ride hailing / ride sharing

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

by Brad Stone  · 30 Jan 2017  · 373pp  · 112,822 words

money.” During Logan Green’s senior year back in Santa Barbara in the fall of 2005, the pieces started coming together in his mind—the ridesharing channel on Craigslist; the crowded vans in Victoria Falls; the intractable flaws of the public-transit systems. He started working on a concept he called

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using the app,” he told me. “What actually happened was that people stopped driving their cars and renting cars during travel and instead started using ride-hailing apps.” As demand boomed, yellow-taxi apps couldn’t keep up supply—just as Kalanick had predicted. Hailo later tried to pivot in London, adding

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Radhakrishnan, who adds that Uber Green and Uber Eco were briefly considered and rejected. Now, an important clarification: Unlike Lyft and Sidecar, the so-called ridesharing companies that were at that very moment making their debuts in San Francisco, the original UberX accommodated only professional drivers who held taxi licenses. Kalanick

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we try to be totally, legitimately legal,” Kalanick replied. Kalanick was in something of a catch-22. If he responded with his own unlicensed ridesharing service and it was declared illegal, the larger and older Uber could face a much heftier penalty. But if he did nothing, he risked letting

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It sent cease-and-desist letters to Lyft, Sidecar, and TickenGo, a French company that had just moved to San Francisco and introduced its own ridesharing app for the iPhone.22 The companies were allowed to operate but ordered into talks with the CPUC, which regulates common carriers like limousines, airport

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staff goes off the deep end?” “You have some good points,” Peevey wrote to Kennedy. “Still, I have this nagging fear that the area of ridesharing, aided by technology, will grow and grow and there will be terrible accidents, with the drivers only having minimum insurance coverage.” Peevey was prescient. But

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one-million-dollar backup insurance policies, a complement to a driver’s personal coverage. And she suggested there was an aura of inevitability around the ridesharing services, linking them to organized carpooling across the Bay Bridge and arguing that “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” Peevey,

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ever considered shutting down Lyft and Sidecar, Kennedy quickly turned him around. That fall, he instructed Marzia Zafar, his director of policy, to let the ridesharing companies operate but to figure out a way to protect the safety of riders. Zafar, who ran the subsequent rule-making process and would write

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A few weeks later, Lyft expanded into Los Angeles and Sidecar moved more aggressively into L.A., Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Austin, Brooklyn, and DC. The ridesharing wars had begun. Travis Kalanick had watched, waited, and even quietly agitated for Lyft and Sidecar to be shut down. Instead, they spread, undercutting Uber

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regulation to thwart our competitors. Instead, we chose the path that reflects our company’s core: we chose to compete.” Uber, he wrote, would add ridesharing to UberX nationwide and roll it out in cities where there was tacit approval, regulatory ambiguity, or an absence of enforcement. Drivers would have to

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countless cities, states, and countries all over the world over the next few years. Angry taxi drivers, their unions, execs from Uber and the other ridesharing companies, and interest groups representing the disabled and the blind all crammed into the auditorium at 505 Van Ness to loudly articulate their concerns. “People

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Hayashi was outraged by what she viewed as a privacy violation. With limited success, Marzia Zafar tried to keep the proceedings moving and civilized. The ridesharing companies testified, one after the other, often over the jeers and taunts of the assembled taxi drivers. After the debacle in DC, Uber’s lawyers

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Francisco, took the podium and insisted that Uber was only a software company. “Our offices have programmers, not drivers,” he said. “Uber is agnostic about ridesharing. Whatever the decision is, we will follow it.” When Zafar opened the session to questions, an immigrant driver stood up and cut through Uber’s

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“I think that’s completely inappropriate.” Zafar agreed and threw the driver out of the auditorium. The decision by the five PUC commissioners on the ridesharing companies was ultimately unanimous. Under Michael Peevey’s influential direction, and with letters of support from Mayor Ed Lee in San Francisco and Mayor Eric

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Garcetti in Los Angeles, Peevey and the four other commissioners voted to formally legalize ridesharing, classified the firms as “transportation network companies,” and said they would revisit the ruling in a year. The new rules required the companies to,

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was running on Uber’s platform. His company, Global Way Limousine, flourished for a year, at one point with sixteen drivers taking shifts. But when ridesharing took off, Ouali knew trouble was ahead. Fares were coming down and drivers no longer had any reason to split their commissions with a fleet

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it.’” Kalanick had been among those who had overestimated the risk, misplayed it, and been bruised by it. Uber had waited on the sidelines of ridesharing for seven months, and in that time new rivals had gained critical momentum. What Lyft and Sidecar did was ambitious, he conceded, vowing: “We

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tougher!’ and Travis would come back saying, ‘We have to be nicer!’” Executives at Airbnb had watched Uber’s travails, following its controversial embrace of ridesharing, and insisted somewhat dubiously that its approach was different and softer than Uber’s. “They have their own way of seeking growth,” said Jonathan Mildenhall

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coming next. Over the next two and a half years, with Wall Street desperate to capitalize on the success of the upstarts and the Chinese ridesharing giant Didi raising its own enormous war chest to challenge Uber for global supremacy, the two companies together would raise more than $15 billion. They

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and the safety of both the drivers and the riders using its service. Taxi drivers and their representatives, their livelihoods squeezed by Uber and other ridesharing services, led the anti-Uber crusade with angry, sometimes violent protests in countless cities around the world. The upstarts Uber and Airbnb, frequently named in

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a board member at General Motors, and thought he could help Uber with its regulatory problems around the world. Google invested $258 million in the ridesharing company. David Drummond joined the Uber board, while Krane joined as a board observer. TPG invested $88 million, buying shares directly from founder Garrett

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this thing?’” Michael says. “It just kept going.” Some U.S. cities, such as Austin, Las Vegas, Denver, and Miami, resisted the arrival of unregulated ridesharing; amusingly, New Orleans sent Uber a cease-and-desist letter before it was even operating there.1 But Kalanick still had his trusty playbook as

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the beach handing out Uber postcards and affixing pro-Uber posters to light poles. The company’s campaign to drum up popular support to legalize ridesharing in South Florida had a website, an Instagram page, and a Twitter hash tag: #MiamiNeedsUber. Miami was a challenging market for Uber. Private for-

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meant to keep them safe from loosely regulated competition from limos and town cars. It didn’t stand a chance against sustained popular demand for ridesharing. Lyft and then Uber would open for business in Miami-Dade a few months after the visit by Uber employees.2 Though the companies’

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play out in 2014, was another example of this. Kalanick had regretted letting Lyft take hold in 2012 while waiting for California regulators to sanction ridesharing. He was obsessed with Lyft and its potential to outmaneuver Uber, and he worried that a more seasoned company might acquire it. Around this time

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that Lyft had the better reputation, even though in some ways it was the more aggressive player. It had been the first to introduce unregulated ridesharing in San Francisco, Miami, and Kansas City, yet the endeavors of its founders, Logan Green and John Zimmer, often came off as sincere idealism,

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to be changing the future of transportation, which will deliver a more people-centered city of tomorrow.”23 That July, Lyft started preparing to launch ridesharing in New York City, where Uber operated only with licensed professional drivers. Sidecar had attempted such a feat the year before, only to see its

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later, its valuation had more than tripled, to $68 billion, making Uber the most highly valued privately held technology startup in history. The rise of ridesharing also sparked another wave of conflict in nearly every major city and country in the world. Travis Kalanick had promised a more optimistic and mature

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and fierce competition than any technology startup had ever seen. London was one of the first European cities to grapple with the disruptive implications of ridesharing. The city had a proud taxi heritage, with drivers of its iconic black cabs required to study the city’s demanding street grid for three

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needed to grow its supply of drivers without such obstacles. In February 2014, with the French government unwilling to relax the licensing requirements, Uber introduced ridesharing in France that allowed drivers without professional taxi licenses to pick up passengers using their own cars. Because Uber already had UberX in the country

