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

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.