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.