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in the fifteenth century to protect against invasion from the Mongols. Considering everything that was about to happen, this seems apt. All the early Chinese ridesharing startups lost money, and the ones that arrived late to the market or tried to replicate Uber’s original strategy of starting with the more

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.16 The strategy seemed to work, at first. With Didi and Kuaidi consumed with their merger, Uber started gaining ground on the strength of ridesharing and clawed its way to what it estimated was 30 percent of the Chinese market for on-demand transportation apps. As usual, there was drama

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offices in Guangzhou and Chongqing.18 In January 2015, the country’s Ministry of Transport ruled that private car owners were not allowed to use ride-hailing apps for profit. But strangely, Uber and its rivals were allowed to continue to operate. The Chinese government showed little appetite for a total

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later disputed Didi’s account and characterized the meeting as “super friendly.”21 Didi execs rejected the proposal and soon introduced their own version of ridesharing in China, as well as carpooling options and commuter buses. Didi would prove a powerful incumbent, capable of raising billions of dollars of venture

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the taxi industry had few friends. These lessons would prove handy in other American cities, like Las Vegas, Austin, Portland, Miami, and wherever battles over ridesharing were being waged. Uber would win many of these fights, lose a few, and demonstrate that it still had capital, political connections, a great many

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were each burning through more than a billion dollars a year in China, giving unprofitable subsidies to drivers and riders. As Kalanick had expected, the ridesharing business in China was massive. Six of Uber’s top ten cities by ride volume were in the country. Subsidizing rides at that scale made

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indefinitely. “Look, we could keep going. Both sides could keep going. It was just time,” he said. “The thing for us was that the ridesharing wars were going global. You had American tech money going into our Chinese competitor and you had Chinese sovereign wealth money going into our global

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our operations. We can stop investing [whenever we want] and get profitable,” he said. I noted there were skeptics who still thought the economics of ridesharing companies were unsustainable, propped up only by venture capital. “Then how were we profitable in the U.S. in February? And maybe March too, I

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and Travis Kalanick in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. (Courtesy of Uber) Lyft President John Zimmer wearing a frog costume to promote the ridesharing service Zimride in 2011. (Courtesy of Lyft) John Zimmer, co-founder and chief operating officer of Lyft, left, and Logan Green, co-founder and

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19. “Patent US6356838—System and Method for Determining an Efficient Transportation Route,” March 12, 2002, http://www.google.com/patents/US6356838. 20. There were other ridesharing companies that preceded Sidecar. Starting in 2010, one San Francisco service, called Homobile, offered transvestite performers and members of the gay community rides and solicited

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sfcda.com/CPUC/Lyft_CPUC_SED_IntAGR.pdf. 25. Brian X. Chen, “Uber to Roll Out Ride Sharing in California,” Bits Blog, New York Times, January 31, 2013, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/uber-rideshare/. 26. Travis Kalanick, “@johnzimmer You’ve Got a Lot of Catching Up,” Twitter, March 19

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14, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-uber-puc-20160114-story.html. 28. “Order Instituting Rulemaking on Regulations Relating to Passenger Carriers, Ridesharing, and New Online-Enabled Transportation Services,” Cpuc.ca.gov, September 19, 2013, http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M077/K112/77112285.PDF. 29

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http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/15-questions-with-john-zimmer/. 24. Yuliya Chernova, “N.Y. Shutdowns for SideCar, RelayRides Highlight Hurdles for Car- and Ride-Sharing Startups,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/05/15/n-y-shutdowns-for-sidecar-relayrides-highlight-hurdles-for-car

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-and-ride-sharing-startups/. 25. “Lyft Will Launch in Brooklyn & Queens,” Lyft Blog, July 8, 2014, https://blog.lyft.com/posts/2014/7/8/lyft-launches-in-

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-holds-barred-expansion-strategy-fizzles-in-germany.html?_r=0. 13. Brad Stone and Lulu Yilun Chen, “Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 6, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-didi-cheng-wei/. 14. “Hangzhou Kuaizhi Technology (Kuaidi Dache) closes venture funding,”

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Financial Deals Tracker, MarketLine, April 10, 2013. 15. Zheng Wu and Vanessa Piao, “Didi Dache, a Chinese Ride-Hailing App, Raises $700 Million,” New York Times, December 10, 2014, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/didi-dache-a-chinese

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-ride-hailing-app-raises-700-million/. 16. “Baidu to Buy Uber Stake in Challenge to Alibaba in China,” Bloomberg.com, December 17, 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com

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in China, Traffic Isn’t Only Woe,” Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-taxi-drivers-continue-striking-over-growing-ride-hailing-services-1421239127. 18. Gillian Wong, “Uber Office Raided in Southern Chinese City,” Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work

by Alex Rosenblat  · 22 Oct 2018  · 343pp  · 91,080 words

] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018023686 (print) | LCCN 2018025474 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520970632 (e-book) | ISBN 9780520298576 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Uber (Firm) | Ridesharing—United States. Classification: LCC HE5620.R53 (ebook) | LCC HE5620. R53 R67 2018 (print) | DDC 388.4/13212—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc

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describe precarious, part-time, and piecework employment.38 Scholars, as well as media outlets like the New York Times and Buzzfeed, have moved to rechristen “ridesharing” as “ridehailing” in an attempt to ease the contradiction between altruism and employment. The sharing-economy language has long been both expansive and imprecise, recasting

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emergent issues with Uber, Lyft, and other ridehailing companies, as well as describing his experiences as a driver. Harry Campbell runs a blog called The Rideshare Guy, but blog is an understatement of his business: by the spring of 2017, he had become the voice that represents drivers in the majority

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, Safraz Maredia, an Uber general manager from the tristate area, penned an op-ed titled “Westchester Would Send Anti-business Message by Opting Out from Ride-Hailing.”43 Politicizing consumers with messages that support innovation, business, or employment opportunities is a classic Uber move. As we saw earlier, anything that is an

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Austin.) As author Nikil Saval observes with reference to David Plouffe, former senior vice president of policy and strategy for Uber, “What Plouffe and the ridesharing companies understand is that, under capitalism, when markets are pitted against the state, the figure of the consumer can be invoked against the figure of

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the context that my job is to study how technology affects work, and would also share that I primarily research Uber and ridesharing (a term more familiar to drivers than “ridehailing”) from the drivers’ perspectives, and that I publish my findings both in academic journals and in

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. 68. International Finance Corporation–World Bank, “Driving toward Equality: Women, Ride-Hailing, and the Sharing Economy,” March 1, 2018, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/856531520948298389/Driving-toward-equality-women-ride-hailing-and-the-sharing-economy. 69. Kaleigh Rogers, “Love in the Time of Ridesharing,” Motherboard, May 27, 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us

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/article/yp33yg/love-in-the-time-of-ridesharing-uber-lyft-romance-technology. 70. Lobel, “The Law of the

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Based on Rider Fares,” Ars Technica, September 18, 2017, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/uber-driver-pay-plan-puts-a-significant-risk-on-ride-hailing-service/. 32. Alex Rosenblat, “The Truth about How Uber’s App Manages Drivers,” Harvard Business Review, April 6, 2016, hbr.org/2016/04/the-truth

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acm.org/10.1145/2858036.2858476. 25. Noopur Raval and Paul Dourish, “Standing Out from the Crowd: Emotional Labour, Body Labour, and Temporal Labour in Ridesharing,” Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (New York: ACM): 97–107, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145

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/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets?CMP=twt_a-technology_b-gdntech. 8. Ziru Li, Yili Hong, and Zhongju Zhang, “Do On-Demand Ride-Sharing Services Affect Traffic Congestion? Evidence from Uber Entry,” 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2838043; Office of the Mayor, For-Hire

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sale/. 29. Texas HB 100, www.capitol.state.tx.us/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=85R&Bill=HB100. 30. Kimberly Reeves, “Uber’s Big Win: Texas Ridesharing Rules Bill Passes through Senate,” Austin Business Journal, May 17, 2017, www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/05/17/ubers-big-win-texas

