You can't fight a subsidy war with uber/lyft now while they're still in growth mode. Once investors start demanding profits, and the prices go up, that's the time to come in and spend your money driving people around. Especially if you hear about others doing the same in other cities, or when some of the big loans are coming due.

It's a commodity, brand doesn't matter. Scale across cities doesn't really help that much. Money helps, but public market investors don't like to see it being spent quarter after quarter.