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> Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting support for public services, including transit systems — many of which still haven’t fully recovered from Covid-e

> Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting support for public services, including transit systems — many of which still haven’t fully recovered from Covid-era budget crunches. Though ridership nationwide is up to 85 percent of prepandemic levels, Bloomberg News recently estimated that transit systems across the country face a $6 billion budget shortfall. The gameplan is clear. Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise. Then you’re free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be.

tptacek 1y ago
I don't especially like Uber as a company, but it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public, and in many of the cities Uber operates in, the transit authorities had been faceplanting all on their own without any help.
- lmm 1y ago
  > it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public Hardly a conspiracy theory to think Uber might be trying to undercut their competitors and put them out of business before raising their prices when they have an established history of doing exactly that.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    Yeah I mean.. NYC Ubers are probably 3x the price they were 10 years ago.
- ahtihn 1y ago
  It's pretty easy to outcompete public transit on specific profitable lines. The problem is that public transit has to serve a lot of unprofitable lines and by having a private competitor putting pressure on the only parts that actually make money, the overall economics of public transit become much worse.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    Right, I think everybody gets that. But: they have private competitors. They can't just define that problem away. Most people don't take busses or private shuttles; they just drive.
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    The same as package delivery - Amazon takes the easiest portion, FedEx/UPS the middle tier, and then USPS gets handed off all the most difficult addresses
    - steveBK123 1y ago
      Precisely - USPS legally is required to delivery everywhere, they have no choice. Their pricing doesn't adequately reflect the difficulty of delivery either. FedEx/UPS can also be very picky about which services they offer to who. I've had plenty of FedEx/UPS return shipments that they refuse to pickup due to service level agreements on different shipment classes. USPS you can literally click on their website for them to come pickup a stupid $8 shipment from your door. They'll drive to your house and ring your doorbell to pick it up, incredible.
      - rented_mule 1y ago
        This varies. UPS and FedEx deliver to my door. The USPS will only deliver to my nearest post office, not to my door. There is no home mail delivery at all in our town, nor in much of our county. Each affected home gets a free PO Box.
      - gruez 1y ago
        > Their pricing doesn't adequately reflect the difficulty of delivery either. What's preventing them from properly pricing their services? The whole implication in this line of discussion seems to be that Amazon is taking advantage of USPS, and they're somehow hapless to prevent that from happening.
        kalleboo 1y ago
- arrosenberg 1y ago
  Uber executives would not survive first contact with public hearings that transit authorities regularly have to engage in.
- afavour 1y ago
  I won’t disagree with you for a second that transit authorities have been faceplanting all by themselves. But I also don’t see what I described as a conspiracy, it’s just how business works. While Uber competes with public transit the price they’re able to charge is limited by that competition. Once that competition is gone (and siphoning off a segment of its customer base is certainly a way to make that happen) the company is less constrained in how much they can get away with charging. Uber doesn’t have the obligations a public transit authority has, they’re free to pick and choose the most profitable routes to compete on and ignore the less profitable ones. Uber doesn’t have to deliberate engage in nefarious practises to destroy a transit system, they just have to do what works for them.
kortilla 1y ago
Buses are very unpleasant in the US. They stop too frequently so they are extremely slow. Most cities do not have enough routes or frequency to be useful. The cities that do have them tolerate belligerent people on them making the ride unpleasant. In other words, the high value, richer customers are already not riding the bus.
- mousethatroared 1y ago
  And they smell like urine, are generally filthy and they are the most likely place a middle class person is to be trapped in a small environment with a mentally ill person. If: - America solved its mental health crisis - Americans became cleaner - Americans became better behaved in public Then Americans who can afford not to take the bus would reconsider it.
  - Avicebron 1y ago
    I'm strongly convinced that economic precarity, homelessness and the stressor that brings, is more likely to manifest itself as "mentally ill" than just, "well for some reason we have a lot of crazy people now", it's not too hard to maintain minimum hygiene if you have a roof over your head, three squares, and a bit of positive socialization from work/school/church/library/whatever
    - mousethatroared 1y ago
      Sure, and this is a very interesting question whose absence in American political discourse is an indictment against us. But this meta question is not why I don't ride the bus. The structural inconvenience of it, and the odors inside are.
    - gruez 1y ago
      Being homeless and not having a place to shower excuses you looking unkempt and smelling bad, but that's not what people are upset at homeless people for. There's plenty of people who smell bad despite being housed (eg. teenage boys, gamers, or anime convention attendees), but they get nowhere as much flak as "homeless people". People are upset at antisocial behavior like urinating in public, aggressively approaching others, and setting up encampments. Except for maybe the last item, all of those things are a homeless person chose to do.
crazygringo 1y ago
> Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise. Richer customers don't pay more for public transit. It's not like clothing, where they buy a better product and produce most of the profit. Removing some customers from bus systems doesn't have much of an effect. Bus systems are very flexible in changing routes and times to meet demand. It's not going to cause a "complete demise". Also, if private buses are profitable, they invite competition. Private buses are an incredibly easy business to start. So no, nobody's "free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be".
- bgwalter 1y ago
  Richer customers don't pay more, but they have the influence to keep public transit nice and functioning because they use it themselves. I suppose that in New York and London richer people use the subway to escape traffic jams. They can tell their politician friends (or bought politicians) to keep subsidizing it. In Europe privatization of public transport has been a disaster. Routes are cut, the trains don't run on time, etc.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    I don't think rich people have as much influence on public transit as you think. And in New York at least, truly rich people take a car service. Subways are for the normal people. The truly rich want their own private space and they want sunlight. In any case, nobody's talking about the privatization of public transport, which is the conversion from public to private. This is about alternate private options becoming available. The public option stays. And it's not about subways, it's about buses.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  Rich customer here is not like 1% rich, but everyone above a min. wage job rich. If you remove them from the public system ridership drops signficantly and the scale required to support it erodes. It also becomes much easier to get concensus to reduce funding, accelerating the process. The argument here is more like Canada's public/private healthcare: anyone able to will opt out of the public side. If you don't keep the funding for it in place it will be comparably worse. I would expect it is much easier to cut funding to public transit with less riders, which this will definitely cause.