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-ridesharing-rules-bill-passes.html. 31. HR 100, 85 Cong. (2017) (enacted), https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB100/2017. 32. Joy Borkholder, Mariah Montgomery, Miya Saika

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,” Quartz, December 10, 2015, https://qz.com/571249/three-us-states-have-already-blessed-ubers-independent-contractor-employment-model/; Lisa Nagele-Piazza, “Florida Legislature Approves Ride-Hailing Driver Bill,” Society for Human Management, www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/state-and-local-updates/pages/florida-legislature-approves

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Messed with Texas—and Won,” CNET, June 20, 2017, www.cnet.com/news/uber-lyft-toyed-with-texas-to-get-their-ride-hailing-way/; Kimberly Reeves, “Uber’s Big Win: Texas Ridesharing Rules Bill Passes through Senate,” Austin Business Journal, May 17, 2017, www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/05/17/ubers-big

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-win-texas-ridesharing-rules-bill-passes.html. 42. Lindsey Hadlock, “Upstate New York Ride-Hailing Drives Gig Economy,” Cornell University Media Relations Office, June 29, 2017, http://mediarelations.cornell.edu/2017/06/29/upstate-new

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-york-ride-hailing-drives-gig-economy/. 43. Safraz Maredia, “Westchester Would Send Anti-business Message by Opting Out from Ride-Hailing: Uber Official,” lohud, June 25, 2017, www.lohud.com/story/opinion/contributors/2017/06/26/westchester

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-ride-hailing-uber-view/427351001/. 44. Edward T. Walker, “The Uberization of Activism,” New York Times, August 6, 2015, www.nytimes

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.com/2015/08/07/opinion/the-uber-ization-of-activism.html?mcubz=1. 45. Nikil Saval, “Disrupt the Citizen: Against Ride Sharing,” Portside, July 11, 2017, https

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://portside.org/2017–07–11/disrupt-citizen-against-ride-sharing. 46. Ibid.; Wolfgang Streenck, “Citizens as Customers,” New Left Review 76 (2012), https://newleftreview.org/II/76/wolfgang

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future

by Alec Ross  · 13 Sep 2021  · 363pp  · 109,077 words

its employees with a living wage and decent benefits, there are essentially four choices left. Compel benefits irrespective of the business model. Gig work like ridesharing then reverts to the black-car model of its roots rather than functioning as a service for the masses. Government fills the gap with a

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gain a foothold in China to little avail. By way of illustration, when Uber launched in China in 2014, its CEO Travis Kalanick hoped his ride-sharing app would become one of the first American consumer technology firms to succeed in China. Having watched US tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook

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Corrigan, April 30, 2020. The two companies entered “a massive war”: Shervin Pishevar, interview. By 2016, Uber China had expanded: Zheping Huang, “China Finally Made Ride-Hailing Legal, in a Way That Could Destroy Uber’s Business Model,” Quartz, July 29, 2016, https://qz.com/745337/china-finally-made

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-ride-hailing-legal-in-a-way-that-could-destroy-ubers-business-model/. The company received billions of dollars: Heather Timmons, “All the Things That Went Wrong for

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26, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/2130793/didi-chuxing-ramps-artificial-intelligence-arms-race-says-it-will; Jonathan Cheng, “China’s Ride-Hailing Giant Didi to Test Beijing’s New Digital Currency,” Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas

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-ride-hailing-giant-didi-to-test-beijings-new-digital-currency-11594206564. As of 2019, China has deployed approximately one: Thomas Ricker, “The US, Like China, Has about

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination

by Adam Lashinsky  · 31 Mar 2017  · 190pp  · 62,941 words

domination / Adam Lashinsky. Description: New York : Portfolio, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2017006832 (print) | LCCN 2017013375 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735211407 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735211391 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Uber (Firm) | Ridesharing. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Corporate & Business History. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Transportation. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Computer Industry. Classification: LCC HE5620.R53 (ebook) | LCC HE5620.R53 L37 2017

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from his home base in San Francisco is part of a money-draining and quixotic gambit to replicate the global success of Uber’s disruptive ride-hailing service in the world’s most populous country. Kalanick has spent the previous three days in Tianjin, a megacity on the Yellow Sea, two hours

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with Uber’s promise—and Uber frequently does. Car ownership hasn’t yet declined in the United States as the result of the advent of ridesharing or for any other reason. According to U.S. Census data, the percentage of households with no vehicles declined from 21.5 percent in 1960

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according to census data. As well, the Pew Research Center reported in 2016 that while 51 percent of Americans had heard of the concept of ridesharing, just 15 percent had used a service like Uber and Lyft, and another 33 percent were unfamiliar with them altogether. Surveys suggest that Uber has

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Uber and similar companies to charge 25 percent more than taxis. In most instances a massive lobbying and public-relations onslaught succeeded in allowing the ridesharing companies to operate. But not everywhere. In May 2016, Uber and Lyft left Austin, Texas, after refusing to comply with the city’s fingerprinting measures

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. New ridesharing services willing to comply with Austin’s rules quickly offered service there. Uber’s customers were often reliable supporters of the company, especially in its

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company associated with the pink grill ornament was Lyft, the first of a new breed of so-called ridesharing companies. (Others included Sidecar in the United States and Hailo in the United Kingdom.) “Ridesharing” was a new and nuanced term of art among tech companies. Only professional drivers sat behind the wheels

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merely the cost of the “shared” ride plus a “donation” for her trouble. What’s more, that price might well be less than a cab ride. Sharing was a misnomer, given that Lyft’s drivers were out to make a buck every bit as much as Uber’s. But by promoting the

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. Green’s passion was to encourage alternatives to driving. On a postcollege trip to Zimbabwe, he took note of the efficient if informal system of ridesharing the locals used. He went back to the United States and started a carpooling software company called Zimride, inspired by his trip to Africa. In

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fluffy pink mustache was attached to the front of cars on the streets of San Francisco.) Uber caught wind of Lyft, but initially it decided “ridesharing” not only wasn’t its thing but likely represented a violation of rules regulating taxis. “We watched it closely,” says Ryan Graves, Uber’s head

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Uber had begun to square off against each other across the United States. Lyft, in six U.S. cities a year after starting to offer ridesharing, sold its Zimride business to the car-rental company Enterprise Holdings, which continues to operate it and still caters to universities and companies. (Lyft, Zimride

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’s ridesharing product before the sale, became the company’s name.) Uber went through a product repositioning as well. UberX, initially promoted as an “eco-friendly” alternative

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, which swung from regulation so restrictive it would shut down Uber in Denver to passing one of the first laws that lightly regulated and legalized ridesharing throughout the state. She eventually moved on to Las Vegas, the first city Uber pulled out of and where it eventually won the right to

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of Nebraska Cornhusker football fans. Snover has a strict policy for deciding when to drive. “I don’t drive if it’s not surging.” A ridesharing driver since 2015—he also drives for Lyft—Snover has been able to track the decline in Uber payments. He says he earned about $1

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to $1,200 a week. He earned about that in his best weeks driving a cab in Richmond, Virginia, before that business got zapped by ridesharing. Driving for Uber is harder than operating a taxi, says Tesfaye. Before, he could wait for passengers at a cab stand, giving him time to

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had started the solar panel company Solar City, which he merged with Tesla in late 2016—the Tesla founder was assumed to be exploring a ridesharing service of his own. Kalanick had heard the rumors. When Apple, which was widely believed to be developing an electric car, invested $1 billion in

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, making the case that Apple constituted a bigger threat to Tesla than to Uber. Musk, says Kalanick, pooh-poohed the idea of a self-driving ridesharing service—and of totally autonomous cars altogether. “Elon spent the rest of the call convincing me that it’s too far out and it’s

