Uber and Lyft are looking to replace city mass transit systems, signing transit partnership agreements with municipalities in the US to provide on-demand transportation to a transit hub subsidized by public funds. The move, noted by Bloomberg last month, began with suburbs and small cities and is now rapidly expanding to larger cities, with Uber agreements with San Francisco, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Car-hailing apps have been capitalizing cities looking to slash their public transportation budgets. The cost of maintaining bus lines in low-density communities is proving difficult and unpopular, driving small cities to sign these agreements. In one, the agreement with Uber will cost to the city USD 40,000 per annum, or about a quarter of the cost of running two bus-lines in an area that will be covered by Uber. The program would not only mean a marked shift in the strategy of car-hailing apps, who have long marketed themselves as everyman’s personal driver, but could be a defining moment in defining the often strained relationship between these apps and cities.

And with such major changes, it shouldn’t be surprising that problems are already surfacing. The program, for one, is unusable for people without a smartphone or credit card, cutting off a portion of a city’s population. Critics also raise concerns of how increasing local government’s reliance on these companies would leave it entirely beholden to them and unable to revert back to the old system should these agreements fall through or a shift in strategy happen. But the most prominent issue being reported is transparency. These agreements effectively give Uber and Lyft the right to withhold public information, whether they concern the agreements themselves or commuter stats and information which government relies on and what these companies view as state secrets, Vice Motherboard reports. It remains to be seen whether these will hinder the growth of the program, but it seems unlikely. Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs program has joined the fray offering to overhaul transit in Columbus, Ohio. Meanwhile, DC city officials have proposed having Uber respond to some 911 calls for ambulances. As The Verge to aptly puts it: Welcome to Uberville.