The Decade of Cheap Rides Is Over
slate.com
slate.com
It makes car ownership more necessary in most parts of the US, at a time when cars are expensive.
It eliminates a "default fallback job", exactly when inflation and recession make it more important.
For those who can't drive (whether for reasons of money or immigration status or something else), it makes it all the more important to be in one of the few places with decent transport. Those are expensive places.
In exchange, maybe bus ridership will go up 12% in San Francisco and New York. That's a bad trade.
Yeah, I prefer urbanism too, but, on net, Uber was good for probably everybody but the investors. Hell, if the government ran it at cost, it'd probably add overall to the economy through positive externalities.
Utopia involves nice little walkable towns and bicycles and such, but I don't see how you get to there from here, in the US, without blowing everything up first -- some unimaginable catastrophe, like the Yellowstone caldera going boom, or a decades-long strategic bombing campaign by the Empire of Japan. There's just no way to fix it. It is what it is. Uber makes the best of it.
I think the selling point might be heavier commuter rail, something like the network in Chicago. Make it a bit more luxurious feeling and give it a modern image, but the speed is probably not the issue.
Sell the dream of living by a walkable suburb an hour out of downtown. You can get on the train at 7:45AM, unfold your laptop, and by the time you've arrived, you've already done all the first-of-the-day paperwork and are relaxed and ready for the actual productive day. Come 5PM, you can just unwind in the coach, rather than devote your remaining energy for the day to steering a two-tonne death machine.
No worries about a breakdown blocking the freeway, a road-rage incident ruining your day, or being blocked by a snow-in.
How do you do that without making it inaccessible to poor people?
> your laptop, and by the time you've arrived, you've already done all the first-of-the-day paperwork and are relaxed and ready for the actual productive day.
This is a fairy tale though. Commuter rails are mass transit, people wind up crammed into standing room only, there's absolutely never room to relax or unwind or get work done on a laptop.
I'm not sure how you could make your plan a reality without in making transit less available for poorer people.
I think the way forward is autonomous, affordable electric cars and designing our streets to be more accommodating to them.
There's something the author is ignoring here: public safety. In the Bay Area it's apparently a policy not to report crimes anymore [0]. Maybe decreasing ridership numbers has something to do with it.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-withholding-s...
In fact one of the justifications given by BART is that "juvenile police records are protected", implying that it was reported to the police. Stop spreading misinformation.