Public Transit, Ridesharing, and the role of Public Ownership

       Last year about this time, a battle was in full swing on whether the City of Austin could exert some control--mainly on the question of whether they could require drivers to be fingerprinted-- culminating in a vote on Prop. 1 on May 7. Uber lost. But many aspects of the ridesharing transportation model were examined.
           Please remember that Uber, Lyft, and the like envision a future where they control a basic need--transportation.  And remember that they envision this system operating in the not-too-distant future with driverless cars, already being tested in tech-visionary Austin.  Their dream:  no drivers to be paid, and no competition. They would be positioned to transfer a slice of the ongoing cost of every person's transportation needs out of Austin and into their corporate profits, indefinitely.    

        This report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and McKinsey & Company  came out last October.  Here is a statement from that report: "Electric shared autonomous vehicles will revolutionise transport  in the world’s cities over the next 15 years”  (from An Integrated Perspective on the Future of Mobility, 10-11-2016.) The full report is here: “An Integrated Perspective on The Future of Mobility .” 

     This corporate vision raises many questions: 

• Would such a dispersed system displace rational and affordable public-transit route design? 
•  Alternatively, could a system managed by urban policy provide an affordable well-designed interface between public transit and a driverless network? 
•  Could Austin Energy optimize charging-discharging driverless-cars' batteries to utilize the fleet, and electric buses, as a dispersed battery storage system for a clean-energy future for Austin?
• Is there a potential for Austin to have a first-class public transit system, affordably serving the Austin- and Travis-county residents who are most dependent on public transit,  maximizing instead of displacing the efficiency of buses (which can also be electric), while self-driving cars fill the gaps that buses serve less well?

       This Jacobin article https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/against-sharing/  offers a great perspective on what's wrong with ride-sharing as it currently operates. " 'Sharing economy' companies like Uber shift risk from corporations to workers, weaken labor protections, and drive down wages."
        In addition, we should consider this:  The reason there is a market for rideshare companies is that Austin, like most American cities, lacks a comprehensive public transit system good enough to compete with owning cars. Uber spent  uber-amounts  of campaign money in Austin to make an example of us and scare other cities into capitulation--like Genghis Khan obliterating a village but leaving a survivor to go tell other villages that resistance is futile (pardon my mixing of Genghis Khan with Star Trek metaphors here). 
      Transportation is a basic necessity--I hate to see any mega-corporate ridesharing company sucking profits via the power imbalance over the drivers and riders. Ridesharing companies should meet very high standards as a regulated industry or better yet, it should be a public-private partnership, or best yet, a city-owned utility just as Austin Energy is a city-owned utility, responsive to public debate and values, and providing profits to the City's coffers.