3 ms·

The public infrastructure which you've described didn't 'fail' because of lack of funding, it 'failed' because of lack of aligned incentives. Please specifical

• wfo 11y ago
  Of course it did -- public transportation, the alternative to mass widespread use of taxis/private cabs most certainly dies in most of the US because of a lack of funding. And you're right I left that dystopian comment vague -- let me clarify, having a large private monopoly own a necessary piece of transportation infrastructure is my idea of a dystopia, incidentally especially when their business model is built around using ownership of the name and app to exploit people who really need to use it (i.e. surge pricing) and people who work to provide it (i.e. the "technically private contractors but really just employees without benefits"). The point is transportation is something we all require and should be provided by the public (it already is in the form of roads, but that's not good enough): taxis are a crappy but elastic solution that's there to fill in the gaps. I think their awfulness is a good thing: private cars driving people around are a terrible solution to the real problem which is transportation infrastructure. As soon as a terrible solution starts to look and feel okay to a lot of (wealthy or middle-class) people, that's dangerous. Because things like Uber don't look and feel okay to the very poor. That's why I describe it as dystopian.