Paying customers could start taking their first shared rides in Auckland this month, as part of the company’s global strategy to reduce cars on the road. Not what you'd expect for a company dedicated to giving as many rides as possible to people and their meals.
Lewis Mills starts his presentation with a video of boxes. People “driving” cardboard boxes in the streets of some unnamed city.
Mills leads Uber's “public policy and engagement with regulators” team in New Zealand. He is a former Crown prosecutor and before joining Uber in 2018 was senior counsel to the Mayor of Auckland.
Like policemen, he looks about 22.
The video progresses. More boxes come, they get out of control, crashing into each other; filling the roads and eventually the buildings. It’s chaos. People get angry. Someone jumps out of a building.
The video ends with words on the screen: “Let’s create better cities. Let’s ride together. Uber unlocking cities.”
It’s cool, but of course it’s ironic. Mills knows, as does his audience, that the company and its hugely successful app does much to exacerbate the congestion problem. When taking an Uber is friggin' cheap and easy, why wait for the bus? When Uber Eats will deliver hot food from virtually any restaurant in the hood, why walk up the road to get your takeaways?
Box chaos.
So Mills’ presentation to the audience at JLL’s Future Cities event in Auckland late last week, is interesting. Uber has some grunty goals for electric vehicles, including spending $1.1 billion globally helping drivers switch with the aim of its worldwide fleet being electric by 2040.
Which is laudable in terms of climate change. Especially if, as an Uber spokesperson tells me, Uber makes up almost 1 percent of global vehicle miles travelled.
But greening Uber won’t help congestion; it doesn’t take cars off the road.
For that, there are (for example) Jump scooters and e-bikes. In India there are even Uber auto-rickshaw services and something called a “quadricycle’ – an inaccurately-named kind of low speed, low emissions mini-car.
Now there’s Uber Commute, about to be launched in Auckland. The city is one of only two places in the world (the other is Bangalore) where Uber is trialling the ride-sharing-to-and-from-work product.
Basically if you are in Auckland, your Uber app will likely now have a “Commute” button. Potential drivers can sign up if they have a four-door car less than 15 years old and a full licence. Oh, and they can’t be an existing Uber driver.
Once there are enough people signed up, Uber will try to match drivers offering rides with fellow commuters heading in the same direction at the same time. For a start it’ll be one driver, one commuter, but that might change in the future, Uber says.
Drivers get reimbursed $0.71 per kilometre.
“You could be reimbursed up to $227 over four weeks if you were to give a fellow commuter a lift both to and from work, on a 10km journey, four days a week,” Uber says.
Passenger fares will vary, but Uber says a 5 kilometre journey could cost a little over $5.50, a saving of approximately 60 percent when compared to the equivalent UberX trip. “Hint: being flexible on your time preferences will increase the chance you’ll get matches,” Uber says.
“We were originally going to launch last year as part of our strategy to try and reduce people’s reliance on private vehicles,” says Uber's Carissa Simons. Covid made ride-sharing a less attractive proposition, but New Zealand’s success with Covid recovery made Auckland a good choice for a pilot, she says. “If it proves successful in Auckland we’ll look to expand to other cities.”
New Zealand might also get Uber Pool at some stage, a carpooling product that was available in the US and Europe before Covid put it on pause. Passengers get to share their Uber ride with people going in the same direction, with the even cheaper option of walking to get to your shared ride, and from the drop-off point to your destination.
Or we might not get Uber Pool. “It works best with very dense cities,” Mills says.
Of course, Uber’s different products – bikes, scooters, carpooling – give it a slice of a variety of pies.
But its latest one, Uber Transit, takes the ‘freeing up our roads’ idea one step further. A new trial in Sydney and Chicago gives Uber app users not just the price for an Uber ride from A to B, but a number of options including Uber, public transport – or a mixture of the two. In the future, e-bikes and/or scooters (or auto-rickshaws) could come into the mix.
Say you are on Bondi Beach and you want to go the Sydney CBD, Simon says. Bondi Beach is a public transport desert, but up the hill is great train station. So you could compare different permutations and what they look like [time and price-wise].
It might show you can get an Uber to the train station and then an inner city line train from platform three into the city.
In July last year, Uber bought public transport software solutions company Routematch and the Uber Transit trials have come out of that purchase.
“You might open the Uber app, put in your destination and see you are near a bus line, with a bus on its way. There are potentially thousands of permutations of how a particular trip might work and Uber Transit is about surfacing the information someone needs at the right time, and encouraging people to make the right choices,” Simons says.
The mark one version of Uber Transit is already available in Auckland. With some prompting, I found a public transport information option on my Uber app, though I had to scroll down a way to find it. I put in a destination and it told me which buses were available, when they would leave and what they would cost.
Auckland Transport’s app would have done a similar thing.
What Transit adds is the option of blending Uber and bus, and paying for the whole trip through the Uber app.
“For many trips it can be faster or cheaper to take public transport than any other form of travel. But when we’re in a hurry, we don’t always take the time to compare trip options,” Uber Australia and New Zealand general manager Dom Taylor said last December when he announced Aucklanders were getting the public transport information option.
“Integrating public transport into their Uber app is an important step towards making it possible for people to replace their private car with their mobile phone.
“Public transport is also crucial to Uber’s near and long-term global sustainability goals, and as electric vehicle take up grows and becomes part of our platform, we believe there will be great network effects taking shape by which zero-emissions vehicles can help riders get to/from public transport modalities – creating a truly zero-emissions trip.”
Lewis Mills ended his presentation at the Future Cities event with another video.
No more cardboard boxes. This one is called “Uberair: closer than you think”.
It features a woman at the end of the working day signing into her Uber app, pressing the “Uber Skyport” button in the lift in an ordinary looking multi-storey office building, and taking a shared helicopter-taxi ride home.
As she takes her six-minute flight towards home she looks down at the gridlocked streets below.
The Jetsons: closer than you think.
