Wheel Comes Full Circle...But not Quite

Some time back, I had described Uber’s working (It’s a cab ride sharing company). In Silicon Valley, change is the only constant. And so, recently, Uber announced that if you were willing to walk a bit to the nearest Smart Routes location (shown on your Uber app, of course), they’d give a $1 discount on the fare.

A bit before that, they’d announced that they would suggest nearby points from where your pickup would happen earlier than wherever you were currently located.

A few months before that, Uber mentioned something they called “Perpetual Trip” that would “allow drivers to pick up and drop off passengers continuously along the way”.

Join all these dots together, says Matt Buchanan, and a pattern begins to emerge:

“If you put all of these Uber innovations together—pre-determined routes with fixed pickup points and continuous passenger pickups—it sounds remarkably like a gently optimized version of currently existing mass transit.”

Ha ha! The wheel has come circle: a private cab ride sharing service became good old public transport system!

Now let’s flip the question: can public transport systems become more like Uber? Become dynamically responsive to demand? Unfortunately no. Because not all their customers are married to their smartphones or living in affluent areas.

And that inability to change dynamically becomes a vicious cycle, points out Buchanan:

“One of the more subtle underlying issues with the rise of Uber is the company’s slow siphoning of the political will to fix existing—or build new—public transit infrastructure in major cities.”

And sooner or later, the folks who still use the public transport system are the “ones with little or no political weight to demand improvements to the system”.

And so Buchanan wonders if this is the future?

“The mass adoption of Uber leads to a potential death spiral for public transit—and the true privatization of mass transit.”

Sometimes, the old saying, “The more things change, the more they remain the same”, is not entirely true.