Joining forces with the tech disrupters can be risky as governments doing deals with Uber over public transit are learning
At last year’s Dreamforce, Uber founder Travis Kalanick sat down with Marc Benioff to discuss the ride sharing service’s history and its aspirations to reinvent public transit.
Those aspirations are coming to fruition reports The Verge as local governments across the US sign agreements with Uber to supplement their public transport networks.
In entering those arrangements local officials are finding a number of problems, not least the service’s obsession with secrecy that falls foul of US public data practices and legislation.
That clash between the Silicon Valley obsession with hoarding intellectual property and US open government beliefs is one that will become more common as agencies attempt to ‘Uber-ize’ their services.
However the Uber model isn’t working well in some markets as the fate of Washio shows.
Washio’s success, like Uber and most of the tech startups following the Silicon Valley greater fool model, required capturing enough of the market to have a dominant position in the marketplace making it hard for new competitors to enter while driving out existing players who can’t afford to make losses indefinitely. This is path followed by Amazon, Microsoft and even IBM.
The sad thing is Washio’s unprofitable and unsustainable business model let them kill other companies whose owners, managers or investors were unable or unwilling to compete with a loss making enterprise.
For small businesses in particular the effects of a well funded megalith intent on driving them out of business is particularly cruel – as we saw with booksellers and Amazon.
Local governments need to be particularly aware of the risk of making Uber the only provider of neighbourhood public transport, leaving them the sole player that owns all their data could well prove particularly costly, one only wonders what could happen had a local hospital done a laundry deal with Washio.
Does Uber hold the key to solving cities’ public transport woes?
“We’re building the cities of the future” claims David Plouffe, Uber’s Senior Vice President for Policy & Strategy.
Plouffe was speaking in Uber’s head office ahead of this year’s Dreamforce conference where the transportation disrupter was announcing the next phases of its Uber Business service.
While western societies still remain car dependent, there’s a shift underway as people prefer to live in the cities rather than the suburbs and the far flung exurbs, particularly for younger people. “For my generation it was a big deal to get a car,” says the 48 year old Plouffe. “Millennials today don’t have that same identification – they don’t want to own a car.”
That shift, which is not just confined to millennials, presents challenges for cities believes Plouffe. “Cities need to support people who are moving in at historic rates,” he says. “Our cities are facing huge challenges.”
“Every city is facing congestion challenges which will only get worse over the next ten to fifteen years as the number of people moving into the world cities at a historic pace.”
“Most cities do not have the will or the money to build new public transportation systems,” Plouffe says. “The only way they are going to deal with this is for people to buy less cars, families to only have one car and to reduce the number of cars on the road.”
Not surprisingly, Plouffe sees this as being where Uber can help in expanding accessible and affordable transport to parts of cities which are unlikely to get public transit and to increase the carrying capacity of existing infrastructure.
This is an interesting point of view and one that has some validity if we accept the view that ‘on-demand’ services like Uber and others are actually aimed at all groups and not just the affluent upper middle classes and the rich.
For cities struggling to meet the demands of growing populations and shrinking budgets, services like Uber and Lyft may be part of the answer. That though will take some reform and a change of attitude from many regulators.
Getting out to the Golden Gate Bridge can be a little awkward for tourists but it’s a great way to see the city.
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is one of the must sees for a visitor. However the iconic attraction isn’t close to the centre or to the main public transport routes which, while time consuming is an opportunity to see more of the city.
Probably the simplest way for a visitor to get there is to take a tour bus, of which San Francisco has plenty. There’s also the options of a scenic hour’s walk from Fisherman’s Wharf or cycling on a hire bike, but it’s always been this site’s contention is the best way to get to know a place is to catch the local public transport.
In San Francisco, the public Muni network operates the bus, light rail and cablecar system with the Muni Passport offering unlimited rides at $17 for day or $35 for a week, which is a deal given the cable car services alone are $7 a trip.
The Muni Passport can be bought at most drugstores and at the various Muni ticket stalls dotted around San Francisco, most notably at the Ferry Building and at the Powell Street cable car terminus. While some outlets will sell you a Clipper Card with the passport pre-loaded, most outlets give you a paper copy that requires you to scratch the dates on it.
Getting the bus
San Francisco’s Muni bus network is comprehensive although there isn’t a direct bus to the Golden Gate Bridge except the weekend the hourly 76x bus to the tollgates that continues onto the Marin Headlands and Fort Cronkhite, a worthwhile trip in itself.