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their minds was Uber’s open-warfare competition with Didi. Why, for example, was Kalanick so opposed to the idea of Uber China offering a ride-hailing app for taxi drivers, which constituted the bulk of Didi’s business? The depth and relentlessness of the questioning can easily be viewed as a

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, and so far Uber’s growth hadn’t been seriously hampered by it. (As an example, in 2014 the municipal government of Shanghai decreed that ridesharing was illegal during rush hour, and Uber lost most of its “supply,” also known as drivers; by the following week, enforcement not having materialized, all

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utilized Tencent’s WeChat messaging service to its advantage. Yet both companies focused on the taxi market, leaving Uber unencumbered to pursue its own nontaxi ride-hailing strategy. “When you’re the small guy you can do things the big guy can’t,” said Kalanick, nostalgically evoking his entrepreneurial sensibilities and even

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’re so small right now that it’s not going to cost much to get into the game [in China]. Right now we’re doing ridesharing and just figuring out how to make it work.” Uber would remain neither small nor cost-effective in China. And its Chinese competitors proved that

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lose as much as $50 million a month. In early 2017 it vowed to expand into an additional one hundred U.S. cities. Juno, the ridesharing company that bragged about taking a smaller cut from its drivers, threatened to expand beyond New York. Kalanick had little trouble recruiting top talent. Keeping

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them was another matter. In the fall he hired a new president for ridesharing operations, a Target marketing executive named Jeff Jones. Once again, Ryan Graves stepped back from a job to make way for a newcomer. Jones would

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

by David Kerrigan  · 18 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 80,835 words

operates in over 580 cities and saw over $20 billion of bookings in 12 months. Rival company Lyft provides over 20 million rides per month. Ride sharing is currently responsible for about 4 percent of the miles traveled by car globally and Morgan Stanley believe the number will be nearly 30 percent

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rise of the car and its ills is rather pointless without positive alternatives. In an urban area designed for cars, the current alternatives of walking, ridesharing, biking or transit each have challenges. If we are unwilling to make changes, the only thing that can replace the car, is well, the car

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will operate its own fleet. Tesla owners however won’t be permitted to use their self-driving Tesla to pick up people using a competitive ride-hailing app such as Uber. Rather, they Tesla documentation states they can only do so as part of what is now being called the Tesla Network

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, or the entity that's in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher-quality than Uber's, then Uber is no longer a thing" Travis Kalanick, Uber CEO [116] San Francisco-based ride-hailing company Uber is also a high-profile member of the race for

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” of a new “horseless carriage” era. The line between the agile technology sector and the lumbering powerhouse automotive industries is blurring. The rise of rideshare and ride hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft means that transportation is being tied ever more closely to your cell phone, while autonomous driving technology will require

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means to be a car company. General Motors spent $581 million to purchase of self-driving technology company Cruise Automation, invested $500 million investment in ride-hailing service Lyft, and has launched its own car-sharing service called Maven. According to Fortune, “there is hype, hope, fear, and insecurity—and at the

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U.S. auto companies made their money on the manufacture and sale of motor vehicles. Now they find themselves being dragged into the business of ride-hailing apps, shuttle buses, 3D maps, and computers on wheels that drive themselves. They’re no longer content being known as automotive companies either—they’re

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(the approximate cost of owning and running your own car). Car on Demand/Ride Sharing As we move towards a driverless cars-enabled future, perhaps a pointer to the nature of ownership can be gleaned from the current trend towards ridesharing and on-demand services. Car ownership has, for a long time, been

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still prefer driving their own vehicle to using a ride hailing service and 63 per cent wouldn’t replace their own vehicle with a ridesharing service, even if it were free”.[179] From Car-less to Care-less Self-driving cars will push prices for ride-sharing down to levels that are currently unimaginable. Given

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the cost of Uber or Lyft fares, the advent of self-driving cars could reduce the average ride-sharing fare to well below 50% of current rates. One analyst with ARK Investment Management,[180] is expecting ridesharing firms to drastically lower fares. According to her estimates, the cost for an autonomous taxi would

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of economics would likely make ride/car-sharing vastly more attractive, at least in urban areas. Rural dwellers, where the population density doesn’t support ride sharing, will likely still opt for ownership of cars, even if they no longer drive them personally. In Chapter 2, I noted how Millennials, now the

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largest demographic group in the United States, seem to be more on board with ditching the car. As a result, ride-sharing, car clubs and other alternatives to ownership are already growing fast. Young city-dwellers are turning their backs on owning a costly asset that sits

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merely deferring buying a vehicle, pointing to the fact that people continue to drive at an older age than they used to. The growth of ride hailing/ridesharing (with or without driverless cars) in place of ownership is a grave concern for car manufacturers. People don’t tend to pay attention to the

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remember the brands of the company that sold you your tickets or operated the service. And that’s why major car manufactures are investing in ridesharing services or even turning to providing their own fleets as we’ll see a little later in this Chapter. With the advent of fully self

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like Uber or Instacart. In this scenario, personal ownership might well blur with more of a fleet ownership model. Cities could also offer incentives to ride-sharing services that augment public transit, feeding people to major subway and rail lines. This is already a trend: Uber reports that in some cities, one

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cars. Some people rent cars when they need them (either through traditional car rental companies or newer models like Zipcar). Some people get everywhere through ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft. Some people use public transportation or simply walk. People commonly switch from one of these solutions to another over the

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mention driverless cars. Less than 3% of the transportation plans for the 50 most populous cities in the US even mention the transit impacts of ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft, let alone driverless cars. Expert opinion on the impact of driverless cars on urban sprawl is divided. On one side, the

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nation's overall population) and Japan, the demand for driverless cars may not come from the younger generations we spoke of earlier as champions of ride-sharing but from an older population reaching the limits of their ability to drive themselves and with it the independence it brings - we take travel for

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for conventional personal vehicles—could substantially quicken attempts in those cities to prioritise daily commutes and errands by other modes such as walking, bicycling, and ridesharing. Will driverless cars cherry-pick off public transport - with low income bus users suffering the consequences of even lower municipal investment in shared services? Self

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saved and made available, while privacy advocates will want to ensure it used only for the purposes of navigation and is transient in nature. In ride-sharing and on-demand scenarios, there is already little privacy - Uber have a record of all my journeys, knowing when and where I am going, and

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core question becomes: Do we move and continue down a society built upon vehicle ownership, or do we move to one that is based upon ridesharing? But that's against the basic culture that has existed in this country for decades."[370] As I’ve spent more time examining driverless cars

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.org/projects/creating-safer-streets-through-data-science/ https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/721484633351696384?replies_view=true&cursor=ARAUhOE6Awo https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/30/ride-sharing-will-give-us-back-our-cities/ http://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/focus/future-of-mobility/roadmap-for-future-of-urban-mobility.html?id

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.mercurynews.com/2016/09/02/driving-regulation-how-lyft-works-to-shape-ride-hailing-legislation/ [329] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing [330] http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/10/technology/new-york-self-driving-cars-ridesharing/index.html [331] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/detroit-wants

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy

by Jeremias Prassl  · 7 May 2018  · 491pp  · 77,650 words

as a small niche for digital ‘crowdwork’ has grown into a global phenomenon. Some of the major players have quickly become house- hold names—think ‘ride-sharing’ companies Uber, Lyft, Didi, and Ola, delivery apps Deliveroo and Foodora, or casual task platforms Helpling and TaskRabbit. New platforms are cropping up in industries

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routes and receive wages regardless of whether passengers are on board or not.37 Regulatory arbitrage in the gig economy takes many forms: think about ride-sharing platforms’ insistence that taxi regulation does not apply to their business, for example. Portraying workers as independent entrepreneurs and refuting their employment status, on the

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arbitrage also leads to negative externalities: the social cost of platforms’ activities are higher than their private cost. Think, for example, of a number of ride-sharing cars roaming the streets whilst looking for the next passenger. We have already seen that platforms usually try to have as many workers as possible

