Well, they had me at pimping out desperate people and shifting all costs on to their "independent contractors" and asserting that they are not a transportation company, but this is nice too.

This seems intuitive. Taxis in NYC are constantly picking up people everywhere they go and the destinations are relatively close, so they're not too bad. An Uber or Lyft in a city like that is also picking up their next fair close to the destination of the last one. But once you have any level of sprawl or low density of passengers, the car is driving extra distance beyond your own point A to point B. Unless you fill up the car with your friends, it's pretty inefficient.

We need to get our shit together on trains. Dallas is getting better with the DART system. It's a place where Uber is bound to use more fuel than driving yourself because it has such low density it barely has taxis (you have to be at the airport, you can't flag them down anywhere, and it would cost a ton to call one out to your house).

As an aside, people from other countries and even from the US have no concept of what transit and distances are like in various parts of this country. When someone from elsewhere asks me why don't I call a cab, I have to explain (slowly because they might be stupid) that I can't even get a pizza delivered to where I live and I have never seen a taxi in the town I am in. Not one. Not ever.

People have a really hard time grasping that others lead different lifestyles, not just due to beliefs and culture, but due to practical realities about the place they live.

I grew up in basically the suburb of a small town (about 18,000 people between us, all infrastructure was at the county level, but there was 10 miles of mountain road in the way). The local department store is closing down after about 40 years. They did all sorts of "member of the community" stuff; the owner was Santa every year, when we were hit by a fire they not only cut their profits resupplying everyone but cut into their own costs too and went pretty into the red, stuff like that. But what I'll always love them for is being able to get a new pair of shoes without driving 45 minutes into Santa Fe.

New Mexico is a whole bunch of nowhere connected by roads.

I'll have you know I once rode a taxi for 200 kilometers to get home from the train.

...because the train was hopelessly late, they missed the last bus home, and I had a guarantee on my ticket.

thats about the distance from philly to nyc isnt it? 50k more in fact.

pretty standard thing for upper middle class to do over there. or the weekend drunk

Holy shit! What year and what did it cost? I know someone who got drunk and angry who took a $200+ ride from San Diego to, I think, San Francisco.

2012ish. Did not cost us more than a phonecall to the train company. We had guarantees.