>>1317963Few are the people who actually carpool for money in their daily commute, a fact you seem to acknowledge ("Driving as a career"). So carpooling services are functionally the same as taxis, and suffer from the same drawbacks:
1. They're still cars. Even in the extremely unrealistic "optimal" system where EVERYONE carpools all the time, the reduction in traffic wouldn't do shit because as soon as traffic is less congested people would say "lol fuck this carpool/bus/train noise" and go back to owning a private car.
2. They're still cars. Even if your utopia of everyone carpooling happens.... there are still fucking cars everywhere. Which means there would need to be roads everywhere, and that those roads would be unfriendly to anything that isn't a motorized vehicle. Instead of building cities fit for humans, urban planners would still get away with being car-enabling retards.
3. They're expensive, even more expensive than owning a car. Tell me again, if "money is the biggest motivator for human behavior", why should people go for a more expensive, slightly less convenient service?
(3->)4. Their natural consumer base is people who already don't own a car. If you own a car, why the fuck would you use Uber to commute to work? It's mostly the same time-wise, but more expensive. The reduction in car traffic would be underwhelming.
(4->)5. With people moving away from public transportation, you can expect frequency to suffer, services to be cut, and the entire public transit system would enter into a death spiral because more people would use Uber/Lyft out of necessity. This is an explicit part of these companies' business strategy.
Uber/Lyft are cancer. They are a drag on and an active impediment to the actual solutions that actually work, which are, in increasing order of desirability: Public transit, bicycles, walking. The only people who shill for carpooling are the same sort of lolbritarian retards who rediscover the "magic" of PRT every 10 years.
