70 karma · joined August 27, 2009
Part of the problem is that public transit scales differently from ride share. The more riders public transit has, the better it gets. The more riders ride share has (beyond a certain point) the worse it gets.
Let's also not forget that these ride hailing services are MASSIVELY subsidizing the cost of rides in order to attract drivers/users. That hurts business for taxis. In my mind, this is a sort of protection that ensures taxis stay in business as another, publicly regulated option. What happens in other areas of Uber/Lyft kill all the taxis and then decide doing business isn't profitable and leave (or all their drivers leave I've subsidies end)? This might seem like a farfetched scenario, but remember that Uber is still sitting in a large cash reserves. What will change when they need to turn a profit every quarter? If they have established a monopoly (even locally), they can charge users as much as they want. If they've established a monopsony on drivers, they can lower wages. In my opinion, subsidizing a long-standing industry from a monopolistic competitor with gobs of money to throw at the market looks like a good move.
The second reason is that having a female protagonist changes the entire meaning of the story. Consider Pierre Menard, author of Quixote (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...), which discusses how the particular context of the author effects the meaning of the work.
Wikipedia had an excellent article about gender representation in video games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_representation_in_vid... . One part of the article notes:
> 60% of girls but only 39% of boys preferred to play a character of their own gender, and 28% of girls as opposed to 20% of boys said that they were more likely to play a game based on the character's gender.
So it may not matter to some people, but it matters greatly to others.