Uber sneaks in nefarious plan to take away your vehicle
Ride-sharing firm plans to monopolize inner-city travel, writes DavidBooth.
Were it not so diabolically evil, Uber’s recent about-face would be the height of irony.
No, I am not talking about some secret settlement in the gripping Uber versus Waymo trade secrets court battle. Nope, that’s small fry compared with the seemingly innocuous tweet Andrew Salzberg, the company’s head of transportation policy and research, sent out Feb. 1 in support of something called the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities.
Essentially, it is a document produced by sharedmobilityprinciples.org — “a who’s who of left-wing green pressure groups,” at least as described by Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Libertarian blog — “designed to guide urban decision-makers and stakeholders toward outcomes … that facilitate the safe, efficient and pollution-free flow of people and goods, while also providing affordable, healthy and integrated mobility for all people.”
Nothing wrong with that, right?
Indeed, it’s hard to disagree with shared mobility principles. org’s call for “planning our cities and their mobility together” or the “shared and efficient use of vehicles, lanes, curbs and land.”
Even the mandate for a “zeroemission and renewable energy” future lacks any real revolutionary zeal, since electric vehicles make perfect sense for inner-city public transportation.
Where the plot delves into the dystopian, however, is in the 10th and final recommendation, which states with disarmingly bland equanimity that, in the future, “autonomous vehicles in dense urban areas should be operated only in shared fleets.”
I’ll repeat that one again if you don’t mind. “We (and, by we, the dictum includes Uber, ZipCar, Lyft and some car sharing app called BlaBlaCar) support that autonomous vehicles in dense urban areas should be operated only in shared fleets” and that “it is critical
that all autonomous vehicles are part of shared fleets, well-regulated and zero emission.”
Now, the first thing you should know is that, no, you’re not reading that wrong. Uber and its mini-me ride hailing/sourcing/sharing friends want to have complete control of all vehicles on any city street that they may deem as “dense,” without which the “promise of reductions in vehicles, parking and congestion” cannot be fulfilled.
That said promise might require the complete abolition of the privately held car is just the necessary sacrifice required for Uber’s completely altruistic dream of congestion-free motoring.
A few weeks ago, naysayers decried my proposition that selfdriving cars would result in the banning of human drivers: On Feb. 1, Uber et al established that as fait accompli and that what they’re already working on now is a complete ban of privatelyowned vehicles.
So, that’s the evil. The irony part of my opening statement is all that baloney about it being critical that said fleet of autonomous vehicles be “well-regulated.” As I understand it, “wellregulated” was pretty much what former Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick decried when he was trying so hard to put cab companies out of business.
As to why Uber wants to control inner city streets, just follow the money. It’s hard to know whether sharedmobilityprinciples.org’s “dense urban areas” include just inner city cores or their larger metropolitan zones. But let’s assume only half the cars in America operate exclusively in downtown cores and only half of their miles are purely urban. That would mean Uber and friends would control somewhere between one and 1.5 trillion kilometres of taxi fares. So, that’s why Uber wants a monopoly.
As to why Uber wants it to be well regulated, well, analysts have long been positing some new great technology is on the horizon, technology that would allow individuals to set up lowcost sharing groups able to dispatch our privately owned cars in search of the very fares U ber-via shared mobility principles. org hopes to monopolize.
As to why now, if one is to believe Shelly Palmer — LinkedIn’s No. 1 Voice in Technology for 2017 — that technology is here. Officially known as “distributed ledger” technology, you might know it better as blockchain. If that’s not ringing any bells, how about bitcoin?
It turns out that bitcoin-needistributed-ledger is useful for more than just impossibly complicated cryptocurrencies. According to Palmer’s Nuber: The End of Uber and Central Authority, distributed ledgers allow you to generate encrypted transactions accessible only by private keys that will allow autonomous networks to replace the “central authorities” controlling industries with bitcoin-like “trusted decentralized networks.”
No, I don’t fully understand it either, but it might help if you think of it as the “open source” equivalent of Uber’s centralized control of ride-sourcing data.
Palmer says this challenge to Uber may be imminent. More importantly, if — or more likely when — bitcoin coding becomes as simple as managing a website then Uber’s US$50 billion market cap becomes worthless. And that’s why Uber et all want a “wellregulated” monopoly, all that namby-pamby nonsense about congestion and the environment just masking plain old greed.
Maybe that’s where the taxi companies got it wrong: They didn’t dress up their monopoly as a public good.