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it is not because it has out innovated the incumbent cab market, which at the end of the day has access to exactly the same ride- hailing technology. To the contrary, it’s because investors have failed to rec- ognise that the source of its greatest innovations is and always has been

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net- work effects—that is, where all users of a particular service gain if additional consumers adopt it.43 Think about the growth of a ride-sharing platform in a new city, for example. If a large number of consumers are using a particu- lar app to hail taxis, it will become

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on MTurk will be familiar with the ease and satisfaction that comes from speedy and low-cost service delivery. Studies of consumer pref- erences for ride-sharing platforms reveal the joys of cheaper pricing, wider choice, and easier access.51 There’s nothing that seems impossible with the help of gig-economy

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promote welfare but rather protect entrenched interests are easy cases . . . Attempts at extending permit requirements—what industry interests often call ‘leveling the playing field’ between ridesharing companies and taxi companies, or between other platform companies and the businesses they disrupt—are generally harmful to the evolution of the platform and to

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competitive markets more broadly.24 Most platforms, however, never face such problems: they simply don’t oper- ate in heavily regulated environments. In that sense, ride-sharing apps are a red herring; assembling flatpack furniture, completing online question- naires, and delivering takeout food are rarely regulated to the same degree as local

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3, the reality of work in the on-demand economy is often even more precarious than the underpaid, at-will contracts offered by Sports Direct. Ride-sharing drivers struggle to make the minimum wage once they have accounted for the cost of running their cars, workers are deactivated for refusing to accept

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the early days of the gig economy, observers were faced with a discourse of ‘collaborative consumption’,37 peer-to-peer sharing, and neighbours helping neighbours: ‘Rideshare with Lyft. Lyft is your friend with a car, whenever you need one.’38 The persistence with which work in the on- demand economy has

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attack. When faced with Uber’s strenuous denial of employer status in the autumn of 2016, an employ- ment tribunal in London ruled that the ride-sharing platform’s ‘resorting in its documentation to fictions, twisted language and even brand new termin- ology’ merited ‘a degree of scepticism’.52 The judge could

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state and local levels, drafting and supporting favourable bills, whilst attacking those that do not stick to the playbook. Industry efforts to create so-called ride-sharing laws are a good case study. Details vary across juris- dictions, but one common goal emerges: to deny workers’ employment status and ensure that platforms

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well below minimum wage levels. As regards task assignment, platforms employ a range of strategies to ensure that jobs are accepted as quickly as possible. Ride-sharing platforms, for example, often keep their drivers in the dark about passengers’ destinations until the trip has begun. As independent entrepreneurs, drivers should be free

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for on-demand workers to understand why their ratings have fallen in the first place: It’s a huge disappointment to be fired from your ride sharing job, and to make things worse, you’re given little to no warning or explanation about your deactivation. Instead, when you try to log on

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profit—or loss—and must therefore ensure that workers earn the minimum wage after all costs of providing the service have been taken into account. Ride-sharing platforms are a good example of on-demand business models where the functional concept of the employer clearly identifies the plat- form as the employer

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of being a united workforce. Whereas London cab drivers can congregate in their famous lit- tle tea huts dotted across the streets of the city, ride-sharing drivers are forced to hide out in increasingly rare open parking lots, often struggling to find a place to rest or even to go to

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of the work they complete.4 Concerns are not limited to quibbles about product quality. On occasion, consumers are faced with much more serious problems. Ride-sharing pas- sengers have reported maltreatment because of their sexual orientation and research in the United States has indicated that passengers with African- American-sounding names

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their customers to physical dangers. The Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association (TLPA)—a US taxi industry lobby group, whose website provides a long list of alleged ride- sharing incidents, including ‘deaths, assaults, sexual assaults, kidnappings, felons, imposters, Drive DUI [drink driving] & other’6—has repeatedly criticized platforms’ vetting procedures (for which passengers are

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how, in some (fortunately relatively rare) circumstances, consumers and even bystanders might be harmed out- right: think of a collision involving a delivery cyclist or ride-sharing car. The vast majority of platforms respond in these circumstances by denying responsibility: as mere intermediaries, they suggest, there is little they can (or should

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. Published 2018 by Oxford University Press. * * * 136 Epilogue our jobs once more. What does this mean for the gig economy? Why should policymakers worry about ride-sharing drivers’ working conditions today, when the real challenge is a complete absence of work just around the cor- ner? If anything, might foisting expensive employment

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slightly muddied by the fact that many on-demand work platforms stipulate that workers are to provide the tools of their trade—think of a ride-sharing driver’s car or a crowdworker’s computer. In reality, however, genuine ownership of the underlying assets is generally not required. A host of third

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is not (and will never be) a monopoly’, Forbes (15 February 2016), http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaredmeyer/2016/02/15/uber- guardian-not-monopoly-ridesharing/#2f4e6c377932, archived at https://perma. cc/3DL6-638C 45. Micha Kaufman, ‘The gig economy: the force that could save the American worker?’, Wired (undated), http

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.pdf, archived at https://perma.cc/9JU3-NXFK 59. Debbie Wosskow, Unlocking the Sharing Economy: An Independent Review (BIS 2014), 5. 60. RStreet, ‘Map of ridesharing laws’, http://www.rstreet.org/tnc-map/, archived at https://perma.cc/4QCU-9SNN 61. Heather Somerville and Dan Levine, ‘Exclusive: US states pass laws

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https://perma.cc/PB5L-NM8Y; see also Douglas MacMillan, ‘Uber laws: a primer on ridesharing regulations’, The Wall Street Journal (29 January 2015), http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/uber-laws-a-primer-on-ride- sharing-regulations/, archived at https://perma.cc/2RUQ-M3QH 62. Ohio 131st General Assembly, Substitute House

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Journal of Communication 3758, 3761, 3762, 3766. * * * 160 Notes 22. Doug H, ‘Fired from Uber: why drivers get deactivated, and how to get reacti- vated’, Ride Sharing Driver (21 April 2016), http://www.ridesharingdriver.com/ fired-uber-drivers-get-deactivated-and-reactivated/, archived at https:// perma.cc/3MQL-4TWD; Kari Paul, ‘The

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-airbnb-peer, archived at https://perma.cc/DZ8S-D8SL 57. Doug H, ‘Fired from Uber: why drivers get deactivated, and how to get reacti- vated’, Ride Sharing Driver (21 April 2016), http://www.ridesharingdriver.com/ fired-uber-drivers-get-deactivated-and-reactivated/, archived at https://perma.cc/ 3MQL-4TWD 58. Amazon MTurk

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/gay-businessman-low-uber-rating-london-2015–2, archived at https://perma.cc/ANN3-DD5F. Other passengers feel that the relative ano- nymity provided by ride-sharing platforms is an improvement on taxis: see Jenna Wortham, ‘Ubering while black’, Medium (23 October 2014), https://medium. com/matter/ubering-while-black-146db581b9db#.2c0efltcr

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), https://newsroom.uber.com/nfb-settlement/, archived at https://perma.cc/YK2V-KPVP 6. Who’s Driving You?, ‘ “Ridesharing” incidents: reported list of incidents involv- ing Uber and Lyft’, http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/rideshare-incidents, archived at https://perma.cc/V4TM-YJMV. When UK tabloid The Sun investi- gated Uber-related complaints

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Uber car crash and what it means for the future of auto’, CityLab (10 September 2013), http://www.citylab.com/commute/ 2013/09/real-future-ride-sharing-may-all-come-down-insurance/6832/, archived at https://perma.cc/6XEJ-EMZC 14. Ryan Calo and Alex Rosenblat, ‘The taking economy: Uber, information, and

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-illinois/dui-rates-decline-in-uber-cities/, archived at https://perma.cc/GN7W-YLNN. Drink driving became one of the key argu- ments used by ride-sharing advocates once Uber and Lyft ceased to operate in Austin, Texas: Lindsay Liepman, ‘DWI arrests spike after Uber/Lyft leave Austin’, CBS: Austin (23 June

