Is anyone else slightly apprehensive about Uber substituting as public transport? What if their motive is to bankrupt public transport agencies and then raise prices when people have no alternative?
Private enterprise relies on business failure and distribution of resources to those who can pay the most for them. Some things can't fail (police, fire, transportation, water, medical, etc.) and are needed by everyone regardless of income.
> What if their motive is to bankrupt public transport agencies and then raise prices when people have no alternative?
Uber prides itself, IME, on very aggressive business tactics, concerned only for profit and not, for example, its own workers, local laws, etc. I would be surprised if they did otherwise than what you say.
That said, I don't think the situation is as dire as you're describing. Getting around in smaller American cities is _already_ difficult for many people- as you mentioned, those living on very limited budgets, but also the elderly and other people that can't drive themselves around and must rely on family and friends.
So, in the end, I think it's less a matter of "replacing public transportation", and more a matter of "creating a realistic model for publicly-funded transportation in suburban and semi-rural America".
This is not to say that I'm super chuffed with Uber being the one to do it. But I can see a future where municipal governments become comfortable with the idea, which would open the door to competition, just as we've seen in major cities where there are plenty of alternatives to Uber.
My adjacent city just spent something like 2 years and who knows how much money putting in a new parking garage for one of the MBTA stations that have been notorious for insufficient parking for pretty much forever. With no parking at all during the construction. Assuming the numbers and logistics worked out, something like this would have been very interesting.
I'd be much less concerned if governing bodies created a non-profit that built and ran the technical infrastructure for ridesharing.
* Uber is not substituting for public transport. It's replacing the "last mile" of suburban commuters driving to the local NJTransit station with a pool of drivers who can keep rolling throughout the day.
* Uber replacing a mass-transit link (especially something like a train line into NYC) is unthinkable. The links for cars between NJ and NYC are already at or beyond capacity, and the planning is right now trying to drive commuters to use public transit when possible.
I think mass transit needs to be rethought. On the one hand when I ride buses in Wilmington they are primarily empty. I can totally understand why over the past several years they have raised the fairs, decreased running times, and condensed lines and stops. On the other I can't get really get around without a car.
Due to the car first mentality uber is not heavily in demand, and prices seem higher than when I was in Philadelphia. Uber has not even entered the vocabulary of alot of people around Wilmington.
So which way do you go, the bus routes are expensive and require alot of man power. Yet there's limited demand. Do you put that in a private company? I really don't trust government to vendor relations. I know they easily get overcharged. I would literally toss money at a family subscription for uber or lyft. Locking in rides at a set rate. But that would require a subsidy. I've also seen as you said, rates start small then they raise and bankrupt another party.
For almost all routes, the cost per mile, carbon footprint, and convenience will all be better than a bus or train.
Major thoroughfares will still want to be subway/light rail/commuter rail/bus, for traffic alleviation purposes, and because high capacity is where public transit efficiency really shines. But think of it more like internet backbone—a way to quickly and efficiently get batched traffic through bottlenecks—not as the default mode of access.
Think commuters disembarking rail cars and boarding a swarm of continuously replenished self-driving vehicles, from 2-seaters (faster) to microbuses (cheaper), on the other side of the platform. Those two modes of transport, maximum efficiency and maximum convenience, will squeeze out almost everything in between.
Without centralized routes, there is no point to government involvement for the last mile (last five?) transit system, and Uber/Google/Tesla will coalesce close to cost plus 10% or whatever.
Anyway, the article mentions this is maybe ten to a hundred rides a day. This is either a PR thing or a prototype; time will tell.