Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.

I spent over a decade on a bicycle plus Muni/BART Fastpass and it's pretty good for the price if you're single and stay inside the city. As such a person I could crack open a book and a 15 min from Glen Park to Montgomery St. was the same as a 1 h from Montgomery to El Cerrito (the latter even preferable).

But the various policy choices popular in San Francisco (intentionally high labour usage, ill and violent people in public spaces, low cleaning capacity) do act against transit being a good choice. By comparison, I have family in Vancouver, BC where the politics are similar but the policy is different and the trains run very often and are fast (these are the most important things - made possible by removing labor from the equation) and are relatively clean. People will offer you a seat when you hop on with your stroller, elevators are functional and relatively clean, and it's overall a lot more usable as a family.

Or imagine that you work a professional travel job and you're flying to/from the airport on a weekly basis. Your employer will pay for your ride to the airport, so why would you take public transit? Now you're doing at least 3-4 taxi/uber/waymo rides a week.

That may be causing other cities some caution.

-or- use Waymo if you don’t want to spend resources on owning and maintaining a car, and if you are part of the population that has or may feel too intimidated or unsafe to navigate a potentially adversarial conversation with someone more powerful than you, such as women.

It is the fact that you can't do anything without them being pushed down your throat that is infuriating. Every interaction with a company these days is an attempt to up-sell. When a small number of retail stores started that, I stopped doing business with them. Now they all do it.

Speaking personally, I don't see enough movies or do enough ride shares to want to subscribe to AMC or Waymo, but Doordash would make sense. Maybe it's OK for me to pay a higher price for the ~1 time per year I use those other services.

More typical of Christians so it kind of threw me off.

But anyway, a paid service shouldn't be starting that kind of conversation unless for some reason I started it and even then that'd make it just as uncomfortable for the driver.

My wife will not ride alone in Uber's because she's had one too many uncomfortable -> possibly dangerous situations.

This appears to be true for all of her friends as well.

It can be annoying to have to deal with irrational humans who make mistakes, but that really is just part of life! I'll take some cumbersome conversations over conducting my entire life via corporate app interfaces.

They need a technical solution for issues that a 10 year old can figure out.

Just wait till Google spins it off to private equity; it'll be barley running bits of vehicles patched together by the cheapest mechanics they can find.

Enjoy it while you can; I'd love to give it a go myself, but even though I live in a city where they are supposedly in commercial operation, I can't get one to either of the two houses on either side of town that I currently split my time between. I have a buddy who lives a few blocks from one of their zones who walked over just so he could try it out. As of now, our sub-standard, minimally-invested-in-this-century bus system is actually much better suited to my needs.

"Uber received over 400,000 sexual assault and misconduct reports between 2017 and 2022"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/uber-liable-pay-8-5-million-...

400/mo or 5000/yr for not having to worry about all that plus never playing the "wait let's circle the block, maybe a spot has opened up" game... sounds tempting.

If you don’t like it, then change providers.

If all providers do it, then you must pay to avoid advertisements.

Or, complain to your elected government representatives.

What’s that? Your Chase/Amex credit card gives you a monthly/annual credit? Ok. No more complaints then.

It's less convenient, doesn't work nationally and isn't as fun?

I couldn't care less what people in the Philippines - one of the most gay-friendly countries in Asia - think of me through a camera stream.

Literally don't care. What I don't need is to be evangelised with whatever conspiracy theory or fringe religion my driver just joined the entire way back from JFK.

I once had a driver pick me up in downtown Seattle, and it turned out to be that he was driving for Uber as a tactic for his entrepreneurial venture developing antimicrobial and hydrophobic coating. He claimed to have applied it to the fishing boat from Deadliest Catch. He was specifically circling downtown to try to pick up someone who could get the ear of someone in Amazon's grocery division that he could pitch to (which I was not). At a red light in a nightmarish seven-way intersection, he took out a square of cheesecloth that had apparently had the coating applied, and attempted to demonstrate its effectiveness by pouring water onto it. It worked, and the water got all over his passenger seat and center console instead while the light turned green and cars behind us honked.

A few months later, Uber tried to match me with that same driver, and I cancelled it and walked instead. I have to imagine that if a guy with that level of high-preparation social ineptitude can stick around in their system, that the number of people making offhand inappropriate moves or remarks must be reasonably high.

It'll probably make it another decade. Or two.

Cabin air filter is twice a year at $18 a filter (I replace them as soon as it smells weird)

Home electricity is cheap at least. (7¢/kw)

Source: https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...

But let's use your "worst case" scenario.

Worst case 300 mile EV charge (100%, during peak hours): about $50 Filling up a highly fuel efficient vehicle: about $40

Of course, if you only charge the EV to 80% (as is recommended, and more efficient), and only set it to charge it off-peak (as is normal), then the numbers are more like:

EV: $30 Gas: $40