tptacek 1y ago

I don't especially like Uber as a company, but it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public, and in many of the cities Uber operates in, the transit authorities had been faceplanting all on their own without any help.

lmm 1y ago
> it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public Hardly a conspiracy theory to think Uber might be trying to undercut their competitors and put them out of business before raising their prices when they have an established history of doing exactly that.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  Yeah I mean.. NYC Ubers are probably 3x the price they were 10 years ago.
ahtihn 1y ago
It's pretty easy to outcompete public transit on specific profitable lines. The problem is that public transit has to serve a lot of unprofitable lines and by having a private competitor putting pressure on the only parts that actually make money, the overall economics of public transit become much worse.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Right, I think everybody gets that. But: they have private competitors. They can't just define that problem away. Most people don't take busses or private shuttles; they just drive.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  The same as package delivery - Amazon takes the easiest portion, FedEx/UPS the middle tier, and then USPS gets handed off all the most difficult addresses
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    Precisely - USPS legally is required to delivery everywhere, they have no choice. Their pricing doesn't adequately reflect the difficulty of delivery either. FedEx/UPS can also be very picky about which services they offer to who. I've had plenty of FedEx/UPS return shipments that they refuse to pickup due to service level agreements on different shipment classes. USPS you can literally click on their website for them to come pickup a stupid $8 shipment from your door. They'll drive to your house and ring your doorbell to pick it up, incredible.
    - rented_mule 1y ago
      This varies. UPS and FedEx deliver to my door. The USPS will only deliver to my nearest post office, not to my door. There is no home mail delivery at all in our town, nor in much of our county. Each affected home gets a free PO Box.
    - gruez 1y ago
      > Their pricing doesn't adequately reflect the difficulty of delivery either. What's preventing them from properly pricing their services? The whole implication in this line of discussion seems to be that Amazon is taking advantage of USPS, and they're somehow hapless to prevent that from happening.
      - kalleboo 1y ago
arrosenberg 1y ago
Uber executives would not survive first contact with public hearings that transit authorities regularly have to engage in.
afavour 1y ago
I won’t disagree with you for a second that transit authorities have been faceplanting all by themselves. But I also don’t see what I described as a conspiracy, it’s just how business works. While Uber competes with public transit the price they’re able to charge is limited by that competition. Once that competition is gone (and siphoning off a segment of its customer base is certainly a way to make that happen) the company is less constrained in how much they can get away with charging. Uber doesn’t have the obligations a public transit authority has, they’re free to pick and choose the most profitable routes to compete on and ignore the less profitable ones. Uber doesn’t have to deliberate engage in nefarious practises to destroy a transit system, they just have to do what works for them.

