This is a big part of why I bristle when Uber fans claim that ride sharing makes public transit obsolete.

Families, too. Taking kids on the bus or train is fine. If I were to try and use Uber, though, I'd need to also lug along 60lb worth of car seats. One car seat might be manageable, but even then I'd have to deal with the drivers giving me a hard time about installing it.

> This is a big part of why I bristle when Uber fans claim that ride sharing makes public transit obsolete.

Is public transit where you live like, insanely expensive? Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that public transit is around 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than Uber for me.

Today, when lugging 3 enormous picture frames to work, it was either walking to the city bus for $2.50 (or walking farther to the subway for $2.00), or $6.05 door-to-door in a shared hired car via an app (so I hired the car)

They might just not have an insanely long commute like you do.

So a bus is just a free for all then because you don't need a child seat? What's the reasoning behind that, just because of the sheer size and the weight of the bus cushioning the children from harm?

More or less, yeah. Also the height - most of the impact ends up getting absorbed by the bus's undercarriage, and relatively little of it is transferred to the occupants.

Supposedly un-belted bus occupants are safer than belted car occupants, and may even be safer than belted bus occupants, because seat belts tend to cause spinal injuries. Which is why very few school districts opt to install seat belts in their buses.

School buses: also consider the weaponization of the seatbelt by the student to annoy their seat mate; the ramifications of extricating dozens of children should the bus ever end up in a position where seatbelts are designed to prevent release...

That's always been the concern of the gig economy. People too poor or with some other qualifier that prevents them from using gig services get stuck with a crappier and crappier public option as people with the means to do so flock to gig services and lose their appetite for funding public services they don't use.