Uber as Transit costs much more than Transit

Somebody tried it. A suburban muni with suburban muni problems (low density residential, poorly connected street network, distributed destinations, etc)

BUT

The article notes

Since the introduction of ride-sharing companies such as Uber, transit use has fallen in major American cities nearly 2%, and those losses are cumulative: since Uber first started in San Francisco in 2010, bus ridership has dropped by more than 12%.

If you weren't aware, transit service in San Francisco is not actually all the great. There is BART (flabby and run down), and Muni Metro, but most of the action is on buses. Which run on narrow streets, in mixed traffic. So the buses are slow, and unreliable. Which is what made UBER viable (and attractive) in the first place.

UBER is going to destroy all the low-quality bus routes. In San Francisco, and everywhere. The productivity (riders per route mile) for such routes is already low. If it drops a bit lower, then the service gets cut to lower frequency. And so fewer people ride it, in the classic transit death spiral. The only stuff that is going to be immune to this are the high-quality service, the bus routes good enough to attract bus riders. A frequent network route.

So my vision is this: A limited route network (about 1 mile between lines), running at very high frequencies. And UBER to fill in the gaps, with a subsidy based on distance from a frequent network stop. People nearby continue to have an incentive to walk to the stop, people far away can still get their. (With some fudge factor for the disabled/elderly). 

Drinking and Transit

Taxi's are far too costly unless you live relatively near where you happen to be drinking. Including tip, a taxi will run about $2 a mile. As a result, when coming home from the bar, there are a lot of people who are certainly over the legal limit. When available, people take transit. It would be a far better thing if there was a 'last train' or 'last bus' at 1 or 2 am. Many times when I would have liked to stay downtown, drinking that were made impossible by the need to catch the last TRAX home.

Salt Lake continues to try and build itself up as Utah's entertainment capital, for dining, restaurants and nightlife. But under budget pressure, UTA continues to cut service, so that the last TRAX train leaves earlier and earlier. The last train once left Gallivan station headed south at 11:24p. Now it is 11:14p, and plans call for cutting it to 11:00p. If Salt Lake wants to be a grown up city, something needs to be done about extending the transit curfew.