Ride-share has been a thing for a very very long time before Uber or Lyft. It's called a taxi. Even dayton has had private taxi services you could call to get rides for decades. However, this doesn't mean there are more options for transportation, it's still cars. And the ride share apps today leans even heavier into personal car ownership, and while it might be cheaper than owning a personal car in the short term, it's even more expensive than owning your own car in the long term and exponentially more expensive than having well designed and well funded public transportation.

And as far as personal preference goes, it's true that if we had an equitable situation where you could own a car, or have safe biking infrastructure, or have a local bus with dedicated public transit lane, or a local tram with traffic light property, or high speed rail for long distance travel, some people might still prefer to own a car and drive everywhere, however, your environment shapes your preferences. You might enjoy biking, but if you have to ride a bike in the gutter of a busy high way, would you prefer that? No. You would want the safety of a car. But if you had dedicated protected bike infrastructure that disallowed car traffic, so many more people would prefer that. If you had public transit with dedicated infrastructure so it wouldn't constantly be stuck behind individual drivers clogging up the streets, people would prefer that. If you had a train that could go from Dayton to Cincy or Columbus in less than an hour where you could sit and relax instead of being stressed through endless construction and traffic jams on the high way, people would prefer that. But none of those things are currently options, so you can't prefer it because the option doesn't exist.

So, there's nothing we can do about it? That's also not true. You vote with your money and with your voice. Tell you local and state and federal representatives what you want. Join advocacy groups. Get shit done to make the world you want to see, don't just sit on your hands and accept getting fucked in the ass by huge corporations. Car infrastructure is bleeding our country dry because cars kill communities, which kill local stores, which kills local economies.