Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
49 comments
·June 7, 2025afavour
crazygringo
> Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise.
Richer customers don't pay more for public transit. It's not like clothing, where they buy a better product and produce most of the profit.
Removing some customers from bus systems doesn't have much of an effect. Bus systems are very flexible in changing routes and times to meet demand. It's not going to cause a "complete demise".
Also, if private buses are profitable, they invite competition. Private buses are an incredibly easy business to start. So no, nobody's "free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be".
bgwalter
Richer customers don't pay more, but they have the influence to keep public transit nice and functioning because they use it themselves.
I suppose that in New York and London richer people use the subway to escape traffic jams. They can tell their politician friends (or bought politicians) to keep subsidizing it.
In Europe privatization of public transport has been a disaster. Routes are cut, the trains don't run on time, etc.
crazygringo
I don't think rich people have as much influence on public transit as you think.
And in New York at least, truly rich people take a car service. Subways are for the normal people. The truly rich want their own private space and they want sunlight.
In any case, nobody's talking about the privatization of public transport, which is the conversion from public to private. This is about alternate private options becoming available. The public option stays. And it's not about subways, it's about buses.
tptacek
I don't especially like Uber as a company, but it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public, and in many of the cities Uber operates in, the transit authorities had been faceplanting all on their own without any help.
ahtihn
It's pretty easy to outcompete public transit on specific profitable lines.
The problem is that public transit has to serve a lot of unprofitable lines and by having a private competitor putting pressure on the only parts that actually make money, the overall economics of public transit become much worse.
steveBK123
This is the difference between private & public sector services that is generally missed by the "big gubmint bad" heads.
The purpose of private enterprise is to make money, and you can slice out a business that serves the most price insensitive, high margin, low maintenance clients.
The purpose of public services is to.. serve the public. For example, public safety net programs are always going to have more waste than a private company, because if your program is there to prevent citizens from starving, you give the benefit of the doubt on eligibility.
A private company doesn't need to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, they provide a service to paying customers, and are generally OK losing customers due to payment friction vs giving away services free.
kalleboo
The same as package delivery - Amazon takes the easiest portion, FedEx/UPS the middle tier, and then USPS gets handed off all the most difficult addresses
tptacek
Right, I think everybody gets that. But: they have private competitors. They can't just define that problem away. Most people don't take busses or private shuttles; they just drive.
arrosenberg
Uber executives would not survive first contact with public hearings that transit authorities regularly have to engage in.
afavour
I won’t disagree with you for a second that transit authorities have been faceplanting all by themselves. But I also don’t see what I described as a conspiracy, it’s just how business works.
While Uber competes with public transit the price they’re able to charge is limited by that competition. Once that competition is gone (and siphoning off a segment of its customer base is certainly a way to make that happen) the company is less constrained in how much they can get away with charging.
Uber doesn’t have the obligations a public transit authority has, they’re free to pick and choose the most profitable routes to compete on and ignore the less profitable ones. Uber doesn’t have to deliberate engage in nefarious practises to destroy a transit system, they just have to do what works for them.
lmm
> it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public
Hardly a conspiracy theory to think Uber might be trying to undercut their competitors and put them out of business before raising their prices when they have an established history of doing exactly that.
steveBK123
Yeah I mean.. NYC Ubers are probably 3x the price they were 10 years ago.
kortilla
Buses are very unpleasant in the US. They stop too frequently so they are extremely slow. Most cities do not have enough routes or frequency to be useful. The cities that do have them tolerate belligerent people on them making the ride unpleasant.
In other words, the high value, richer customers are already not riding the bus.
mousethatroared
And they smell like urine, are generally filthy and they are the most likely place a middle class person is to be trapped in a small environment with a mentally ill person.
If:
- America solved its mental health crisis
- Americans became cleaner
- Americans became better behaved in public
Then Americans who can afford not to take the bus would reconsider it.
Avicebron
I'm strongly convinced that economic precarity, homelessness and the stressor that brings, is more likely to manifest itself as "mentally ill" than just, "well for some reason we have a lot of crazy people now", it's not too hard to maintain minimum hygiene if you have a roof over your head, three squares, and a bit of positive socialization from work/school/church/library/whatever
unyttigfjelltol
You don't even need to go this far.
Passenger cars-- heck, even coach buses-- are engineered for passenger comfort and convenience.
City buses are engineered to secure the driver against passengers, to be simply maintained and hosed out as needed, and to accommodate overcrowding standing-room-only discomfort. Seats are hard, leg room is deficient, shoulder room is deprived, and that's even before we talk about trying to time an irregular arrival or departure time on a wobbly bus schedule.
