Shifting Gears: Is this the end of public transit?

Happy Friday and welcome to another week of Shifting Gears, Business Insider's weekly roundup of all things transportation.

The Centers for Disease Control had a dire warning this week as businesses slowly start to bring back employees: they should drive to work.

Of course, they can also bike or walk, the agency said, in order to avoid contracting or spreading the coronavirus, but there's only a small percentage of people who live close enough to work for this luxury.

Not only is there a push for single-occupancy vehicles, public health officials warned that car-pooling and pooled ride-hailing could be just as dangerous, eroding decades of work to ease congestion and pollution on America's clogged highways.

"Our roads cannot handle the increase in demand that will come from increased vehicle dependence," one expert said of the new friction in re-opening the country's economy. "Congestion levels will likely become unbearable."

Adding insult to injury, public transit agencies are grappling with steep declines in revenue that began in March as shelter-in-place order proliferated throughout the US. Now many are wondering: will the commuters come back? Personally, I haven't been on a bus or train in months, just like most of my colleagues. When will you feel safe returning? Let's chat.

Before we dive into the rest of this week's goings on, don't forget you can sign up to get this directly to your inbox here.

Let's go:

• Anecdotal evidence suggests at least a few people might be buying cars to make up for the warnings against public transit. Kristen Lee reports that while some of the process is going digital, dealership's aren't going away anytime soon. Here's why.
• Uber and Lyft are seeing slow comebacks in rides requests. Lyft's biggest upticks are in warm US cities, like Austin, while Uber says Hong Kong and Australia are leading the pack. Interestingly, it's not just people returning to work fueling the resurgence, Uber said, but people going out again during "party hours."
  • Uber's former CTO also gave his first interview since leaving in May. He says that leaving amid a global pandemic that forced the company to lay off many of his colleagues has left him feeling a little guilty. '
• Elon Musk wants to break up Amazon. The billionaire said he was taking a break from Twitter only to return a few days later to support a coronavirus-truther who's peddled falsehoods and conspiracies in his fight with the e-commerce giant. Somehow, it's far from Musk's strangest feud. We rounded up his weirdest beefs — from pedo guy to Azealia Banks — here.
• Amazon, meanwhile, just added 12 new planes to its growing air-cargo fleet that's quickly catching up with UPS and FedEx. Industry watchers say the company's transportation division is on track to challenge the USPS, UPS, and FedEx.
• Dyson's electric car is dead. The company released new photos of the failed project this week, showing a futuristic Tesla competitor that was ultimately scrapped because it was too expensive.
• Tesla could be getting closer to unveiling an EV battery that could last 1 million miles, experts say
• The US plans to ban Chinese passenger airlines, retaliating as China hinders US airlines from resuming flights to its country
• Here's what it was like on the last fight of a Delta McDonnell Douglas 'Mad Dog' jet which were all just sent to an early retirement after 33 years in the sky