Those Silicon Valley geniuses have done it again!
Next week- “it’s like the subway, but with AI!”
Wait they didn’t have them in the US? We’ve had uber shuttles for years in India
If you click the article link, then use a process called “reading”, you would see:
The company has already launched similar services abroad in Egypt, Nigeria, and India. Now it’s bringing the concept to the United States.
Edit: I misunderstood and assumed he hadn’t read the article, which is entirely too common these days.
This person was just expressing their surprise. Why are you so pissy lmao
God forbid I react to the article after reading it
Good? We need more bus routes
We don’t need to make them Uber chartered bus routes.
Why not? The more the merrier, and you, the customer, have a choice.
What if you, the customer, are a poor person? Is Uber going to subsidize a bus pass for you to charter one of Uber’s buses to their job?
From my own experience, if you’re poor, you use a regular bus. If you want to get somewhere faster, you pay more and catch a shuttle. If you want comfort, you pay even more and get a taxi. And all modes of transport are always full to the brim. The more the merrier, always.
But…that’s our point. Uber taking over bus routes would ultimately void that choice. Public transportation is a public service. Letting a VC-funded for-profit company weasel their way into that space is never going to not fuck poor people. It’ll fuck everyone, but it’ll make “public transportation” unaffordable. And, really, when you’re poor, “if you want to get somewhere faster” isn’t really an option. That’s…the thing with being poor. You don’t have the extra money to spend to catch a shuttle and you don’t have the luxury of paying for comfort. Not to mention, even in the best case scenario, where busses would keep their existing schedule and routes (though the likelihood of this happening is slim) and we’d just get more busses? It’d clog the system, ultimately slowing bus routes.
So, no. Not “the more the merrier” when it comes to private companies elbowing their way into public service, and especially not when we’re talking about fuckin traffic.
It works just fine elsewhere.
Like where? Kids school lunches? Oh, no…wait…a bunch of literal children have school lunch debt. Well, maybe family visits for prisoners? Oh, no, they’ve now barred people from visiting inmates and a private company now forces them to pay to do a shitty video chat. Okay, well maybe the American healthcare system? Nope. I guess that one’s killing a whole bunch of people and drowning families in debt for simple procedures and charging people $80 for a Tylenol and charging mothers for letting them hold their own fucking child.
I’m sure there’s a great example where a private company is doling out their services at a loss as a public good, right?
Reducing public transportation is not a solution to fight poverty.
Uber is not public transportation.
And that is the problem with this idea.
Why? Most of our businesses are private. The stores you go are private, the taxi you take are private, the cinema, the airlines, hell even electric and water companies are private. What so special about Uber that it has to be publicly owned? We do have public busses, this will be on top of that.
It is. Just like taxi.
Do people consider shuttles and buses the same thing? Because this sounds like a shuttle, which as far as I’m aware is completely different from a bus. I take a shuttle to the airport, which requires a reservation and ~$50 whereas I take a bus to get around town and it’s typically free.
Essentially it sounds like they are trying to dip into the shuttle market, not the inner-city bus market. Though maybe both?
Whatever you have to tell yourself to avoid sounding like you’re using the same transportation method as the commoners.
… the reading comprehension level of the average Lemmy user scares me
I literally said that I take the bus. And the shuttle.
Muricans don’t understand public transport, give them some slack.
NOW INTRODUCING: Public transports! But private! And dIsRuPTiVe!
This is what happens when you believe the private sector is the answer to everything. We reinvent the wheel one hundred times, and each time its more square than before.
They didn’t reinvent anything, private small scale shuttle buses have existed since forever. If you don’t have them in your city it doesn’t mean that’s a brand new thing.
Yet somehow more expensive.
Which makes it better than a bus because then I don’t have to sit next to poor people /s
I have a friend who unironically believes in expensive services for this reason.
Just waiting for them to reinvent light rail
How about Uber Feet, where you pay to walk somewhere?
Yeah, my nearest grocery store is a 1h15m walk or an 8 minute drive.
Just use uber sprint