You only ride a bus if you're indifferent to personal inconvenience, have firm principles, or have no choice.
throe83949449
Or mentally ill dog owner, who defecates and urinates on public bus! And then attacks child, because "it provoked him" by eating food or making eye contact!
And there is not a chance to get any compensation for hospital bills, because dog never attacked before (haha), and "first bite is free"!
jfengel
Or you could spread people out more, by putting more buses on the routes. Fewer people per bus, buses are more conveniently timed, and more middle class passengers will want to take the bus. They'll save money by ditching their cars.
A bit more money can find more cleaning, as well as giving places for the mentally ill to go other than riding around all day.
Ya know, as long as we're making up fantasies. Americans are not noticeably different on our levels of mental illness, but no power on earth will compel us to spend money that might help someone other than ourselves.
raincole
If the exact idea were born in any other country than the US, HN would be celebrating it.
No kidding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43980845
Spivak
In Shanghai additional routes are part of the normal public transportation system and aren't a private company who is competing with public transportation. It changes the tone quite a bit, even if the underlying idea is pretty good.
_Algernon_
It's basically a law of nature at this point that any attempt at revolutionizing public transit will end up reinventing the train.
1970-01-01
This isn't true. What Uber is attempting is on-demand and completely flexible bus routes. It's not revolutionary, but it is a logical innovation.
kj4211cash
I both agree and disagree. Microtransit is based on several small innovations on traditional fixed route bus service. Uber didn't invent microtransit.
mrweasel
> “But it’s more like they’re reinventing a worse bus.”
Okay, but if their customers where not taking the bus before, it's still better. What I think Uber gets right is that these are probably smaller than your regular busses, which makes them more appealing, bring a bigger sense of safety to some users.
Uber and Lyft are still weird, wasn't the whole point of ride sharing that you'd jump in a car with someone going in the same direction as you? Not that people would operate their own cars as a taxi.
sokoloff
The whole point of the fig leaf naming it ride sharing was to make operating private taxis seem like a wholesome thing that shouldn’t be regulated like taxis.
dmurray
> During Uber’s big announcement, Kansal showed a video of one possible Route Share ride in the Big Apple. It covered about 3 miles from Midtown to Lower Manhattan, which would take about 30 minutes and cost $13.
Definitely a weird choice for the presentation: the best-served part of the best-served city in the US for public transport. Why not pick literally anywhere else?
kj4211cash
I worked on the earlier iteration of this at Uber. I was curious why more people didn't call it out at the time. Yes, using cell phones and Uber's market share to make demand responsive microtransit is an interesting idea. Yes, it can work relatively well in areas where there isn't enough demand for fixed route bus service but there is sufficient demand for this type of service. On the other hand, every public transit nerd will tell you that microtransit has serious limitation and is often used to negative effect in areas that would be better served by fixed route bus service. The sad thing for me was that almost no one at Uber knew anything about public transit or transportation in general. The claim that it's just a bunch of tech bros reinventing the bus (again) sadly rings very true to me. As someone that was there.
r721
tionate
Hong Kong has the same concept in their mini buses, in particular the red ones. Whether they wait until full is up to the driver though.
beAbU
South Africa has minubus taxis that operate the same way. Although they are despised by most other road users (very bad reputation for reckless driving and poor vehicle maintenance) they do serve as the main form of transport for the vast majority of the population.
I think they are much quicker, flexible and localised than larger buses.
xnx
Wired 1908: "Henry Ford Just Reinvented the Horse Again"
Also, dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43985861
tptacek
People love this "reinvented the bus" line, but: aren't they just saying "Uber has started a bus service"? The connotation is always somehow that Uber or its customers are too dumb to realize that busses exist. There's a reason people take private shuttles instead of the number 66 bus cross-town.
tuyguntn
I wonder what's the purpose of collecting tax from citizens, if there is no properly run public transportation system, medical system and education.
Why should anyone pay extra from their income, if private companies are going to profit from providing a service to the public which was intended to be built using taxes by the government?
xnx
> I wonder what's the purpose of collecting tax from citizens,
In my city, it's to pay interest on debt, overly generous pensions to retirees, and settlements to police lawsuits.
amanaplanacanal
If this is more than just a rhetorical question, you can get copies of the federal, state, and municipal budgets to see where the money collected is actually spent.
aga98mtl
I do not understand why Wired exist. Who wants news about technology from a techno-pessimist angle?
curtisszmania
[dead]
> Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting support for public services, including transit systems — many of which still haven’t fully recovered from Covid-era budget crunches. Though ridership nationwide is up to 85 percent of prepandemic levels, Bloomberg News recently estimated that transit systems across the country face a $6 billion budget shortfall.
The gameplan is clear. Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise. Then you’re free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be.