Another one for your acronym file: TNC – transportation network company, like Uber.
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From Next City via Durning:
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Is Uber Really Alt Transportation?
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Susan Shaheen, a professor and co-director at University of California, Berkley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, sees TNCs as part of an evolving network of transportation options for city-dwellers.
“To me they fit into this broader terminology of shared-use mobility, which includes car-sharing, bike-sharing, casual carpooling, ride-sourcing services, flexible transit services, even employer shuttles. Shared-use mobility can be used to connect to transit or can sometimes be used as a form of public transit itself.”
Given how quickly the services are evolving, not to mention the lingering regulatory issues and unresolved questions about their labor models, it’s perhaps too early to say exactly what role TNCs will ultimately play in cities.
But for Goldberg, anything that removes single occupancy vehicles from city streets is just common sense.
“City streets are general constrained. As more people get around on foot and bicycle, more space needs to be given to their safety. We also need to preserve space for freight. Something has to give. The most rational thing to give up is people traveling one to a car.”
I think UBER is a great idea. However in a city where taxi licences are controlled by a few and go for almost a million dollars each, there are great political pressures to keep a game changer like UBER out of the market. It is such a shame-I was speaking to a 92 year old who waited two hours for a taxi at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre last week. He kept calling the company and no one came, despite the fact he is a long standing customer, who needed to go eight blocks. Obviously this short ride was not of interest to the taxi company’
This 92 year old ended up walking home slowly on his canes. We need UBER .
We need better control over private domination of public space.
Taxi licensing and supply constraints is a crude form of congestion pricing. We made it impossible to destroy the public space with a flood of taxi service vehicles, but we destroyed the public space anyway with a flood of private vehicles.
Uber’s only true, intrinsic advantage is that so far, they are have evaded these supply constraints, but no one has explained why we won’t end up in the same place – an ostensibly public space (the street) made useless in a modern tragedy of the commons. Maybe instead of private vehicles or taxis, the streets will be clogged with Uber vehicles. Same difference.
Get some form of road pricing right and private vehicles, taxis, transit and new technology companies can all compete on a level playing field.
Get it wrong (or don’t bother with any) and the public gets taken to the cleaners.
It is indeed amazing that our green czar, aka Mayor, does not embrace the idea of more than one person sharing a vehicle, as empty car seats are indeed wasted resources. Uber could play an important role in decongestion and even as part of a public transit system on less frequently traveled routes, in lieu of empty buses. But I guess pandering to unions and powerful donations trumps common sense.
Meanwhile in Edmonton a judge has struck down the city’s injunction allowing Uber to continue operating. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/uber-beats-city-s-injunction-effort-1.3020100
Why not in Vancouver ?
Even the major of Toronto stated that it makes more sense to work with such new technology firms than ban them. “Uber is here to stay” he stated (correctly): http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/uber-is-here-to-stay-toronto-mayor-elect-john-tory-says-1.2840295
For crying out loud. Uber is not carshare. Uber is a boutique taxi service.
Modo is carshare. Ride share listings on Craigslist are carshare. Car2go isn’t quite carshare but it’s a hell of a lot closer than Uber. It’s somewhere between naive and deliberately obtuse to say the Mayor doesn’t support the idea of more than one person sharing a car in a city that supports Modo, zipcar, car2go and now Evo. The carsharing industry in Vancouver is booming.
I’m also not terribly clear on how you improve congestion getting to work in an Uber instead of a personal vehicle. Do Uber cars warp space and time in the same way that they warp the common sense of market zealots?
1)Uber provides a better value taxi service, which makes going car free more practical.
2)Uber also provides many other services like uber shuttle which is similar to a car share. If the regulations are good we can reduce the amount of cars on the road.
So… carpooling?
Listen, I get that the Uber app is great and identified a major failure of the taxi industry. The taxi industry is dumb as nails for not keeping up with the times and desperately needs reform. If Uber comes to Vancouver I’d probably use it, but let’s please not treat “taxis but with a better user interface” as some kind of revolution in personal transportation.
By ubershuttle they normally use vans so I guess like car pooling, still much better than SOV. Basically it gives you more options and incentives to not own a car.
1)50% of the blame for Vancouver’s lack of Uber goes to the province.
2)Opposition parties have also not helped by saying uber is not safe etc. They also seem to not resist the political donations of the taxi cartel.