i think the US lacks the regulatory structure and social character that's more present in Japan that make private-public services more successful there.
as a regular metro commuter, i don't think i'd be totally opposed to private transit in LA if it were heavily regulated. but without that, i'd rather deal with all the problems on the metro (stinky riders, drivers switching mid-route, track traffic) at 1.75 per ride, than any of my money go to making Uber shareholders (or anyone who profits by exploiting the "gig economy") more money.
The U.S. used to have a vibrant private transportation industry. The cities killed it. NYC is a great example. The vast majority of the NYC subway system was constructed by _two_ private companies (!) in the 19-teens(!) in competition with each other(!!). The city regulated them and kept them from raising fares in the 20s and 30s. By the 40s the city had to rescue and acquire them because they could not survive on artificially-low fares. And until the 50s there was a vibrant trolley car and bus network between Brooklyn and Queens. Today only the city runs buses, and there is much less capacity per-capita between Brooklyn and Queens.
It's the same nationwide, roughly. There is nothing like Buenos Aires' private bus system in the U.S. because the cities don't allow it.
It didn't have to be that way. But in the U.S. the federal government has no power to nationalize, the States do but are in competition with each other so they don't do it. But the cities?
The cities can totally "nationalize" the transport industry, and they do and did all the way up until ride sharing came along to destroy the hyper-regulated taxi industry. Ride sharing grew fast enough that the cities did not have time to quash it and now they can't without incurring the ire of their citizens.
Now finally comes the ride sharing industry to -let us hope- finally destroy the cities' stranglehold on public transportation.
One thing to remember is that a lot of streetcar companies were started by developers who wanted to make their developments convenient travel from downtown. Many of them would have needed to consolidate or shift to remain financially viable.
The thing which killed transit was the massive subsidies for private car ownership and especially coding transit riders as poor/black. Cities didn’t kill transit because they loved traffic, it happened because much of the tax base moved out to the suburbs and generations of city planners prioritized private car travel over transit at almost every turn.
kindly, what would make you believe that the private, highly-likely-to-ignore-or-skirt-regulation ride sharing industry would produce a mass-transit product that remains price/service-competitive in an american city?
i have zero trust in the private sector to do anything that won't turn into a gated community, become abandoned, or rely on labor that they won't exploit worse than what they already do with "the gig economy".
we can have the private sector provide public good but we don't have the regulatory infrastructure in place to enforce that, and the more we strengthen the private sector at the expense of the public sector, the further we get away from that, and the closer we get to Biff's America.
> kindly, what would make you believe that the private, highly-likely-to-ignore-or-skirt-regulation ride sharing industry would produce a mass-transit product that remains price/service-competitive in an american city?
Your question very unkindly builds in a biased premise, namely that "highly-likely-to-ignore-or-skirt-regulation". Also, ride sharing killed taxis by essentially working around a ridiculous pile of regulations, and good thing too, and we should all be thankful for that. So right off the bat your reply is phony. You were not being kind.
But I'll answer it anyways: I gave you an existence proof that such a product can exist. Buenos Aires is even an American city in a way :) Sure, it's not proof that such a thing can work here, but then too no U.S. city has tried to put together a public-private public transportation partnership like Buenos Aires', so in fact we can't know until we try, but your attitude is one of the reasons we can't even try.
First of all, that's facts about one company. Second of all, ignoring bad laws (I'm speaking generally here, not specifically about any Uber-related cases) is a very good thing since bad laws often don't change at all without disobedience.
I'm all in favor of Buenos Aires style public transportation. We should adopt that in the U.S.
Idk about you but I wanted the taxi regulations gone. I could never have achieved that via civil disobedience, but corporations succeeded by working in the nooks and crannies of the law to the point where lawmakers could no longer maintain their corrupt taxi regimes, and I say hip hip hooray to that!
Uber achieved their success by cheating - they went billions of dollars deeper into debt each year to subsidize your rides, because their business model doesn't work. On top of this, they operating by exploiting gig workers who, sometimes, earn effective negative wages.
Make no mistake - Uber did not pioneer anything. They merely developed new wages to exploit you, the business model of Venture Capital, and their workers.
as a regular metro commuter, i don't think i'd be totally opposed to private transit in LA if it were heavily regulated. but without that, i'd rather deal with all the problems on the metro (stinky riders, drivers switching mid-route, track traffic) at 1.75 per ride, than any of my money go to making Uber shareholders (or anyone who profits by exploiting the "gig economy") more money.