In my city the buses suck. There are lots of lines going on meandering routes through the suburbs. Not enough routes going between dense areas with high frequency. I desperately wish to take public transit, but it’s normal that the travel time would be hours longer than driving, which makes it totally impractical.
There is obvious room for improvement with routes that dynamically respond to demand. If the bus doesn't have to run where nobody uses it, and can instead pick up riders who are waiting in a popular area, and take them where they want to go, the same number of buses and drivers could deliver much more transit value.
Probably it would be better if the city bus service ran this instead of Uber. But that bureaucracy has no history of making reasonable decisions.
This looks a lot like a digital marshrutka.[0]
These things are actually pretty great, in a way. My city is full of them. The drivers are maniacs, they're overcrowded and dangerous, but they're affordable, have great coverage and are better than yet more cars on the road.
How much cleaner, safer and faster would the actual public transit option be if everyone who was prepared to pay $13 each way for a 30-minute commute paid the same amount in taxes instead?
Public transportation does not need to be run at a profit - it is a public utility, just like mail service. What better metric could we use to compare private driver services to public transit?
We can roughly assess the economic value added to the community per dollar of transit spend. I am not sure that metric is possible to measure for Uber?
I would take this for the sole reason that junkies and panhandlers won’t be able to afford it
Main difference:
They can kick out disruptive passengers
Transit expert discuses Uber reinventing public transit: https://humantransit.org/2017/05/the-receding-fantasy-of-aff...
A lot of people feel the bus is not for them but will be fine taking this :/
Patrick Boyle did a series on techbros reinventing things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jhTnk3TCtc
My favorite is transport means that involve rails.
> The goal, he said, “is just to reduce prices to the consumer and then help with congestion and the environment.”
Like Uber cares about any of these things (prices, consumers, congestion, the environment)