Where are you getting this idea that Uber and Lyft were supposed to help traffic? Unless there's carpooling involved then it's not taking any cars off the road. What they help with is reducing the need for dedicated parking, since car ownership becomes less necessary.

Building densely near mass transit helps encourage taking that mass transit to jobs/housing located at other stations, removing cars on the highway for inter-city trips. But if areas of a city are underserved by mass transit, then taking a car the last mile will still be necessary.

Yes to more public transit.

Yes to more regulations on Uber.

Are you going to be the first rider in a driverless Uber?

Uber and Lyft are taking up space on our roads and adding to traffic. So are delivery companies. I suspect many vehicles are delivering more than we realize to Palo Alto homes. Amazon Prime, Google Express as well as FedEx and UPS are prolific on our streets, but so are more "unmarked" delivery vehicles such as pizza or restaurant meals from companies like Door Dash.

So what about driverless vehicles making deliveries? I am sure they will be the first users of autonomous vehicles. Oh, they already are in San Jose with Mountain View and Palo Alto next on their list. Web Link

"So what about driverless vehicles making deliveries?"

Those single-operator (aka driverless) WAYMOs should be restricted as well. All they do is roam aimlessly around the neighborhoods slowing up traffic and they are not making any deliveries.

There are never any passengers in these vans.

Get rid of all of these cars while we're at it! Bring back the horse and carriage.

How about this for a solution -- wall off Palo Alto, and turn it into a bombing range.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving locale.

> Bring back the horse and carriage.

This would require the emergence of a entirely new CPA Department...a corps of 24/7 highly-skilled professionals to walk the city streets and pick-up scattered horse poop. Outstanding pay + full benefits & PERS package.

Horses wear diapers nowadays! Web Link They sell them on Amazon, but they don't show a picture.

"they are the biggest contributors to making things worse"

That's obviously false, because there are about 100 single occupant commuters for every uber or lyft. I took a lyft up to SFO last week, and the driver was a nurse up at Kaiser in South SF. She said she would do one pick up for Lyft each way along her commute to help get some extra money for her family. Anyway, she wasn't the devil, and she was actually reducing traffic by one vehicle.

^^^^the problem is that 99% of the single drivers on the road don't do this.

I occasionally Uber, usually to meet my spouse for an evening or to one or other airport. Generally speaking my ride comes within 10 minutes and often far less. That tells me that there are plenty of cars not too far from me at any given time. Now whether they were circling or just happened to have dropped their previous ride off as I summoned them I don't know, but it is interesting to note that they are never far away from me. Like the poster above, I have had a driver who was en route to work or class, but more often or not when I get a chatty driver, it is someone between jobs, working their day off from another job, students, or similar. I have heard of drivers who commute as Uber drivers, but I have never had one drive for me.

I do believe they are circling around unless they are filling up gas or restroom breaks at fast food outlets. I doubt very much that they will be paying for parking somewhere.

They just circle around, because uber has too many on the road, in order to cut wait times. That, alone, drives the driver wages into the ground, and then we deal with the drivers who circle, double park, wait in loading zones, take u-turns where they shouldn't, etc..

Plus: we have to deal with all those gross uber commercials as uber tries to buff up their corporate image after all their disastrous tech-bro corporate policies.

Ugh.

They have near zero regulation. Gotta change.