"Slate both quotes me (a brilliant idea) and makes self-defeating arguments against increased use of ride sharing services, like Lyft and Uber, as alternatives to traditional mass transit.
Specifically:
1. The author laments that ride share services employ private citizens who charge less than expensive, unionized government employees - ignoring that transit should serve customers, not fatten government employee coffers.
2,. He points out that ride share services currently provide rides at less than true cost, while not caring that buses/subways use far more massive taxpayer subsidies. Example: he cites a bus route in Florida where riders pay only $2.25 of the $16 cost per ride, then criticizes the Uber/Lyft replacement of that route for using a $5 per ride subsidy - which saves taxpayers almost $9 per ride while (the author admits) providing better service. Yet, this is bad in his view.
3. He unfavorably compares Uber/Lyft's "fare box recovery" (the % that riders pay of overall costs) to selected subway fare box recovery while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of public mass transit are buses and light rail, which have FAR lower fare box recovery rates than Uber/Lyft or subways.
If this is the best critics of transit modernization can do, they will lose badly to advocates of privatization and modernization of mass transit.
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