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suggest a range of results— even, in one slice, more DWI collisions than before. It’s worth repeating that Uber is referring to correlations between ride-sharing’s availability and colli- sions, not necessarily causation’: W. Gardner-Selby, ‘Uber says drunk-driving crashers down in Austin since advent of

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ride-sharing services’, Politifact (16 December 2015), http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2015/dec/16/ uber/uber-says-drunk-driving-crashes-down-austin-advent/, archived at

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161 Relay Rides 46 Silberman, Six 61, 114, 162, 163, 179 ‘reluctants’ 29 Silver, James 156, 158 reputation algorithms 54 Singer, Natasha 43, 155, 156 ride-sharing/ridesharing 2, 21, 38, 41 Slee, Tom 32, 53, 142, 151, 155, 158, 159 (see also taxi apps) Smith, Adam 73 algorithmic control mechanisms 55–6

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Smith, Jennifer 170 business model 102–3 Smith, Yves 148 discriminatory practices 62, 121 social media 114 maltreatment of passengers 121 social partners 10, 94 ride-sharing laws 47 social security contributions 21, 125–7 Ries, Brian 181 social security provision 3, 48, 131 Ring, Diane 124, 125, 132, 147, 182, 184

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac  · 2 Sep 2019  · 444pp  · 127,259 words

a cab home. They worked for the Portland Bureau of Transportation and had a mandate: Find and stop anyone driving for Uber, the fast-growing ride-hailing startup. After months of trying to work with city officials to make the service legal in the city, Uber had thrown negotiations out the window

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do so. The taxi union would have a conniption. Furthermore, there were existing regulations that prevented some of Uber’s services from operating. And since ride-hailing was such a new phenomenon, much of Portland’s existing rules didn’t address the practice—laws for Uber just hadn’t been written yet

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within the city’s confines. And for more than a year, the hope was that such a forward-thinking city could do the same with ride-sharing. But Portland’s good intentions weren’t delivering on Kalanick’s time frame. Now, the two sides found themselves at an impasse. “Get your fucking

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regulations fail to keep pace with innovation,” an Uber spokeswoman would later tell reporters of the Portland incident. “When Uber launched, no regulations existed for ride-sharing.” The problem wasn’t Uber’s black car service, which functioned well in a number of cities because it adhered to standard livery and limousine

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confused many employees after they joined—are not clear. † “Fear of missing out,” naturally. ‡ Before Uber’s 2015 party, the local taxi unions had kept ride-sharing out of Vegas. Uber launched in Las Vegas just one month prior, but the company was barred from picking up passengers from the airport; that

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entrepreneur off some panicked ledge. Gurley competed for the most important deals. And more often than not, he won. Benchmark had been looking for a ride-hailing or taxi-based business to invest in for some time. Gurley had already been meeting with companies like Cabulous, Taxi Magic, and a handful of

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other San Francisco–based ride-hailing companies. A popular ride-hailing company could quickly produce what technologists call a “network effect”—a shorter way of saying “the more people that use a service, the

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driver and rider “incentives”—freebies to get people to use the service—in order to spur demand and, later, to lure riders away from other ride-hailing competitors. Those employees rarely had to check in with headquarters. Top managers in Uber’s San Francisco office barely knew employees in, say, Chicago or

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was doing and appreciated their intensity and aggression. But Paul realized there was a much larger market opportunity in what he called “peer-to-peer ride-sharing.” That is, instead of focusing on professional limo drivers, Paul wanted to convince normal, everyday people who owned cars to become part-time drivers themselves

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Zimmer announced their pivot. Zimride would abandon its long-distance carpooling program and launch a new service called Lyft; the plan was to make casual ride-sharing a fun, friendly experience, asking passengers to ride shotgun next to their drivers and strike up friendships while joyriding to their destination. The cherry on

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until then he hadn’t been willing to cross the line into extreme ride-sharing. But he was wrong to hesitate. After Kalanick took his first Sidecar, it clicked. There was an enormous potential market in peer-to-peer ride-hailing with everyday drivers. Kalanick needed to build the same thing for Uber. From

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in. In a policy paper published to the company’s website, Uber announced that it had created a low-cost option, “UberX,” that allowed for ride-sharing. Uber was going head-to-head with Lyft. “We could have chosen to use regulation to thwart our competitors,” Kalanick wrote, disingenuously, upon flipping the

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the obliteration of any opponent. There wasn’t enough room for Uber and Lyft to coexist, he believed. The game was zero-sum. Every single ride-hailing car on the road in every single important market should have an Uber driver behind the wheel. Nothing less than a complete monopoly would suffice

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against regulation. Later, as Uber matured, the company’s staff swelled to include nearly four hundred paid lobbyists across forty-four states; the number of ride-hailing lobbyists outnumbered the paid lobbying staffs of Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined. The money was well spent. Uber was able to sway legislation in many

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the Trump administration, had put “Travis Zalanick” [sic] in the subject line, showing the BuzzFeed editor just how much his friend Wolff knew about the ride-hailing chief’s reputation or reasons for hosting the dinner. Wolff would later say he assumed Smith had known the dinner was off the record, an

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of a car’s horn in Chinese. While the name sounded playful, the company and its leadership were anything but. Didi Chuxing was the preeminent ride-hailing startup in China, built on years of analysis of how China’s billion-plus citizens travel the country’s congested streets. Cheng Wei, Didi Chuxing

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only held a handful of jobs in sales prior. His bet on building a taxi-hailing business in 2012 ballooned into a multi-billion-dollar ride-hailing giant in just three years, backed by heavy-hitting venture investments from Tencent and Alibaba, two of China’s biggest and most popular technology companies

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and merged, but not before burning millions of Yuan worth of free rides offered to users. By the time the two companies merged, app-based ride-hailing was woven into the fabric of everyday life. Kalanick wasn’t fazed. He had overcome corrupt politicians and taxi unions in every major city in

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well. All across Asia Kalanick was fighting taxi operators, governments, and well-funded competitors like Ola in India and Grab in Southeast Asia, two cutthroat ride-hailing startups that were willing to play just as dirty as DiDi. Kalanick sent a twenty-four-year-old employee—Akshay BD—to be a front

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reinforced every negative stereotype that people held about Uber. The Indian response was much more severe. Indian officials, sensing public outrage, immediately shut down all ride-hailing services in New Delhi, pending an investigation. General managers in Indian cities like Bangalore shuttered their headquarters and moved into hotels, an attempt to escape

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parents and families into hotels with them; taxi officials were beating up Uber employees in the street. Southeast Asia was another debacle. Grab, the predominant ride-hailing company in the region, was a tenacious competitor. Uber would spend nearly $1 billion fighting Grab. The result was an astonishing loss of nearly 50

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logs, access to Wi-Fi connections. These were permissions that were suspect for any app to request, much less a taxi service. Why would a ride-hailing app need access to their customers’ text messages or camera? It was seen as a broad overreach into users’ privacy. Not only was Uber willing

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, who between them had fifty years of experience at the highest levels of the computing industry. “No one else knows what they’re doing in ride-sharing. We have it figured out.” During the meeting, Cue thought challenging Kalanick a bit might bring out his self-effacing side. “Why do the Google

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. But when Sullivan got the email from Thuan Pham, Uber’s chief technical officer, asking for help, Sullivan was intrigued. He had read about the ride-hailing company—no one could escape the headlines about the embattled unicorn. Uber sounded like a hot mess. Tracking riders, digging up dirt on journalists, slurping

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ride-sharing service that didn’t need drivers, they could charge almost nothing, steal all of Uber’s customers, and destroy its business. Brin was being interviewed on stage by the journalist Kara Swisher, who ran the Code Conference. She asked him point blank if Google had plans to ever create a ride-hailing

