That ties in with something I was reading a while back about the activities of Uber.
Uber is an odd beast. In many areas it has haemorrhaged money. It also gets involved in lots of lawsuits about breaking employment laws, licensing laws and other protective regulations. In fact, it's more like a very large investment fund with a disruptive, regulation-busting arm that happens to have chosen transport as its area of operations.
One of Uber's campaigns was to prevent the extension of a specific public light rail system. Although efficient any rail system leaves the problem of the "last mile" from station to home. Uber said to one city, "Don't spend all that money extending your rail system into new suburbs – give us a contract to get people from the existing system direct to their homes." Of course a rail system requires upfront investment, so the Uber offer came in cheaper over the first N years, but potentially more expensive afterwards.
But that wasn't quite the point. The Uber offer was cheaper AT CURRENT UBER RATES. But Uber was effectively asking the city to give it a monopoly. A monopoly from which escaping could be expensive, given to a private company with a history of surveilling its customers to leverage their personal data, and of micro managing individual drivers and the number of cabs in any given area.