[Mawr]

That doesn't track at all to me as a European also. You must have hit an edge case with the car app. First time customer discount or something.

The cost of a comparable single trip for me would be on the order of 5x more expensive, in favor of public transport.

If we take into account monthly tickets, it'd be on the order of 10x.

This isn't a fluke either, there is simply no way a single occupancy taxi service could ever cost less than mass public transport. You just got lucky.

[santiagobasulto]

A metro ticket for a 1hr trip, yes. For 15 minutes? I doubt it.

[Mawr]

I don't know what you mean. The only way you could ever end up with a cheaper fare with a taxi is the sort of edge case you've hit - a single trip that happened to end up cheaper. And that must be an edge case, since even single trip cost is always lower for mass transit. Travel times and such may be worse of course, but not cost.

Even discounting single trip price, the more trips you make, the better and better mass transit scales. For example, take London - even if you do the brainless act of just tapping your card on every card reader as you go, you can only get charged so much: [1].

But monthly/yearly tickets are really where the cost effectiveness comes in. I was being very generous in my calculations above, I assumed you'd only travel 2x a day, to commute to work. But as soon as you've bought the ticket, all trips during its duration become effectively free, so there's no reason not to use the system as much as practicable.

For example, I've probably made around 40 trips in the last 3 days. That plus all my commuting trips this month puts my cost per trip on the order of pennies per trip. You just can't beat that for cost.

[1]: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/find-fares/capping