Like most big tech it is just a financial scam attempting to get monopoly marketshare and then jack up prices. Their technology is, itself, pedestrian.
Probably, though DOTs are all governed in the exact opposite way. They are always looking for ways to have zero in-house staff for anything remotely technical. They just want to contract everything out to the private sector.
They love to give Uber, Lyft, and Google money for traffic data, for example. They can't imagine doing GPS data aggregation themselves even when they are surrounded by 20 companies that can all do it. Hiring technical staff is somehow unfeasible even though they are still paying a company that employees technical staff and charges overhead. Part of it is that some of the companies do have little monopolies (e.g. Google Maps. Buy most of it is simply neoliberalism. Departments were gutted to cut costs with a promise that contracting to private industry would save money. Now that it is obviously not doing so, they can't reverse course because the people controlling the purse strings need to be buddy-buddy with hr contractors to get that sweet Chamber of Commerce campaign support.
Like most big tech it is just a financial scam attempting to get monopoly marketshare and then jack up prices. Their technology is, itself, pedestrian.
Why do I get the feeling that if local DOTs created their own Uber alternatives it will be shut down because muh IP infringement!
Probably, though DOTs are all governed in the exact opposite way. They are always looking for ways to have zero in-house staff for anything remotely technical. They just want to contract everything out to the private sector.
They love to give Uber, Lyft, and Google money for traffic data, for example. They can't imagine doing GPS data aggregation themselves even when they are surrounded by 20 companies that can all do it. Hiring technical staff is somehow unfeasible even though they are still paying a company that employees technical staff and charges overhead. Part of it is that some of the companies do have little monopolies (e.g. Google Maps. Buy most of it is simply neoliberalism. Departments were gutted to cut costs with a promise that contracting to private industry would save money. Now that it is obviously not doing so, they can't reverse course because the people controlling the purse strings need to be buddy-buddy with hr contractors to get that sweet Chamber of Commerce campaign support.