A criticism of this "model" is that building a ridesharing app and cloud backend is now not that hard.
So some developers with VC money can develop an app, launch in a city, and force Uber to cut prices, because people will be happy to install a FastRyde app and get rides for $3 less than Lyft/Uber.
I work at AMZN and am actually a "security certifier" who is in charge of making sure that services don't do stuff like this. There are numerous policies about what customer information you can handle/log/store and how to handle/log/store it. In addition, before your service can serve traffic, a certifier will go through and audit your code to make sure that you aren't logging any PII or other dangerous-to-log data.
Plenty of fallible human actors involved, but the processes are definitely in place to prevent behavior like this.
Sevilla, Spain is the poster-child of rapidly building out a bike network[0], and with the political will, that could be replicated elsewhere (especially somewhere flat and sunny like LA). Another easy way to improve transit is paint dedicated bus lanes for BRT lines. Not as sexy as dropping a few mil on light rail, but quick, cheap, and rapidly scalable.
Big slap in the face to the other cities filing bids. They also made attractive offers, but Amazon wasn't interested in them, just in wringing tax breaks out of NYC.
Either NYT or WSJ (I forget) had some analysis for this after some of the fires. One of the cited reasons was that municipalities are fine building into sensitive areas, because it increases their tax base while the state shoulders the cost of fire prevention/fighting/etc.