The headline reminded me of once reading the McDonald's investor relations website, where they claimed there was so much upside to investing in them because the

The headline reminded me of once reading the McDonald's investor relations website, where they claimed there was so much upside to investing in them because they were hoping to eventually deliver "just one meal per day" to each of the World's 7 billion inhabitants. Now to be fair, they claim to feed 68 million people each day right now, so they are on their way. But there is a reason that in a free market, they are unlikely to ever create the pseudo-monopoly they desire. And with public transport, Uber and Lyft have even more of a hurdle to clamber over. Firstly, in many parts of the World the public transport system is government-owned in some capacity. You can buy Citibike, sure, but it's not actually possible to buy the London equivalent: it's operated by the Mayor through the public sector entity Transport for London (TfL). And this is in in the UK where there is extensive privatisation in the bus and train markets, so you'd think there would be opportunity there. Maybe now: the free market experiment on these quasi-monopolies has been widely considered at least a partial failure and the appetite for nationalisation of the train network has never been higher. Developing cycle networks is reasonable. I despise the "leave anywhere" bikes, because they are already cluttering up London in reaction to the government owned scheme. However, I can see how this is super attractive for some classes of customer, and the cost base is low enough it wouldn't surprise me to see the mayor follow suit and mimicking their platforms. But a wholly integrated stack? I'm sceptical. A system where I could book a point-to-point journey from say my home to my girlfriend's mothers (180 miles away) that incorporated car from my home to the train station, the train itself and then a car at the other end would appeal, but only if it was significantly price competitive with me doing that myself right now, which ideally requires advance booking, a model that Uber is specifically uninterested in. It's also not obvious Uber/Lyft needs to own or operate most of that stack, and owning it may actually make it less attractive. Given an Uber or Lyft app that did this, and a third-party app that used APIs to integrate and give me wider options and more competitive pricing, I'm not likely to go with Uber or Lyft. Uber's & Lyft's only option then is to try and eliminate in its entirety any sense of competition. This rarely ends well. So you then end up with a race to the bottom on price, and that's unlikely to lead to profitable businesses, unless they try and borrow budget airline business models, which again, models itself on advance booking price/yield management, a model Uber and Lyft seem to be trying to avoid. I don't quite see the big picture here. CityMapper might be the people to watch in this space...