[Bartweiss]

Has Uber wrecked local bus services anywhere? I imagine it cut into their revenues for a few years, but everywhere I've seen the major conflict was "taxis vs Uber", with bus services muddling along without changing anything.

[neilv]

Anecdotally, Uber kept coming up in citizen discussions of improving&maintaining public transit, as a reason not to invest in public transit.

[Bartweiss]

Hm, this might be a city-size thing then. I can definitely picture mid-size cities with mediocre bus services looking to Uber as a reason not to invest.

I've mostly seen its effects in big cities (where public transit gets invested in regardless, and lots of people taking buses never moved to more-expensive Ubers), and small cities (where bussing was already atrocious, with no real plans for changing that).

[neilv]

I only have the data point from my major-ish city: Boston's public transit has been suffering from deferred maintenance, and from projects postponed. We're catching up on some deferred maintenance now, but there are daily failures. Uber comes up in conversations about that. Paraphrased typical examples: "Why should we spend all this money, when we can use Uber," "Public transit sucks; I just Uber", "We should let [worker-exploiting and unsustainable] Uber manage transit," etc.

[shereadsthenews]

It's not the competition, it's the congestion. The presence of a huge number of terrible TNC drivers double-parked makes it impossible to keep the bus on its timetable.