent of public transit and walkable cities. Anyone who shares my support should be cheering wildly at Uber's expansion. Uber is the greatest, and perhaps the only, threat that we've ever had to American car ownership.
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.
To this point, I am a car guy, I was a car salesman for many years, and always had a nice car. A few years ago when I moved to Seattle, I decided to take a chance on public transit and Uber and decided to only have a single car for my family of four. It worked out! I actually can't stand to even drive anymore, and when my wife and I go out we try to avoid driving ourselves whenever possible. We still need the vehicle for long trips and for things like going to home depot, but it gets driven far less. I've also found myself taking the bus to destinations I normally wouldn't because the bus stop is a few miles from where I want to be, knowing that when I arrive I can get an Uber for the last little leg of the trip.
There is theoretically a public bus in Wilmington for $1 that makes a frequent trip past where my wife works (in the heart of the CBD) to the Amtrak station (about a mile and change away). Except it's never on time (in a small city with no traffic to speak of), and drivers decide to just randomly end their trips early and stop picking up passengers.
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.
> It is telling though that Constine notes that one of Uber’s Smart Routes runs “up Fillmore St. from Haight St. to Bay St. in the Marina, which the Bay Area’s BART service doesn’t cover,” when the route is directly covered by the SF MUNI 22 bus, which runs every eight minutes according to Google Maps
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.
I don't think people are taking Uber over the MUNI because of "stigma" or "bigotry". For sure there are some Uber users who are too good for public transportation, but I don't think that's a majority.
The real reason not to take the MUNI is speed. The MUNI is really, really slow. First of all it's a bus in SF traffics so it's a natural disadvantage except where it has a preferred lane. Second, the MUNI stops way too frequently, which adds many minutes to travel time. Sometimes it stops at every block [0]. So a ride on the MUNI that would be about 40m will be 20m in an Uber because the Uber will stop only 1-2 times depending on how many people you're sharing the ride with. So the MUNI is $2.25 and the Uber will be about $6 (in my experience). If you add in the convenience of hailing the Uber with your phone and getting to track it with GPS, you can see why people with extra money would use this.
However you should not take this as an endorsement, it's simply an explanation. I find it pathetic that the best SF can offer me to get from the north part of the city to downtown is a 45 minute jam-packed bus ride. It's only 3 miles! I'd love to see public transportation get more effective. Until then, I'll pretty much always ride my bike or take a Lyft Line.
This is very noticeable in the Bay Area, but not an issue in either Toronto or NYC. For example - in Toronto - while most people would generally prefer the subway or streetcar there's no stigma against buses (well - unless you consider the Vomit Comet).
I think this stigma and bigotry is an SF Bay Area thing. Or at any rate, I have never seen it here in Seattle. Plenty of well-off Amazon employees on the bus every morning.
I wonder if it has to do with the Bay Area being so spread out and car-centric, that only quite lower-class people don't have cars. Just a hypothesis from an outsider.
The price vs. users graph[0] is hopelessly wrong, dangerously wrong even. So wrong I can't take anything the author says about economics or markets seriously at all. I think they're trying to make the argument that Uber will achieve economies of scale but that would be cost vs. users, not price. Price and cost are different things.
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.
For me the main problem with infrastructure heavy mass transit, which the author seems to prefer, is that the horizons are in multiple decades. I've forever been frustrated by mass transit going not where they are needed.
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.
Same as Amazon, Google, Github. Basically technology monopolies, or technopolies as I like to call them. They have become so powerful that they are the de facto government in certain areas. Thrn they get in bed with the government and its hard to say where one stops and the next begins.
The endgame is for America to become the next China.
> One of the more subtle underlying issues with the rise of Uber is the company’s slow siphoning of the political will to fix existing—or build new—public transit infrastructure in major cities.
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.
So, I guess Hacker News is focused more on the tech than the political, but, still, I'm kinda taken aback by the comments here. The Uber "endgame" is a super-small fish in the bigger ocean called "neoliberalism". It's not just a tech issue, but technology does accelerate the issue.
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.
Uh no, the end game is autonomous logistics; getting someone or something from point A to point B. More automation is good, we're sorely lacking in automation.
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.
Jamaica has had this system for years. You stand next to the street and point if you want to go up or down, and you get a ride for $1. It's pretty cool. 7 people in one car at times.
The author writes "One of the more subtle underlying issues with the rise of Uber is the company’s slow siphoning of the political will to fix existing—or build new—public transit infrastructure in major cities."
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.
I live in DC. Our public transit is regularly late or broken, and is on fire often enough that people feel the need to check before their morning commute [1]. If the future of public transit is Uber, then I can't wait.
