Uber CEO Travis Kalanick used the TED stage on Tuesday to attack transport regulators for standing in the way of uberPOOL's mission to cut "congestion, pollution and parking" and reclaim city streets. "In the US we spend 7 billion hours a year wasted sitting in traffic," Kalanick said. "There's $160 billion wasted in lost productivity; one fifth of our carbon footprint is spewed out of the cars we're sitting in; and 96 per cent of the time your car is sitting idle. Up to 30 per cent of our land and our space is used storing these hunks of steel. We can turn every car into a shared car and we can reclaim our cities starting today."
He said uberPOOL could help solve these problems - if regulators didn't stand in the way. Since uberPOOL was rolled out in Los Angeles last year, he said, "We've taken 7.9m [vehicle] miles off the road, and 1.4k metric tonnes of CO2 out of the air. Eight months alter, we've added 100,000 new people that are carpooling every week." The company wants to go much further: "When I talk to my team, we don't talk about 100,000 people carpooling a week - we say, how do we get that to a million?" In China, he said, there are now 15m uberPOOL trips per month - around 500,000 a day.
But regulators are standing in the way, he said - just as they had done a century ago, when a US startup called Jitney Bus offered carpooling as a challenge to the incumbent trolley-bus industry. "There was an Uber way before Uber, and if it had survived, the future of transportation would already be here," he said. "Let me introduce you to the Jitney Bus. A car salesman form LA, LP Draper, created it in 1914 when he saw trolleys with long lines of people queueing." By 1915, there were 50,000 Jitney rides a day in Seattle, 45,000 in Kansas, and 150,000 in Los Angeles. "To give you some perspective, Uber in LA is doing 157,000 rids a day today," Kalanick said.
But, he added, the bus-industry incumbents used regulation to fight back. "They were clearly not happy about the Jitney juggernaut. They got regulations put in place to slow down the growth of the Jitney. For some cities you were required to be in the Jitney for 16 hours a day. In others they required two Jitney drivers for one Jitney, They had to put a back-seat light in every Jitney to stop a new pernicious innovation that they called spooning. By 1919, the Jitney was regulated completely out of existence."
Uber, he said, wanted to confront the public cost of private car ownership. By 2007, there was a car for every man woman and child in the US. In China by 2011, there were more car sales than in the US. "In New York City, there are till 2.5m cars that go over those bridges every day, because .mass transit hasn't yet figured out how to get to everybody's doorstep."
So Uber is rolling out uberCOMMUTE to encourage commuters from the suburbs to share rides - if regulators will allow it. "You become an Uber driver - we'll match you up with one of your neighbours," Kalanick said. "It's a really great thing, but there's just one hitch - it's called regulation. 54 cents a mile is what the US government has determined that the cost of owning a car is per mile. If you charge 60 cents a mile you're a criminal. But what if for 60 cents a mile we could get half a million more people carpooling in Los Angeles? It goes back to the lesson of the Jitney. Imagine without the regulation that happened, how would our cities be different today? Would we have parks in place of parking lots? We lost that opportunity."
Kalanick also said that Uber's self-driving cars were "likely to take a lot longer than I think" to hit the roads. "There will be a long transition. These cars will work in certain places, not others. A million people die a year in cars. It's a challenge, but one for optimistic leadership . Instead of resisting technology, like the taxi industry or trolley industry, we have to embrace it. It's going to be a better world."
Uber has grown from 400 staff two and a half years ago, to 6,500 today.
Asked about how price cuts were hitting drivers' income, Kalanick said the opposite was in fact happening. "UberX when we started was 10-15 per cent cheaper than our black-car product. In many cities now it's half the price of a taxi. We have data to show drivers making more money than taxi drivers, with more trips per hour, more time where they're productive, and earnings going up. In places where we bring the prices down and don't see earnings go up, we address those prices."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