kortilla 1y ago

Buses are very unpleasant in the US. They stop too frequently so they are extremely slow. Most cities do not have enough routes or frequency to be useful. The cities that do have them tolerate belligerent people on them making the ride unpleasant. In other words, the high value, richer customers are already not riding the bus.

mousethatroared 1y ago
And they smell like urine, are generally filthy and they are the most likely place a middle class person is to be trapped in a small environment with a mentally ill person. If: - America solved its mental health crisis - Americans became cleaner - Americans became better behaved in public Then Americans who can afford not to take the bus would reconsider it.
- Avicebron 1y ago
  I'm strongly convinced that economic precarity, homelessness and the stressor that brings, is more likely to manifest itself as "mentally ill" than just, "well for some reason we have a lot of crazy people now", it's not too hard to maintain minimum hygiene if you have a roof over your head, three squares, and a bit of positive socialization from work/school/church/library/whatever
  - mousethatroared 1y ago
    Sure, and this is a very interesting question whose absence in American political discourse is an indictment against us. But this meta question is not why I don't ride the bus. The structural inconvenience of it, and the odors inside are.
  - gruez 1y ago
    Being homeless and not having a place to shower excuses you looking unkempt and smelling bad, but that's not what people are upset at homeless people for. There's plenty of people who smell bad despite being housed (eg. teenage boys, gamers, or anime convention attendees), but they get nowhere as much flak as "homeless people". People are upset at antisocial behavior like urinating in public, aggressively approaching others, and setting up encampments. Except for maybe the last item, all of those things are a homeless person chose to do.

crazygringo 1y ago

> Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise. Richer customers don't pay more for public transit. It's not like clothing, where they buy a better product and produce most of the profit. Removing some customers from bus systems doesn't have much of an effect. Bus systems are very flexible in changing routes and times to meet demand. It's not going to cause a "complete demise". Also, if private buses are profitable, they invite competition. Private buses are an incredibly easy business to start. So no, nobody's "free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be".

bgwalter 1y ago
Richer customers don't pay more, but they have the influence to keep public transit nice and functioning because they use it themselves. I suppose that in New York and London richer people use the subway to escape traffic jams. They can tell their politician friends (or bought politicians) to keep subsidizing it. In Europe privatization of public transport has been a disaster. Routes are cut, the trains don't run on time, etc.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  I don't think rich people have as much influence on public transit as you think. And in New York at least, truly rich people take a car service. Subways are for the normal people. The truly rich want their own private space and they want sunlight. In any case, nobody's talking about the privatization of public transport, which is the conversion from public to private. This is about alternate private options becoming available. The public option stays. And it's not about subways, it's about buses.
skeeter2020 1y ago
Rich customer here is not like 1% rich, but everyone above a min. wage job rich. If you remove them from the public system ridership drops signficantly and the scale required to support it erodes. It also becomes much easier to get concensus to reduce funding, accelerating the process. The argument here is more like Canada's public/private healthcare: anyone able to will opt out of the public side. If you don't keep the funding for it in place it will be comparably worse. I would expect it is much easier to cut funding to public transit with less riders, which this will definitely cause.