[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.