Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a “disruptive” innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft Shuttle of its biggest competitor. Even Elon Musk gave it a try in 2018 with the “urban loop system” that never quite materialized beyond the Vegas Strip. And does anyone remember Chariot?
Now it’s Uber’s turn again. The ride-hailing company recently announced Route Share, in which shuttles will travel dozens of fixed routes, with fixed stops, picking up passengers and dropping them off at fixed times. Amid the inevitable jokes about Silicon Valley once again discovering buses are serious questions about what this will mean for struggling transit systems, air quality, and congestion.
Five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report that found ride-share services emit 69 percent mo
re planet-warming carbon dioxide and other pollutants than the trips they displace — largely because as many as 40 percent of the miles traveled by Uber and Lyft drivers are driven without a passenger, something called “deadheading.” That climate disadvantage decreases with pooled services like UberX Share — but it’s still not much greener than owning and driving a vehicle, the report noted, unless the car is electric.
Khosrowshahi insists Uber is “in competition with personal car ownership,” not public transportation. “Public transport is a teammate,” he told The Verge. But a study released last year by the University of California, Davis found that in three California cities, **over half of all ride-hailing trips didn’t replace personal cars, they replaced more sustainable modes of getting around, like walking, public transportation, and bicycling. **
From my very limited experience, it comes down to two things:
My experience in taking public transit generally is that there is often very little advertising about them and as a result people don’t know about them unless you have to use them. Not only that but bus route maps are so damn hard to read. The best innovation I’ve seen is Google maps allowing you to use public transit as an option to get somewhere.
The second is who is profiting. We all know conservatives don’t like paying for services they don’t use, especially when it benefits the poor. Schemes like Uber are a way to get people to pay for their buses so that the municipality can pay less into their public transit system and ideally pay into theirs.
Expect when it comes to subsidizing private motor vehicle roads and parking. Then suddenly a bunch of fiscal conservatives can’t see part the windshield.