It's not the job of wealthy and educated people to use their skills to fix public transit, any more than it's my job as a private citizen on the East Coast to r

It's not the job of wealthy and educated people to use their skills to fix public transit, any more than it's my job as a private citizen on the East Coast to reform the police department in LA (take your pick which "LA"). That job belongs to the local government. If the local government is incompetent at running public transit in an efficient manner so that both locals and visitors can easily use it to get around, that's the fault of the local government. The "wealthy and educated" people you refer to are not government officials, and have no business telling the government what to do (they probably aren't even constituents). So they're doing the only thing they can: making a private service that solves a real problem and provides a real solution for many, many people. If local governments would like to learn from this and come up with their own solutions, perhaps even hiring some of these smart people to help them, that'd be great. But I don't see them doing any of that.