I don't think this idea is going to work. But the sentiment is definitely true:
- Public transit can be inefficient, unpredictable, slow, crowded, or on its worse days downright broken. Transit needs a shakeup.
Buddy of mine interns at the cities' public-private bus company. They recently launched a kind of 'bus+' concept, which branded buses as if they're metro lines (with their own dedicated color), added wifi and fancier looking rolling stock. Ridership went up 30% on some lines, 10% on others. People who usually didn't take the bus were mostly responsible for that rise. Public buses have a bad reputation which can only be solved by investments.
People bitch and moan about the quality of public transport in San Francisco more than anywhere else I've been, despite the fact that SF's public transport is actually pretty good. The BARTs are fast and the MUNIs are frequent. Yes, there's the occasional delay or breakdown, but in Sydney there are some parts of the city that you'll just never be able to get to on public transport alone. Some routes only run one bus an hour and if that doesn't show up you're fucked. That seems to be pretty common around the world, so props to SF for running efficient services. There is a real problem with public transport, though, but it's a bit more subtle than "bloody techy rich people don't want to come in contact with the ooky poor people." There's a game I like to play on BART and MUNI called "Name That Bodily Fluid." Often there will be one empty seat on a crowded train, and although you can't see what's on that seat, at every stop people will board the train, make a bee-line for the empty seat, and then recoil in horror. Spoiler alert: it's usually vomit. Getting wi-fi and lattes thrown in is, like kleinbl00 said, a bit of a yuppie touch, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to pay more for a service that gets cleaned more often. If private industry can do better than the public services, then have at it! The other thing that often gets swept up in the "bloody tech-heads" sentiment is the wild economic inequality in San Francisco. I don't think it's the tech industry's fault that there are so many homeless people, but the presence of so much wealth makes the poverty stand out more. The article's concern that private buses will leave public transport as a hovel for poor people isn't a problem with the buses, it's a problem with poor people. You could say the same about restaurants or any other paid service -- "But if you can pay more for a nice meal, then won't Denny's become a last resort for the poor?" And yeah, it kind of is, but again the problem isn't with the restaurants, it's the economic inequality.
Public buses have a bad reputation where they've earned them, I think. That's the problem with a $7 bus - it's stuck in the same traffic as the $2 bus. Worse, if your city has bus lanes, your $7 bus is stuck in the same traffic as the proles while the $2 bus rockets across the Bay. Unless your $7 bus is run by the city in which case HELL YES charge the yuppies an extra $5. There's a fundamental problem with all this, though. Much like insomniasexx's post, it presupposes an economy whereby people with too much money will put up with the exact same bullshit as the rest of us, only minus some money. Been to Vegas? A limo costs about a dollar more than a taxi from the airport to the Strip. "Fancy buses" are a self-correcting problem - if there's demand for them, there will be competition and if there isn't, there will be extinction. But more on that post over there.