As a tech bro, my app of choice is Google Maps. It used to be suuuuuper hard to figure out which bus connections would get you home at the time you wanted. Half the time "except Thursdays" would be hidden in an asterisk or something.

Now I can drop into any city with zero research and just go places easy.

Do you know how many times the wheel was invented? Some things just make sense

The reason they keep doing it is for "innovation". Not technological innovation, pricing scheme innovation

No, it's an indirect deregulation thing. Private company "shuttles" that are only factually but not legally identical to busses don't need to fullfill all normal requirements for operating a bus. Probably including liability that you passed on implicitly by using the app.

From my very limited experience, it comes down to two things:

• who owns the buses
• who makes money off the buses

My experience in taking public transit generally is that there is often very little advertising about them and as a result people don't know about them unless you have to use them. Not only that but bus route maps are so damn hard to read. The best innovation I've seen is Google maps allowing you to use public transit as an option to get somewhere.

The second is who is profiting. We all know conservatives don't like paying for services they don't use, especially when it benefits the poor. Schemes like Uber are a way to get people to pay for their buses so that the municipality can pay less into their public transit system and ideally pay into theirs.

For one thing, tech bros are stupid. They're the kind of stupid where they think they have all the answers, and don't know what they don't know. So sometimes they're completely sincere when they think they have a genius new idea (eg: a small private room where you can make a phone call. And maybe we can just put a phone in there, in case you don't have yours charged or whatever. And then we can charge a fee. A phone booth. That's a phone booth.)

But sometimes they do know the idea already exists, but they're selfish, capitalist shit heads. They don't want to make a better world. They want to make a profit. If they can run a "bus" service, drive all the other competitors out of business, and suck up all the money from a handful of people? That's a win. That's better than actually getting people where they need to go. People who live in out of the way routes? Fuck 'em, not profitable. People in wheel chairs? Not enough of them to justify the cost of making the buses accessible.