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Comment by madiator | Hacker News Reader

The article sounds one-sided in favor of Uber, but as a tourist who visited the place recently, it would have been much easier for me if Uber/Lyft operated.

The public transit may be nice, but as a tourist, I didn't bother with the bus timings and such: it was way easier to get a cab. Under such circumstances, Uber/Lyft may have made it much easier, especially since, at times we felt flagging down a cab was impossible.

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If you're not used to public transport in your home city, you probably wouldn't know how to use it in a different city. For example, you can send a text to any bus-stop, and immediately get a list of upcoming bus times. They were also fully integrated to Map apps.

This is the sorest spot of "Uber culture" for me: wealthy and educated people who would put skills and pressure into keeping public transit sharp and usable for themselves (and therefore everybody else), instead "opt out" for their own private needs and leave public transit to rot.

It's not the job of wealthy and educated people to use their skills to fix public transit, any more than it's my job as a private citizen on the East Coast to reform the police department in LA (take your pick which "LA"). That job belongs to the local government. If the local government is incompetent at running public transit in an efficient manner so that both locals and visitors can easily use it to get around, that's the fault of the local government. The "wealthy and educated" people you refer to are not government officials, and have no business telling the government what to do (they probably aren't even constituents). So they're doing the only thing they can: making a private service that solves a real problem and provides a real solution for many, many people.

If local governments would like to learn from this and come up with their own solutions, perhaps even hiring some of these smart people to help them, that'd be great. But I don't see them doing any of that.

Los Alamos, NM!

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