If you haven’t yet read the unfortunately titled “Bay Watched,” Nathan Heller’s excellent New Yorker article about the modern face of the Bay Area’s tech world, it’s definitely worth your time. The reporter looks at how entrepreneurs are keeping things on a micro level, upsetting the established venture-capital culture and competing with the public sector to provide basic services. In the latter category are start-ups like Lyft, which allows anyone to summon a taxi with a smartphone or to become a driver, and Leap, a private shuttle service which offers comfortable, wi-fi-enabled rides for three times the price of the city’s bus service. Of course, as we’ve seen with schools, privatization enacts a price on those who can’t afford to upgrade. An excerpt:

“Leap, like Lyft, is an example of the helpful, Mr. Fix-It style of local techie culture. If a system isn’t working well, your neighborhood entrepreneur will build a better one. The approach has clear benefits for transportation, but it has risks, too. Say you’re a lawyer who rides the Muni bus. You hate it. It is overcrowded. It is always late. Fed up, you use your legal expertise to lobby an agency to get the route fixed. And the service gets better for all riders: the schoolkid, the homeless alcoholic, the elderly Chinese woman who speaks no English. None of them could have lobbied for a better bus on their own; your self-interested efforts have redounded to the collective benefit. Now the peeved lawyer can just take Leap. That is great for him. But it is less good for the elderly Chinese woman, who loses her civic advocate. Providing an escape valve for a system’s strongest users lessens the pressure for change.

[Leap co-founder Kyle] Kirchhoff saw things differently. Part of the reason the Muni bus was bad, he said, was that there was no market competition to make it better. ‘I think choice is a wonderful thing, and I think that competition is a good thing, too,’ he told me.”