Ubers and Lyfts are far too expensive. A single ride will tend to cost at least as much as a 3-day and more often than a week Muni pass. Or a half dozen meals.

If anything apart from public transit, carpools/rides from friends/family, they may use jitney services.

If you look closely you can find them idling outside grocery stores and such in many cities.

Poor people may not be riding so much, but are they driving? To some extent yes, but they are also excluded here if their car is not in adequate condition, or they cannot access loans to purchase a car specifically for ridesharing. At worst, the extra mileage risks unexpected repair costs leaving them both out of a job and out of a car. That's a risk many understandably won't take.

There's a cottage industry of individuals or companies who own cars in good condition who rent them out to drivers and then take a chunk of their earnings (echoes of taxi cab industry, minus the badges). Talk to your drivers a bit and you'll learn all sorts of things.

Rather than justify "well, poor people ride and drive too", how about we look at what might drive someone to consider driving rideshare to be a viable primary source of income despite the low pay, high risks, and rent taking cottage industry.

Expanded access to cheap transit expands available employment opportunities. And who knows, maybe once they have a stable part or full time job with benefits, they'll drive on the side in their own car they could afford to buy.

Opportunity cost matters a lot here. Purely looking at cost -- minimum wage is $18/hour in SF. If you can save 30 minutes of time by taking an Uber vs taking public transit, that's $9 of time-value.

People who have no other options than to take the bus don't think like this. This is how economists think. What they do is look at their employment opportunities, realize that they can get X number of hours more from a job if they take the bus rather than walk to work, and then they make the 1 hour or 1.5 hour bus ride work even if it kills them because the alternative is not eating or not feeding their family.

So no, opportunity cost doesn't matter here.

Ride-hailing apps absolutely fill transit deserts, and poor communities do, in the real world, use them quite a lot. That decision is not explicitly framed as opportunity cost, it's more the common-sense "I'll be late for work if I risk taking the bus".

This comes off very divorced from reality.

> If you can save 30 minutes of time by taking an Uber vs taking public transit, that's $9 of time-value.

I suspect you're used to the luxury of logging/clocking your own hours?

Hours (note: not half hours) worked do not work like that in most jobs. I get the shifts/hours the boss gives me. I can't get to my job at a convenience store or restaurant half an hour and then ask the boss for an extra $9.

And chances are, if I/we don't have cleanup done by end of shift, I'm not getting paid for the work done after end of shift, but I'm still expected to do it or lose my job. In restaurants, bosses will only dangle overtime when they're desperate, and will sooner cut shifts and run skeleton crews Sun-Thu than pay it out.

Sure, but being late for work because you took a bus instead of an Uber Pool is a real-world decision that real-world people make every day. The opportunity cost isn't "oh, I got an extra 30 minutes of paid time!" it's "I need to be on time or my pay gets docked or I get fired".

Okay? That doesn’t mean you can’t sometimes take the bus, or that the bus is the wrong way to get to work. For many people, probably most people imo, the bus would be cheaper if a route existed. There’s also all sort of positive side effects to developing public transit infrastructure, like making the city cheaper to traverse, cutting down on requisite parking space, requiring less people to own cars, reducing traffic, etc.

These apps aren't profitable as-is for their owners. Raising wages would just lead them to push prices even higher, locking more and more people out

Public transit (arguably) can be run as a public service rather than a private enterprise designed to extract value for investors. It's far better for the community

Uber is profitable, with 2 Billion in earnings in 2023 and 2024.

Public services also extract value. There are just different sources and recipients.

Uber was profitable, according to a quick Google search (dated in May of 2024) they then lost $654 million after that

I dont know where google is pulling that information, but their SEC filings and stock financials disagree [1,2]. In Q1 2024 they claimed a $750 million unrealized loss tax write-off, but were still cashflow positive. [3]

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBER/financials/

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_earnings/2024/q2/e...

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_earnings/2024/q1/e...