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Kalanick. The men, both in their forties, imagined a future filled with self-driving vehicles, with Levandowski’s engineering talent fueled by Kalanick’s enormous ride-hailing network. In Levandowski, Kalanick felt he had found a “brother from another mother,” he’d later say. That first meeting developed into a series of

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. And Jones was a brand guy. It didn’t take long for Kalanick to lure him over to Uber. Jones’s title was “President of Ridesharing,” a portfolio as vague as it was wide. In practice, Jones took over most of the marketing duties of Ryan Graves, SVP of operations. Graves

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outweigh the excitement. Even if they had to white-knuckle it through bad times, there was a pervasive feeling that Uber, the world’s preeminent ride-hailing service, would soon become a global behemoth on the order of Google, Amazon, or Apple. Uber had billions in the bank, was poaching top talent

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, of Silicon Valley—the industry that many believed duped Americans into electing Trump in the first place. To #deleteUber wasn’t just to remove a ride-hailing app from one’s phone. It was also to give a giant middle finger to greed, to “bro culture,” to Big Tech—to everything the

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the brink of failure. At last showing positive signs of growth, Lyft soon attracted investment from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the private equity firm, buoying the ride-hailing company with more than a half-billion dollars in additional capital. Lyft’s fundraising sunk Kalanick’s spirits. He had spent the entire summer trying

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car leases. Thousands of new drivers came onto the platform, and the managers in charge were given hefty rewards for the idea. It was the ride-hailing equivalent of a subprime mortgage. And just like 2008, the negative consequences came soon after. Uber noticed that the rate of safety incidents spiked after

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shake everyone in the top ranks of the company awake. Uber didn’t have an image problem. Uber had a Travis problem. As president of ridesharing and the only person on the executive leadership team with a history of marketing experience, Jones took it upon himself to study the root of

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in Philadelphia. The legal department, led by Uber’s general counsel Salle Yoo, said it was a gray area; there were no specific laws about ride-hailing services, so technically, Uber would argue, it wasn’t illegal to drive for one. The term “gray area” was music to Travis Kalanick’s ears

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the past six months, Jones decided to pull the ripcord. On March 19, 2017, Recode ran a story saying Jeff Jones, Uber’s president of ridesharing, had resigned from Uber, with sources claiming his departure was directly due to the string of controversies that plagued the company. Kalanick tried to fight

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that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business. There are thousands of amazing people at the company, and I truly wish everyone well. In the world of carefully worded corporate communiques, this

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not have taken place at all and was in fact part of a plot against Uber perpetrated by executives at Ola, Uber’s major Indian ride-hailing competitor. According to a review conducted on the driver’s and victim’s accounts, the driver held multiple Uber accounts and the victim’s account

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his twelve-year run as the CEO of Expedia, he grew annual revenue from $2 billion to $10 billion. He understood the intricacies of the ride-hailing market, the complicated economics of balancing riders’ desire for cheap fares with drivers’ need to earn enough to keep them on the road. While Khosrowshahi

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profitability. For years, Kalanick had no checks on his decisions. He had burned through billions of dollars, for example, in money-losing wars with other ride-hailing companies across multiple continents. Khosrowshahi, a CFO for years under Barry Diller at InterActiveCorp, was a number-cruncher, an executive who met budgets. As he

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balance sheet, awash in red ink, he began to cut losses. That meant selling off Uber’s business in Southeast Asia to Grab, the local ride-hailing competitor, for a 27.5 percent ownership stake in the Singaporean company. Where Uber was notorious for poaching employees from competitors in earlier years, Khosrowshahi

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-by-a-mile-an-alternative-look-at-ubers-potential-market-size/. 87 In a policy paper published: Travis Kalanick, “Principled Innovation: Addressing the Regulatory Ambiguity Ridesharing Apps,” April 12, 2013, http://www.benedelman.org/uber/uber-policy-whitepaper.pdf. 87 “nervous breakdowns”: Swisher, “Bonnie Kalanick.” 88 Kalanick would tweet: Travis Kalanick

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, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/27/technology/uber-ceo-search.html. 326 Son reached a deal: Mike Isaac, “Uber Sells Stake to SoftBank, Valuing Ride-Hailing Giant at $48 Billion,” New York Times, December 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/technology/uber-softbank-stake.html. 327 It was

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, 100, 107, 130, 160, 183. See also Silicon Valley as epicenter of venture deals, 75 popularity of Uber in, 78, 83 regulators in, 86–87 ride-hailing companies based in, 78 rollout of UberCab in, 59–60, 63 success in, 147 transportation in, 41, 44, 48–49, 59–60, 63, 108–9

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back

by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy  · 15 Mar 2020  · 296pp  · 83,254 words

decade, New York City, San Francisco, the state of California, and government entities around the world began passing laws to rein in companies, especially in ride-hailing and lodging. And as they did, they fed controversies that have accompanied the sector since its earliest days. Debating the Sharing Economy There are already

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,” and he wanted to earn more, so he decided that he’d try doing Uber full-time. Now he “has a different view on the ride-sharing business,” citing “excessive” wear and tear and maintenance on his vehicle (he had to buy a new one), decreases in pay, (lower-paid) Uber

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lower income neighborhoods of color were underrepresented as earners.20 (The median income of Chicago taskers was twice the poverty line.) A field experiment on ride-hailing apps found that black users experienced longer wait times and twice as many cancellations and that women’s rides were longer (and more expensive) than

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and a whopping 9.6 percent in cities with high-population density. Another national study, by transportation expert Bruce Schaller, found that the introduction of ride-hailing apps resulted in a doubling of the “for-hire” driving segment and an estimated 5.7 billion additional miles driven.31 Schaller calculated that for

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six metropolitan regions), their impact can be as high as 8 percent (Boston) or 13 percent (San Francisco).33 These findings contrast with early claims. Ride-hailing was supposed to reduce car ownership; instead, workers are buying cars in order to drive. The software was supposed to reduce “dead-heading” (drivers riding

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around looking for passengers), and while that happened at first, the increased demand for rides has far outweighed that efficiency. Overall, the biggest impact of ride-hailing has been that more people are taking more trips in private cars and putting more carbon and other pollution into the atmosphere. One survey finds

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-competitive with public transport and offers superior convenience. It may be affordable for consumers but not for the climate.39 There’s another aspect of ride-hailing that isn’t environmental but that the increased number of vehicles on the streets is responsible for: traffic accidents and, even more problematically, fatalities.

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the majority conducted in public locations such as cafes and parks. We asked open-ended questions about their experiences, including how they got involved with ride-hailing, their best and worst rides, how they decided which rides to accept, how they manage their profiles and listings, and what kinds of experiences

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). Its most notable finding is the disproportionate representation of the young and highly educated. Eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds are overrepresented as consumers of ride-hailing, clothing rental, and coworking spaces; buyers of secondhand and handmade goods; and consumers of gig labor for household tasks. The twenty-nine to forty-

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differences across categories. While half the population had purchased secondhand goods online, take-up for other sharing services was much lower: 15 percent had used ride-hailing services, 11 percent lodging platforms, 4 percent coworking and task labor, and 2 percent had rented clothing from platforms. These numbers have increased in recent

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of Homesharing: Phase 1 Report.” San Francisco: Cleantech Group. Clewlow, Regina R., and Gouri Shankar Mishra. 2017. “Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization, and Impacts of Ride-Hailing in the United States.” UCD-ITS-RR-17–07. Davis, CA: UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. https://itspubs.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/themes/ucdavis

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Autonomy and Control: Strategies of Arbitrage in the ‘On-Demand’ Economy.” New Media & Society 20 (8): 2954–71. Sheldon, Michael. 2016. “Income Targeting and the Ridesharing Market.” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56500157e4b0cb706005352d/t/56da1114e707ebbe8e963ffc/1457131797556/IncomeTargetingFeb16.pdf. Shestakofsky, Benjamin. 2017. “Working Algorithms: Software Automation and the Future of Work.” Work

