The emergence of app-based ride-sharing platforms like Uber and Lyft transformed the way people in cities get around — and not always for the better. It nearly decimated the taxi industry while offering riders a more seamless way to travel. But it also choked many cities with car traffic and disrupted labor with the popularization of gig work. The Verge covers all the news and analysis related to ride-sharing as well as what the future holds for this mode of transportation.
Tony West, who also served in the Department of Justice during the Obama administration, just spoke at the DNC. Of course, he wasn’t there to talk tech, but rather, to speak to Harris’ character.
Announced in May, Uber Caregiver will help caregivers more easily arrange transportation and deliveries starting this summer. What I think is really useful, though, is that Uber’s partnering with health insurers so you could use healthcare benefits to pay for rides to medical appointments and more.
The waitlist is free to join, so why not?
[businesses.uber.com]
If you use Uber with an iPhone, you can turn off unwanted marketing notifications — but the feature is a leetle hard to find. Okay, it’s a lot hard to find. John Gruber found it, though: go to Account > Settings > Privacy > Offers and Promos from Uber and tap the word here. You can then unsubscribe from some or all Uber marketing emails or notifications.
Uber’s Lost & Found Index just came out, with a look at the most commonly forgotten items (clothes, luggage, not shocking), the most forgetful cities (get it together, Miami!), and the weirdest things people are leaving in their Ubers. Also, it’s Wednesday, which is apparently Leave Your Wallet In An Uber Day. Be careful out there!
Waymo has been offering autonomous rides in Phoenix since late 2022, but now it’s providing transportation for a new kind of customer: your dinner. Starting today, Waymo will start making food deliveries for some Uber Eats customers.
[www.uber.com]
According to The Wall Street Journal, ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft “say people are receptive to their ads,” with customers “less likely to cancel” their rides if they’re distracted by advertisements while they wait.
Uber has been cramming ads wherever it can, but it doesn’t work everywhere. The Journal writes that people hated them in push notifications so much that Uber cut those out in under a day, but folks don’t mind movie trailers on in-car tablets.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Just in time for al fresco dining season, too. But for real, don’t make your courier hack through a jungle or swim across rivers to find you. And don’t forget to tip!
In addition to discounts for eligible Uber Pro drivers, Revel will use anonymized Uber data to decide on future EV charging station locations to address “charging deserts,” according to a press release shared with The Verge by Uber spokesperson Conor Ferguson.
Revel CEO Frank Reig says this will help it grow its charging business in NYC and, eventually, other cities. Revel plans to add 48 public fast-charging stations near the rideshare waiting area of New York’s La Guardia Airport.
The robots are expected to hit the sidewalks of Tokyo starting at the end of March, marking Uber’s first international expansion of its autonomous delivery service. The six-wheeled delivery robots are manufactured by Cartken, an Oakland-based AI company, and operations will be supervised by Mitsubishi Electric. Delivery robots are growing more popular, but they still require a team of human workers to make the system work.
That’s because thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers in over a dozen cities are going on strike for 24 hours to protest low wages and unfair practices by the gig economy companies. Their demands? A larger cut of fares, a living wage, transparency in pay calculations, and an end to unfair deactivations.
“The main challenge is surviving,” said Nupur Chowdhury, an Uber driver and ride-share organizer in Arlington who helped plan the strike in the Washington area. “We cannot make the same amount of money we used to make, even if we work double the hours.”
[The Washington Post]
An extra zero mistakenly added to a closely watched profit margin metric sent the stock soaring over 60 percent before the CFO later corrected things. The stock is still up over 15 percent after the company forecasted better-than expected bookings and a path to profitability.
When it comes to AVs, the landscape is littered with over-optimistic predictions and missed deadlines. What happened?
The alcohol app has been a cybersecurity headache since Uber acquired it a few years ago. The FTC found out that a hack affected 2.5 million customers in 2020, two years after the company initially learned about a security flaw.
“We’ve decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything — from food to groceries to alcohol — all on a single app,” Uber SVP of delivery Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty told Axios.
Uber and Lyft were supposed to reduce carbon emissions, but they turned out to be polluters. Robotaxis look to repeat some of the same mistakes.
