Those Silicon Valley geniuses have done it again!
Next week- “it’s like the subway, but with AI!”
This is what happens when you believe the private sector is the answer to everything. We reinvent the wheel one hundred times, and each time its more square than before.
Yet somehow more expensive.
Which makes it better than a bus because then I don’t have to sit next to poor people /s
I have a friend who unironically believes in expensive services for this reason.
Just waiting for them to reinvent light rail
How about Uber Feet, where you pay to walk somewhere?
Yeah, my nearest grocery store is a 1h15m walk or an 8 minute drive.
Just use uber sprint
NOW INTRODUCING: Public transports! But private! And dIsRuPTiVe!
silicon valley invented the marshrutka
Good? We need more bus routes
We need more public transportation, not privatized bus routes
We don’t need to make them Uber chartered bus routes.
Why not? The more the merrier, and you, the customer, have a choice.
What if you, the customer, are a poor person? Is Uber going to subsidize a bus pass for you to charter one of Uber’s buses to their job?
From my own experience, if you’re poor, you use a regular bus. If you want to get somewhere faster, you pay more and catch a shuttle. If you want comfort, you pay even more and get a taxi. And all modes of transport are always full to the brim. The more the merrier, always.
But…that’s our point. Uber taking over bus routes would ultimately void that choice. Public transportation is a public service. Letting a VC-funded for-profit company weasel their way into that space is never going to not fuck poor people. It’ll fuck everyone, but it’ll make “public transportation” unaffordable. And, really, when you’re poor, “if you want to get somewhere faster” isn’t really an option. That’s…the thing with being poor. You don’t have the extra money to spend to catch a shuttle and you don’t have the luxury of paying for comfort. Not to mention, even in the best case scenario, where busses would keep their existing schedule and routes (though the likelihood of this happening is slim) and we’d just get more busses? It’d clog the system, ultimately slowing bus routes.
So, no. Not “the more the merrier” when it comes to private companies elbowing their way into public service, and especially not when we’re talking about fuckin traffic.
It works just fine elsewhere.
Like where? Kids school lunches? Oh, no…wait…a bunch of literal children have school lunch debt. Well, maybe family visits for prisoners? Oh, no, they’ve now barred people from visiting inmates and a private company now forces them to pay to do a shitty video chat. Okay, well maybe the American healthcare system? Nope. I guess that one’s killing a whole bunch of people and drowning families in debt for simple procedures and charging people $80 for a Tylenol and charging mothers for letting them hold their own fucking child.
I’m sure there’s a great example where a private company is doling out their services at a loss as a public good, right?
Until the city decides to get rid of the subsidized bus system because “Uber is a better service and covers the routes anyway” and then they jack the price sky-high.
Exactly. How people haven’t realized this yet is fuckin inconceivable. Trusting a for-profit company—with a history of the exact problematic behavior we’re worried about—is beyond stupid. They can operate at a loss for a long time. Just to fuck other businesses out of the market so they can charge as much as they want. It’s literally their business model.
Wait they didn’t have them in the US? We’ve had uber shuttles for years in India
If you click the article link, then use a process called “reading”, you would see:
The company has already launched similar services abroad in Egypt, Nigeria, and India. Now it’s bringing the concept to the United States.
Edit: I misunderstood and assumed he hadn’t read the article, which is entirely too common these days.
God forbid I react to the article after reading it
This person was just expressing their surprise. Why are you so pissy lmao
