Well, speaking of Amtrak employee accountability, I have a story about that. A few years ago my family took a train ride across the country. When we changed trains in Chicago I noticed that the reading light in my sleeping compartment was stuck on, which of course was bad if I wanted to actually sleep. I found the friendly and helpful attendant and reported it, and her reaction was like watching a balloon deflate.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"If we report damage they take it out of our wages," she said.

"What! What do you mean take it out of your wages?" I asked.

"If a car is damaged under my watch I have to pay for it," she said.

"Well," I said, taking out my swiss army knife, "I guess there's nothing to see here."

I have to say that I've never encountered such a nice, enthusiastic, friendly group of people with such an abysmally low morale as the crew of a cross-country train. With passengers they're great, but all through the trip I'd see two or three congregated having low muttered conversations. It didn't take me long to figure out they were talking about management. And while the experience was wonderful, the equipment was in horrible shape. It was like traveling in a third world country.

With management that bad, more data doesn't equal more accountability and better performance. It means scapegoating.

Beg to differ all you like, having lived in one of those countries most of my life and another of them for a number of years, I'm not impressed.

Certainly it affects all those things. The drivers get a decent wage, the schedules and routes mean they run all day, and often all night, when purely commercial operations would not operate outside busy hours and routes, and unlike the unlicensed systems you mention, they tend to have stops with electronic countdowns to when the busses are due.

In Britain they partially "deregulated" the busses in the 1980s, and the services got worse and more expensive.

As I said, your opinion is prejudice, not reality.

Convenient, yes. Cheaper, depends. But don't dismiss the importance of having the price quoted before the journey - that's a BIG attraction.

I'm afraid you've committed a classic systems analysis mistake - letting your preconceived idea of a solution affect your requirements (or use cases).

Again, it's got fuck all to do with the cost of licenses. Uber uses drivers with badges where the law already allows for their technology to be used.

That's your prejudice, not reality. Neither government, subsidy, not monopoly affects the speed of a bus. Congestion does. And dedicated lanes speed them up again.

Oh, I certainly don't want to click on them. They're just useful for context. The very thin ones are fine.

Setting aside the sheer depravity of this argument, we have ample historical context for what happens when society cuts off the neediest. France, Haiti, Cuba, China, Russia, Algeria, Egypt, India, Scotland, The Phillipines, Mexico--just to name a few places where social and political inequality have driven massive, bloody revolts.

Wealth and political power calcify with the already wealthy and powerful. The middle and working classes slowly lose what wealth they have through attrition. Poverty becomes a virtually inescapable sink of destitution. Eventually, enough people end up having quite literally nothing to lose that you get vicious, deadly, destructive revolutions that take generations to recover from.

If you insist on taking a "pragmatic" view of not even bothering to -try- to improve the lives of the impoverished, try to at least understand the historical ramifications of what you're arguing for.

Duh! I'm not talking about a phone call. I'm talking about an app on the passenger side, and an app on the drivers side that calculates a fare. The legal barrier is the means of calculating the fare. (phone app vs sealed, approved, serviced meter of a specific type.)

It's not about the USA but a country where proper public transport is much needed, and these mini-bus taxis are filling in for the lack of it.

Invest in bubbles, and you ask for the consequences. I certainly hope that the utility of a city's transport system isn't dictated by such considerations.

What's not cheap about busses?

I'm afraid you have got the wrong end of the stick.

Yes they do. For example London. However London also has the quite separate "private hire car" category, who are not entitled to pick up hailing customers from the street or use taxi ranks. That's the group Uber operate in there. Paying the appropriate fees.

That's the issue. Uber operate quite legally, within the system, where their system is permitted. ANd they use civil disobedience where it isn't.

It's not about refusing to pay for badges.

That's not true. Taxi legislation often specifies how the taxi service is operated, such that specific taximeters and manufacturers/service companies are mandatory.

Good.

No, that's a false dichotomy. You can change the law so that mobile phone driven taxis are legal within the system, whilst still leaving the system restricted to badge owners. That's exactly how Uber operate where I am. Perfectly legally, because there is a category of licensed hire cars that doesn't exclude their technology.

Yes, they are a country, and it would be utterly wrong to take away their rights to legislate via TTIP.

On the other hand, civil disobedience is a valid way of protesting bad law.