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Uber and Lyft are private companies. They have to constantly improve their service, and if they aren't providing value to their customers, they can ultimately f

Uber and Lyft are private companies. They have to constantly improve their service, and if they aren't providing value to their customers, they can ultimately fail. They also have tons of headwinds from regulations and hatred from politicians / journalists. You know what I don't have a choice on? My tax dollars that pay for inefficient, unprofitable, and terrible service from public transportation. Washington DC spent hundreds of millions of dollars on brand new subway cars that were supposed last 40 years, now they all need to be replaced after 3 years. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/over-half-washington-d-c-metro-rail-cars-pulled-after-n1281814 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/over-half-washington-d-... Without the market test of profitable / unprofitable, politicians keep shoveling dollars at boondoggles that don't make any sense. I like Uber and Lyft because they respond to the needs of their customers. Government transportation is - at best - decent. It never blows you away, and is usually behind schedule, dirty, broken, and full of employees who don't care.

dgan 5y ago
Interesting thesis! Maybe constrained to US though. I really appreciate public transportation in Lyon and Paris, and never felt any need to own a car. You shouldn't generalize your particular experience to "public transportation" EDIT: okey lets be fair, a little less for Paris, because of constant strikes last years.
mrtranscendence 5y ago
> now they all need to be replaced after 3 years. Your link doesn't say that. They were all taken offline, but the issue is with the wheel assembly, not the entire car, and it seems likely to me that only a portion of those will have to be replaced.
AlexandrB 5y ago
Public services should not have the goal of being profitable. That's how you get negative feedback loops of bad service and declining utilization. Public transportation does not have to be terrible, by the way. Many cities have great public transit - Montreal and Hong Kong are ones I've personally experienced that had great public transit systems. But I get the sense that a lot of US cities treat public transit as a parasitic entity taking up space and leeching money. When providing public transit is not a priority it's not surprising that it becomes compromised in ways that ruin its utility. > Washington DC spent hundreds of millions of dollars on brand new subway cars that were supposed last 40 years, now they all need to be replaced after 3 years. By the way, isn't this the fault of the (presumably private) contractor that built the things? It's not like a bunch of bureaucrats built these things with their welding rigs and wrenches. Until there are meaningful penalties for these kinds of fuckups by the private sector, why wouldn't they treat public projects as free money? It's what the profit motive dictates.
woah 5y ago
Every city subsidizes cars with billions of dollars of free parking. It is perhaps the largest expense of our government. All we get for that is road rage and traffic deaths.
- seibelj 5y ago
  Yep - I don't support the government subsidizing this either!
ryan_lane 5y ago
I've been living in Tokyo for about a year and a half, and I've been in a car maybe 4 times since then. Public transportation is incredible, when done right. When I lived in NYC, I rarely used cabs, lyft or uber. The reason it isn't done right in most of the US is because people think it needs to make a profit. That leads to it being underfunded, which means it doesn't run often enough, and doesn't have enough coverage, which leads to lower ridership, which leads to people like you complaining that we're wasting so much money on terrible service. Stop thinking of public services as companies.

dgan 5y ago

Interesting thesis! Maybe constrained to US though. I really appreciate public transportation in Lyon and Paris, and never felt any need to own a car. You shouldn't generalize your particular experience to "public transportation" EDIT: okey lets be fair, a little less for Paris, because of constant strikes last years.

mrtranscendence 5y ago

> now they all need to be replaced after 3 years. Your link doesn't say that. They were all taken offline, but the issue is with the wheel assembly, not the entire car, and it seems likely to me that only a portion of those will have to be replaced.

AlexandrB 5y ago

Public services should not have the goal of being profitable. That's how you get negative feedback loops of bad service and declining utilization. Public transportation does not have to be terrible, by the way. Many cities have great public transit - Montreal and Hong Kong are ones I've personally experienced that had great public transit systems. But I get the sense that a lot of US cities treat public transit as a parasitic entity taking up space and leeching money. When providing public transit is not a priority it's not surprising that it becomes compromised in ways that ruin its utility. > Washington DC spent hundreds of millions of dollars on brand new subway cars that were supposed last 40 years, now they all need to be replaced after 3 years. By the way, isn't this the fault of the (presumably private) contractor that built the things? It's not like a bunch of bureaucrats built these things with their welding rigs and wrenches. Until there are meaningful penalties for these kinds of fuckups by the private sector, why wouldn't they treat public projects as free money? It's what the profit motive dictates.

woah 5y ago

Every city subsidizes cars with billions of dollars of free parking. It is perhaps the largest expense of our government. All we get for that is road rage and traffic deaths.

seibelj 5y ago
Yep - I don't support the government subsidizing this either!

ryan_lane 5y ago

I've been living in Tokyo for about a year and a half, and I've been in a car maybe 4 times since then. Public transportation is incredible, when done right. When I lived in NYC, I rarely used cabs, lyft or uber. The reason it isn't done right in most of the US is because people think it needs to make a profit. That leads to it being underfunded, which means it doesn't run often enough, and doesn't have enough coverage, which leads to lower ridership, which leads to people like you complaining that we're wasting so much money on terrible service. Stop thinking of public services as companies.