[+] [-] omonra|10 years ago|reply
" 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...
[+] [-] bradleyjg|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|10 years ago|reply
It's not required that the two costs be identical for the writer's question to make sense. It's known that the Uber investment >||= the necessary criteria, but it's not known by how much. Maybe it was just about enough, or maybe it exceeded it by miles.
[+] [-] orblivion|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|10 years ago|reply
Ideological Anti-Tax, special interest groups have put huge amounts of money and effort into discrediting and defunding public transit and turning public opinion against expansion projects that would benefit everyone. The most recent example of this would be the Vancouver transit referendum, where the Canadian Taxpayers Federation seeded the idea that the transit runner Translink was a woefully inefficient organization even though in reality by almost any measure it's the best performing transit system on the west coast of NA. In the United states the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity group has been pushing back against transit expansion and funding all across America. http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/03/koch-brothers-war-transit/
[+] [-] Symmetry|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bweitzman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zdw|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|10 years ago|reply
Then imagine the best possible future with the system I do like.
My system is clearly superior!
[+] [-] woah|10 years ago|reply
A truly sinister system of subterranean socialism that stands in stark contrast to the red-blooded freedom of the open road.
That's almost scarier to me than Uber bans.
</sarcasm>
[+] [-] placeybordeaux|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masterleep|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josu|10 years ago|reply
Your vision necessarily needs coercive governments to make sense.
[+] [-] Aqueous|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noir_lord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuiA|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hodwik|10 years ago|reply
Here in the Philadelphia metro, tickets for the train are sold by SEPTA ushers (cash only) who walk up and down the aisle of the train. It's been shown numerous times that a major portion of the cost of running the trains are these ushers, but the union blocks every attempt to move all sales to ticket kiosks.
In fact, labor costs now make up $898,340,000 of SEPTA's $1,259,764,000 budget, but time and again any move to lower that cost is blocked outright.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|10 years ago|reply
That's a big honkin' if. Here in New York, you can get an unlimited metrocard for $116 a month; that's probably a week's worth of Uber rides.
Mom's not going to benefit much from that 20 minute ride if she still has to get up an hour earlier and work for two more hours to pay for Uber.
> We can't have it both ways. Either we go full capitalist
Also, this is a problem. If we go full capitalist and kill all government public transit, we end up having ONLY the upper classes use transit. There will be no reason to lower rates, there will be no subsidies. Is Uber going to build me a train to get me across town for $2.25? Absolutely not.
A city can afford to lose money on a public transit system because it gains that money back in having a tax base and an economy that's fueled by the people who use it. A private transit company has absolutely no reason to lose money per ride, except in the very beginning when they're trying to establish a user base. After that, their interest in the local economy is not as high as the municipal government's.
[+] [-] hiou|10 years ago|reply
That's quite a blanket statement that sounds a whole lot like ideology. Data seems to point to a high usage in several cities[1] and usage continues to grow over time. If this was such a horrific service as you describe, I think we would see little to no ridership.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...
Please be a bit more pragmatic about actions that will effect around 100 million people.
[+] [-] rmxt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chevalier|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jhspaybar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hiou|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] habosa|10 years ago|reply
The real reason not to take the MUNI is speed. The MUNI is really, really slow. First of all it's a bus in SF traffics so it's a natural disadvantage except where it has a preferred lane. Second, the MUNI stops way too frequently, which adds many minutes to travel time. Sometimes it stops at every block [0]. So a ride on the MUNI that would be about 40m will be 20m in an Uber because the Uber will stop only 1-2 times depending on how many people you're sharing the ride with. So the MUNI is $2.25 and the Uber will be about $6 (in my experience). If you add in the convenience of hailing the Uber with your phone and getting to track it with GPS, you can see why people with extra money would use this.
However you should not take this as an endorsement, it's simply an explanation. I find it pathetic that the best SF can offer me to get from the north part of the city to downtown is a 45 minute jam-packed bus ride. It's only 3 miles! I'd love to see public transportation get more effective. Until then, I'll pretty much always ride my bike or take a Lyft Line.
0 - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are...
[+] [-] allengeorge|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umanwizard|10 years ago|reply
I wonder if it has to do with the Bay Area being so spread out and car-centric, that only quite lower-class people don't have cars. Just a hypothesis from an outsider.
[+] [-] hoopd|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ilaksh|10 years ago|reply
The endgame is for America to become the next China.
[+] [-] alwaysdoit|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oneJob|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omouse|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] myth_buster|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] dba7dba|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taigeair|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredkbloggs|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.ismetroonfire.com/