Decades before Lyft and Uber, a scholar of transportation argued that
the most efficient public transport system might be an army of less-
regulated taxis.
The scholar is "Martin Wohl, a professor of transportation system planning at Carnegie Mellon University", he died in 2009, the year Uber was founded [0]
He co-authored a book "The Urban Transportation Problem" in 1965 [1]
A taxi medallion, the artificially scarce license to operate in New York, cost $35,000 in 1976. In 2014 a medallion sold for $1.3m. In 2015 a medallion sold for $900,000, presumably as a result of Uber and Lyft.
He co-authored a book "The Urban Transportation Problem" in 1965 [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Wohl
[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_urban_transportatio...