Uber has replaced buses not cars
Back in 2014, Uber’s pugnacious founder Travis Kalanick set an ambitious goal: for Uber to take 1 million cars off the roads.
At the time, many of us were a bit doubtful. Would Uber’s customers really come out of cars, or would they come out of buses?
The answer was revealed four years later, in this DfT report. It turned out that just 10% of Uber riders would previously have used their car, against 36% who would have used public transport.
Would have gone by bus…
As an advocate for public transport, that doesn’t make me anti-Uber.
I also passionately believe that making it easier for people to get around without falling back to their cars is a thoroughly good thing: that 10% of drivers that switched to Uber may also now make other journeys by public transport.
Nevertheless, it’s not a great sign that such a large proportion of customers were willing to (almost certainly) pay more for Uber’s service.
Given that the journey time didn’t change, what was the reason?
Well, price was almost certainly a big one: Uber was in its blitz-scaling stage and flooding the market with offers. As the VC funding taps have now been replaced by the discipline of the listed markets, this will not be the case in future.
But it will also have been because Uber was just so incredibly easy.
My favourite example of this taken to extremes was this software developer who installed a button in his bathroom that would summon an Uber to his door while he was still in the shower.
But there’s no doubt that one of the reasons that bus use has declined in recent years is that Uber use has increased.
This is relevant right now, as the VC funding hose is now pointing at e-scooters. In 2020 alone (during a pandemic!) micromobility startups raised $1bn. That’s right: $1bn! No fewer than four networks are planning on launching in the UK as soon as lockdown ends.
Like Uber, they will have incredibly intuitive apps powered by teams of expert product designers, and they will launch with big, loss-making discounts.
I’ll talk more about e-scooters in a future post but, for now, the best reaction for the bus industry is to learn from the best bits of what Uber did: which was to make the process of booking a ride utterly frictionless.
Do you tweet? Here’s one ready-made
