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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Except that is how capitalism works time and time again. Companies will lower prices to gain market share then once they have a large control of the market will happily raise prices and keep any gains in productivity for themselves. The only reason Uber is trying to undercut people right now is because the industry is new and they want to try and capture the market for themselves. Once they do or some situation forms like what we have with internet with Comcast and other providers avoiding competing you can expect prices to not ever be lowered again. If anything this is another reason why I favor public transit over self driving cars because public transit investment is owned by the government and therefore the people, it's not gonna try and milk people for profit. Whereas these ride share companies already have shown they're willing to act shitty towards their drivers to drive up their own profits, I imagine these companies would continue to find ways to milk more profit out of the service with self driving cars and with drivers being gone that's gonna come at the expense of the users.
Then competition comes in.
Explain to me how public transport is going to suddenly become this thing that will replace cars when it has had 100 years to achieve that and hasn't?
I mean one example in the US I can look to is a city I lived in for a bit, Seattle. They have been actively expanding their public transit and even when I lived there I didn't use a car to get around and honestly the only problems I had was trips taking a bit longer sometimes and busses running not on time both of which are problems that can be fixed and with the expansions are actively being fixed. If you want an end game for what public transit can look like Europe is a great example. While I don't think America can ever quite reach that level I think we could definitely reach a point where cars are still required but only for people living further out in the country. Heck if you want a good example for public transit in a larger country the high speed rail China has been building is pretty impressive. Don't know the most about it but I've heard fairly good things about it (of course ignoring the other problems with China, but that isn't related to public transit). Overall public transit does work and works well especially in the cities that actively invest in it like Seattle and Portland (both of which I've lived in/near). The problem in America with adoption just comes from a very car centric attitude which at least in the cities I mentioned before has been slowly getting better as people start to realize that public transit benefits everyone, including drivers. Just because we have to fight to show that it benefits everyone and that building bigger roads doesn't help doesn't mean we should just surrender to car infrastructure because it's hard and takes a long time to push for public transit investments.
Oh Lord.
Well we are having two different conversations then. Because I am from Europe and I travelled a lot. Public transport is horrific. Here I was thinking of a future that is better than the crap that is in Europe but you don't even expect to reach that level.
I mean I will admit I don't know a lot about European public transit and it is quite a broad region. I mostly have looked at Amsterdam as that's the big example people use so when I say America won't reach that level I'm more referring to how nice it is there. I have visited the UK once and I have step family there and the public transit/trains were nice there to actually have them as options compared to America which often times just doesn't. When I visited I only visited Newcastle and London so again don't have a ton of knowledge but in general seemed nice. But from my experience not owning a car in America travel within cities is already starting to get pretty good where I've lived and I just wish more cities would invest in it and create high speed rail lines between cities for longer trips.
I'm not going to look too far into it but half of all trips in Netherlands are made by car and 36% in London (which is probably significantly lower than the rest of the country). I don't see either of those figures significantly changing. Netherlands is wayyyy denser than USA so you won't even get close to 50% car trips with the Netherlands system.
That's not to say you should copy what the Dutch do, you should. But it won't solve the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_the_Netherlands
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_London