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154–55; European, 152–54; lodging, 160; monopolies, 151, 158; platform opposition to, 156, 161–62; and proprietary data, 159–60; regulatory arbitrage, 155–56; ride-hailing, 152–53, 161; U.S. debate on, 154–58 Reich, Michael, 193 RelayRides, 26 Remix, 191 rental housing, 105–7, 160 rental services, 193 RenttheRunway

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, 181–84; interviews, 177; nonprofit cases, 178–80; recruitment, 177 residential segregation, 92–95 retreat from control, 43, 76–81 Rich, 59 Richardson, Lizzie, 193 ride-hailing, 26, 31, 34–37. See also Lyft; Uber; access to, 46; algorithmic management, 66, 68, 159; business model, 151; deactivation, 63, 92; dependent earners,

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson  · 26 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 117,093 words

. (It also helps that the platform is not directly competing with taxis; the average BlaBlaCar trip is 200 miles.). By September 2016, the company’s ride-sharing platform was operating in twenty-one countries, and facilitating over 10 million rides every quarter. Indonesia’s most popular O2O transportation platform is very different

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of the time. Rent the Runway and Uber, respectively, enable more productive use of them. The average passenger car sits idle 95% of the time. Ride sharing can reduce that to 50%. That means we can get the same amount of capital services with one-tenth as much capital. It’s therefore

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one app for riders, which lets them hail drivers, and a separate app for drivers, which lets them find riders. People who sign up for ride hailing via Uber don’t directly benefit if other people adopt the same app, the way they do when their friends adopt WhatsApp. Instead, what ride

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the rider-finding app increases the likelihood that an available car will be nearby, and therefore makes the service more attractive to people using the ride-hailing app; it shifts out the app’s demand curve. Without such a shift, there really wouldn’t be much demand at all: a

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ride-hailing app that somehow managed to get millions of users but was connected to zero actual drivers would not be very attractive to these ride hailers.

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Similarly, drivers don’t benefit when other drivers sign up for the rider-finding app, but they do benefit from more users of the ride-hailing app. The two-sided network we see for Uber riders and drivers is far from unique: credit card users and merchants also constitute a two

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long, low, and large. Second, because Uber is a two-sided network, the increase in demand doesn’t just affect the consumers who use its ride-hailing app; it also increases demand for drivers who use rider-finding apps. In fact, as the number and thus density of riders increases, each driver

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1970, so it’s not as common to hear the term “lemon” used in this way as it was back then. § The French long-distance ride-sharing company BlaBlaCar incorporates particularly precise ratings. Its name comes from the ability of drivers and passengers to communicate their talking preferences in their profiles: “Bla

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with the other people in the car, “BlaBla” if they like to talk a little, and “BlaBlaBla” if they’re quite chatty. Rawn Shah, “Driving Ridesharing Success at BlaBlaCar with Online Community,” Forbes, February 21, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2016/02/21/driving

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-ridesharing-success-at-blablacar-with-online-community/#73ea3e4679a6. ¶ Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky found in an experiment that Airbnb hosts were, on average, 16%

…

://www.ft.com/content/4260cd4e-7c75-11e4-9a86-00144feabdc0?siteedition=uk#axzz3QsbvnchO. 190 “BlaBlaCar drivers don’t make a profit”: Laura Wagner, “What Does French Ride-Sharing Company BlaBlaCar Have That Uber Doesn’t,” Two-Way, September 16, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/16/440919462/what-has

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-french-ride-sharing-company-blablacar-got-that-uber-doesnt. 190 the average BlaBlaCar trip is 200 miles: “BlaBlaCar: Something to Chat About,” Economist, October 22, 2015, http://www

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operating in twenty-one countries: BlaBlaCar, accessed February 5, 2017, https://www.blablacar.com. 191 facilitating over 10 million rides every quarter: Rawn Shah, “Driving Ridesharing Success at BlaBlaCar with Online Community,” Forbes, February 21, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2016/02/21/driving

…

-ridesharing-success-at-blablacar-with-online-community/#5271e05b79a6. 191 $550 million in investor funding: Yoolim Lee, “Go-Jek Raises Over $550 Million in KKR, Warburg-Led

…

://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/business/dealbook/why-uber-keeps-raising-billions.html. 201 Traditional taxis provided 8.4 million trips: UCLA Labor Center, “Ridesharing or Ridestealing? Changes in Taxi Ridership and Revenue in Los Angeles 2009–2014,” Policy Brief, July 2015, table 1, p. 3, http://www.irle.ucla

…

/lyft-is-gaining-on-uber-as-it-spends-big-for-growth. 208 In 2013, California passed regulations: Tomio Geron, “California Becomes First State to Regulate Ridesharing Services Lyft, Sidecar, UberX,” Forbes, September 19, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/19/california-becomes-first-state-to-regulate

…

-ridesharing-services-lyft-sidecar-uberx/#6b22c10967fe. 208 by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them: BlaBlaCar, “Frequently Asked Questions: Is It Safe for Me to

…

revenue opportunities, as benefit of open platforms, 164 revenue sharing, Spotify, 147 reviews, online, 208–10 Ricardo, David, 279 ride services, See BlaBlaCar; Lyft; Uber ride-sharing, 196–97, 201 Rio Tinto, 100 Robohand, 274 robotics, 87–108 conditions for rapid expansion of, 94–98 DANCE elements, 95–98 for dull, dirty

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy

by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle  · 12 Mar 2019  · 349pp  · 98,309 words

her home out. TaskRabbit assistants and Kitchensurfing chefs aren’t “sharing” their services but being paid. Likewise, even though Uber and Lyft describe themselves as “ride-sharing,” charging for private vehicle transportation is simply a taxi or chauffer service by any other name. While Lyft (slogan: “Your friend with a car”) originally

…

criminal activity is going on, workers may be in a dangerous situation where it is safer to acquiesce than protest. This is especially evident with ride-sharing services such Lyft and Uber. New York is one of the few locations to embrace sharing economy drivers as its own: drivers are fully licensed

…

taxi drivers keep their partitions open, allowing for easy payment and communication with the passenger, they at least have the option of closing the partition. Ride-sharing drivers don’t.8 The partition was originally intended to reduce or prevent robberies and can be considered a success: No taxicab driver has been

…

Hispanic man, reached out to me in response to a request for research participants that I posted on Uberdrivers.net, an online discussion board for ride-sharing drivers. A college graduate, he was working as an assistant manager for a furniture rental center, working forty-seven hours a week and making $460

…

been able to save. From the beginning, Hector knew that driving could be dangerous or have legal implications. In New Jersey, where he started driving, ride-sharing was illegal. His first ride was a group of five, technically more than his car could fit, but “they made it work somehow.” He dropped

…

for him to determine which passenger owned the account. Without a camera, there was no record of who was in the car. Hector believes that ride-sharing services may be especially appealing to drug dealers because the prevalence of Uber and Lyft cars in the outer boroughs of New York City may

…

economy. While 50 percent of adults have purchased used goods online, there’s a sharp drop in the percentage of respondents who have tried a ride-hailing app (15 percent), utilized an online home-sharing service (11 percent), or hired someone online for a task/errand (4 percent). The Pew study also

…

; CrowdFlower lawsuit, 226n35; illegal listings, 40; landlord-tenant disputes, 230n17; lawsuits by workers, 38; lawsuits over being underpaid, 38; New York City Housing Court, 230n17; ride-sharing in NJ, 145; short-term rentals, 20, 39–40; workers’ compensation, 92. See also criminal activity legislative issues, 51–53, 52fig. 8 Lepore, Jill, 208

…

reviews, negative, 4 review systems: customer review sites, 26; employee monitoring and, 204–5; negative reviews, 4, 13, 91, 143; transfer between sites, 20 Rideshare Guy website, 76 ride-sharing, 223n75, 233n72 risks: overview, 22; mitigation of, 170; as transaction costs, 27 risk shifts: overview, 31, 36–38; advanced planning and, 97–100

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