OH haayyyy, no, it’s not meta because honestly, don’t y’all have better things to do? I hear Indivisible needs help. Anywho...there’s cursing below so...tap out now if you’re not in the mood.
We all know about Uber and Lyft so we won’t rehash. Whatever you feel about either---it’s fine. If you love them, great. If you hate them, great.
I’ve more or less been ambivalent on both. In the region I live in, they both fill a transportation niche and demand that is not being met by taxis or buses (we only have buses)—and probably won’t be met by those modes, ever. Make a note right now about the word “buses.” It’ll be important to this later.
Let’s take a trip to Austin, whose voters more or less told Uber and Lyft to shape up or get the frek out. Uber and Lyft chose to dismiss the very reasonable requests of the city and its electorate, and packed up and left. waaaaa snowflakes. My gods did the tech bros WAIL, as if their children had been ripped from their very bosoms and sold at market. How on earth would they get around during SXSW? What on earth would they do? How could they LLIIIVVVVEEEEE? IT WAS THE APOCALYPSE TO THEM.
Austin, of course, has a transit system. I got to experience the bus system at Netroots Nations in 2008. It wasn’t bad and I liked it. I also got to experience the traffic inbound from the airport. That was bad. I understand they’ve now added a streetcar/trolley/light-rail/tram-train which was under construction when we were there. Austin of course has traditional taxis. Most of its adult population owns at least one car. So it’s not like the tech bros were stranded. And barring they, they could use their fucking feet, these amazing things we evolved to fucking use. Bipedal locomotion. Imagine that. Yes, I walked around Austin too, even though it was 100 bloody degrees.
But never let a tech bro think they don’t have the magic solution (subways, high speed rail transport, mars, taxis, et cetera) to EVERYTHING that ails us. Enter the Lyft Shuttle.
The Lyft Shuttle is AMAZING. It will pick up large numbers of people at point A, and then drop them at Points B, and C, and D, and maybe E, picking up and dropping off passengers along the route and then repeating that route at the end in reverse. The route? It is fixed. Isn’t this innovative? Isn’t this amazing? A vehicle that travels along a fixed route! And it picks people up and drops them off along the route! The tech bros fell to their knees and exclaimed “WON’T HE DO IT?”
Lyft invented a fucking bus.
This is literally how a bus route works.
So what we have here is something that’s come to me recently. Tech bros my age and younger likely grew up in the suburban sprawl. Even Elon Musk grew up in suburban Pretoria in South Africa, and Pretoria has low density suburbs like any Australian or North American city. They were driven everywhere (or drove themselves when they reached legal driving age). The only time they ever got to experience some semblance of a walkable complete community is when they got to college, where everything is in walking distance---home, food, work, school, entertainment, probably a free transit bus owned by the transit authority and subsidized by the university (Musk went to UPenn which has everything and THEN some in walking distance including several other universities and if it, isn’t hop on the trolley). So when they left this magic nirvana and move into real cities and towns and the real world---they’re disappointed that they have to sit in traffic, deal with transit that is often slow and populated by weirdos, put up with surly and unpleasant taxi drivers, and so on. It can be and is bullshit. I know. I take the bus every bloody freking day. And sometimes instead of riding the bus with cute college kids like at uni, I ride the bus with people who are sometimes having a bad day, like the pill popper who conducts his pill-selling business over the phone at 6:30 am every day. I put on my fucking headphones and read a goddamn book and get over it. But this is too much work for way too many techbros—most of whom I share a generational cohort with. Way to be a stereotype of our generation.
And the insult here is they won’t say they are going to start a private bus service. Instead it’s a fucking innovation (WHICH IT ISN’T) because even though it’s a fixed route, it’s somehow not a fucking bus. Do they think we’re stupid (yes, they do I’ll answer that one up front).
It’s a bus, bros, a fucking bus. Yes, in cars, but it’s still a goddamn bus route.
Oh and this isn’t even new. Did they forget Bridj? Which was the same damn thing? Which also folded last month? Or… Leap, that gross as fuck bus the state of California shut down? Did they forget these things? I sure as hell didn’t.
Lookit, private buses and van-pools exist in a number of big cities in the US (some regulated, some not), and work fine filling the niche not filled by transit or taxis or whatever. They don’t go around lying to people by saying “we’re not really a bus.” This is what Lyft is doing, calling this a new and magical innovation. It ISN’T. And neither are vactrains--err—hypeloops , car tunnels with their own special elevators and sleds, or plowing new tunnels through faster with little regard of the subsurface geology, or that ridiculous fucking juice machine that is just indescribably dumb. Or Uber and Lyft for that matter—illegal on-demand taxis have existed for decades in many cities and will continue to do so when Uber and Lyft are gone.
If the vote had gone 70,000 people in the other direction in 3 states, this is where this would end. I’d rant. People would respond, and we’d be getting ready to yell at our Republican Congress for not pushing through infrastructure spending because they’d be on their “HILLARY SUCKS” bullshit. But it didn’t, and Federal support for a good deal of transit is simply going to end if that budget happens, stranding millions (not that young tech-bros give a flying fucking shit). My bus may vanish. I’ve actually calculated it’s cheaper for me to move and rent a studio a block from work during the week than drive to work every day. What about the other workers in my area who don’t make close to my income, like those who need to take the bus out to Amazon’s warehouses? The bus that serves them almost died because the county the warehouses are in wanted to play games with their local match this year. What happens when the regional transit agency loses its federal support? That county won’t step up (its taxpayers would NOT allow it), and neither will the state. Will Amazon? The bus is a great deal for those workers. Driving to make $14/hr is not, at all.
That’s why I’m ranting about this. They won’t be using Lyft Shuttle, that’s for sure. Oh and when transit dies you’ll all be sitting in a lot more traffic and if new lanes are built to accommodate that traffic (likely displacing thousands of people just like in the 1960s and 1970s), you’ll be paying tolls to use them. Elections have consequences. We’d better be ready to fight this.
Tuesday, Jun 20, 2017 · 7:52:41 PM +00:00 · terrypinder
PS: I’m still somewhat ambivalent about Uber and Lyft. I just loathe that the “innovation” they promise (and far too many seem to fall far) isn’t any kind of innovation at all. Which is typical of so many of the techbros.