Originally Posted by tandempower

I don't know who made the decision to make Lyft into a publicly-traded stock and why, but to me it just seems like an intentional move to feed the value of car-sharing to sharks whose appetite is based on a one-car-contract-per-person economy.

Ride-sharing is most certainly more cost-efficient than driving for individuals, and it is also a more cost-efficient use of motor-vehicles than single-household car ownership, but for investors it is more profitable to sell one or more cars/trucks per household, and that is the reason they will sell it into the ground. Of course, if people continue to use the ride-sharing service, there will be some value that they won't be able to destroy unless they saddle them with lawsuits, etc. so I expect to see more of that, as has been happening with the scooter-share companies.

The sad thing is that people aren't really happy with all the driving they have to do, but when all the alternatives have been killed off, they will continue to endure the misery purely out of the will to survive and the fear of being left behind in the rat race. It's a terrible thing when you consider how much research we've had (not to mention personal experience) about how much happier people are getting around car-free and avoiding congestion and sprawl-commuting.

Slavery has been illegal for over a century, and yet we've become enslaved to the automobile in just about the same amount of time.

I wonder why the SEC doesn't have the ability to recognize hostile/anti-competitive selling and protect publicly traded stocks from it so that actual investors can support industries they care about without losing their shirts to bull short-sellers. I'm sure that if car-free companies and other companies providing alternatives to dominant industries were protected from anti-competitive forces, they could carve out niche markets that would grow over time.