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by apendleton
4084 days ago
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Huh. I have pretty much the opposite feelings about Uber as you, as a fellow non-driver and public transit advocate. I think Uber (and also car-sharing services like Zipcar) are great for transit advocates, because they make it much easier for city dwellers to justify not owning a car, to the extent that I suspect that they actually increase transit usage. Many people in my city (Washington, DC) that own cars don't actually need them most days, but they do have occasional needs that aren't easily doable by transit (Costco trips, driving out to see friends in the less-transit-friendly suburbs, hiking in Shenandoah, etc.) so they keep a car for that purpose. But the problem there is the incentives; the fixed costs of car ownership (a car payment, insurance, scheduled maintenance, etc.) are high, and once you've paid them, the incremental cost per mile of travel is really low (certainly way lower than the per-mile cost of transit), so if you have a car, you have a strong incentive to use it more than you need to. Uber and Zipcar are alternatives that make cars available in the circumstances where you need them and thus could allow these people to ditch their personal cars, and they also flip the cost incentives around: low-to-no fixed costs, and comparatively higher per-mile costs, which means you only use it if you really need it, and use transit most of the time. |
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However, this isn't the way a lot of people use Uber; at least where I live a lot of people use Uber because it's faster and more comfortable than public transportation, not because public transportation doesn't get them where they need to. I've seen business school students (i.e. students who have cash to burn) frequently take Uber between MIT and Harvard for god's sake. There's direct bus and subway service, but it involves a 5 minute walk on both ends, they're too lazy to look it up, and don't want to wait outside.