I don't entirely agree with the reasoning, but I think it goes like this: Historically transportation in NYC has been pretty egalitarian (leaving aside car ser

I don't entirely agree with the reasoning, but I think it goes like this: Historically transportation in NYC has been pretty egalitarian (leaving aside car service). A 1-percenter pays the same cab fare, subway fare, or (heaven forfend) bus fare as a single mom on welfare, and presumably gets basically the same level of service. The president drinks the same Coke you and I do. Uber basically allows those with more money to jump the queue. You hear the same thing about medical services in single-payer or socialized systems, where it's seen as almost a form of bribery for a medical professional to expedite care for someone who pays extra. Unfortunately while markets are arguably fair for groups of people with the roughly the same level of resources at their disposal (people are just expressing their preferences by allocating their money differently), they can be very "unfair" (for a certain narrow meaning of the word) because some people have vastly more resources to trade for a limited good. It almost makes you wish you could somehow separate "spendable money" from "earnable money", but unfortunately you need a way to incentivize people to work and be productive, and giving them more spending money seems to be the most straightforward way of doing so.