Another direct service is Golden Gate Transit’s number 10 and 70 services which don’t accept the Muni Passport but are faster and more direct than the Muni buses as they service the commuter town to the north of the city.
28 Muni bus at Golden Gate Bridge
For most times though the 28 – 19th Avenue service is the most frequent and cheapest service to the Golden Gate however it goes nowhere near the tourist precincts giving a visitor an opportunity to explore the city and get a taste of the ordinary person’s San Francisco.
Connecting to the 28
The quickest connection from downtown San Francisco is the 38 or 38R Geary services from Union Square, these frequent services head directly West from the city and drop you off at the corner of Geary and 19th Avenue which the 28 runs along.
If you’re feeling more active during peak commute times the 38R continues to Lands End, the walk from there to the Golden Gate Bridge takes around two hours along the route of one of the original steam car routes and gives great vistas of the Marin Headlands and the Bridge. The Cliff House and Sutro pool ruins at Lands End itself are worth exploring as well.
38R Muni Bus at Union Square
There are other buses that can connect with the 28 at 19th Avenue including the 1 California however they are a lot slower and less frequent than the 38 Geary.
Another way, which may be faster than the buses during peak times in to catch the N – Judah/Ocean Beach service which drops you at 19th Street a little further south of the 38’s stop. On the outward route the stops are a block apart while coming back from the Golden Gate, the stops are adjacent.
From Fisherman’s wharf and the cable cars
The cable cars aren’t particularly convenient to the 28 terminus in the Marina district and the best way to make the connection is the 30 bus that goes along North Point with a change at the corner of Chestnut and Laguna Streets.
All the above options are available in the reverse direction and again the Golden Gate Transit service is the fastest option back to the city although it doesn’t accept Muni passes. You can catch GGT buses from the toll plaza level of the bridge.
If you’ve walked the bridge and aren’t inclined to do the return trip, some GGT services stop on the Northern approaches and the 76X stops on the xx road just above the bridge’s approaches, otherwise you can walk another 45 minutes to Sausalito and catch a ferry – again Muni Passes aren’t accepted – to either the Ferry Building or Pier 43 near Fisherman’s Wharf.
Whichever way you go, the trip out to the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the must do things of a San Francisco visit and using the public buses is a great way to get a feel for the city.
The mapping of Nairobi’s Matatu minibus network and AirBnB’s Cuban ambitions show how apps could change the developing world
It’s not unfair to call many of the apps disrupting today’s industries as being the result of ‘first world problems’.
Uber was born out of founders Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick difficulty in hailing Parisian cabs while AirBnB came from Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky’s struggles with San Francisco rents.
Now as smartphones and mobile internet starts to become available to those in less wealthy parts of the world, we’re seeing how these concepts can be applied to problems more widespread.
With some modifications, the data can be fed into Google’s transit map format that allows the routes to found on Google Maps.
The next logical step for this is for entrepreneurs, possibly even Uber, to entice matatu operators to use Uber like apps to track the location of minibuses and give passengers better payment options. It’s quite possible we’re seeing the start of an evolution into a new type of transit network using independent, privately owned vehicles bound together by an app based platform offering city wide public transport.
In which case, today’s developing nations will see very different structures in their industries to those in the developed west that were built around 19th and 20th century technologies.
Image “A matatu” by Jociku – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons –
CES, Connected cars, fast trains and copyright laws are today’s links
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicks off today with thousands of product announcements at what is by far the biggest technology convention in the world. No doubt news from the show is going to dominate the tech media for the rest of the week.
One of the biggest fields for tech vendors at CES will be Internet of Things with connected cars being in the spotlight with both BMW and General Motors leading the way.
GM unveil their connected car of the future
For some years GM have offered a connected car service with their OneStar system. At this year’s CES they’re showing how they intend to extend the service with more integrated social and navigation services.
Driving the crashless car
While we fixate on the driverless car of the future, the next few years are going to see the technologies be incrementally introduced into our motor vehicles. A good example of this is BMW’s Active Assist that CNET writer Wayne Cunningham claims he could not crash.
The story points out Active Assist isn’t affordable in today’s cars but undoubtedly much of this technology will be standard in many automobiles by the end of the decade.
This troubled project has been years in the making and it’s not expected to be completed until the end of the next decade at a cost of over 60 billion dollars. An interesting aspect in the story is how communities in California’s Central Valley region are pinning their hopes of an economic resurgence from the project.
