Why Uber Won
Uber is a fact of urban life today. But not too long ago, summoning a cab through a smartphone app was a newfangled concept that threatened the status quo of tightly regulated, uncompetitive, unreliable, and often corrupt local cab sectors throughout the country.
In Disrupting D.C., Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen take us back to that time — telling Uber’s story not as a triumph of technology over sclerosis but as a warning about what happens when governments offer poor services, provide inadequate welfare benefits, and lack the spine to enforce the law when a flashy company promising innovation comes to town.
Wells et al. are a trio of unabashedly left-wing academics, the type of people who talk about “neoliberalism” like it’s a bad thing, and no conservative or centrist will change his entire worldview after reading this book. However, the strength of Disrupting D.C. lies in its most straightforward parts, in which the authors explain how Uber came to power in Washington and report what they learned by interviewing countless political players and Uber drivers.
To their great credit, they do not deny that Uber succeeded because, in very basic ways, it worked.
In its early days, Uber had a habit of entering cities regardless of what the applicable taxi laws said — living by the tech-sector creed that if it happens through the internet, that means it’s not illegal and aided by ambiguities in rules drafted in the pre-smartphone era. In 2012, shortly after the service began in Washington, the city’s elderly taxi commissioner alleged it was violating the law and personally participated in a combination of a sting operation and a publicity stunt: He summoned an Uber to pick him up and had officials waiting at the other end of the trip to ticket the driver and impound the vehicle. Soon thereafter, the city council contemplated regulations for Uber, including a minimum fare five times that of a local taxi.
All hell broke loose. In what it dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, Uber urged its customers to contact city officials to protest the minimum, resulting in about 50,000 emails. The council caved.
Why all the passion on behalf of some tech company? Well, to indulge in a bit of business jargon, people wanted Uber because Washington’s cabs sucked, and so did its public transportation system. Cabs, though not too expensive, wouldn’t reliably show up to take customers to early morning flights, were not particularly clean, didn’t accept credit cards until 2013, and would avoid black customers and poor neighborhoods. Regulations limited competition and prevented companies from charging more for better service, and for good measure, a recent scandal had involved cabbies bribing officials for licenses. Meanwhile, the Metro system closed overnight, was suffering from a series of track fires, and offered less-than-comprehensive bus service.
And so, once Washington got a taste of Uber, travelers were more than willing to support the company politically. The racial angle, to which Disrupting D.C. dedicates an entire chapter, proved especially potent. “It is upsetting to stand in front of the U.S. Capitol, in a suit, after a long day of public service and see cab after cab pass you by,” one black woman wrote to the members of Washington’s city council. “With Uber, I call a car, and it comes.”
When it first launched, Uber was a luxury service, but prices quickly came down as the company expanded and added the lower-cost UberX option. (Uber turned its very first profit just last year, suggesting that it was basically subsidizing fares to grow its market share for most of its history.) Given the complexity of driving an Uber, with workers classified as contractors who must handle their own car maintenance, gas, and schedules, the low prices can lead to a meager living, especially for those who aren’t skilled in leveraging the system to focus on the most lucrative times and routes. Unsurprisingly, a lot of attention has been paid to gig workers’ contractor status and pay rates as a result.
Because Uber driving is a mostly solitary task, many drivers report hardly ever talking to each other, which the authors of Disrupting D.C. see as a barrier to labor organization. However, the city’s airport was the site of a brief strike, and some drivers there discovered they could game the algorithm by shutting off their apps simultaneously before large planes landed, triggering surge pricing. News of the surge-pricing scam broke shortly after the strike, undermining any effect of the latter in boosting public support for the strikers’ cause.
Something else that’s clear from the
authors’ interviews and analysis, though, is that people have good reasons for driving Ubers. Some pride themselves on staying ahead of their peers in terms of finding the most profitable approach, keeping tabs on factors such as wasted time and maintenance. Others enjoy the scheduling flexibility that allows them to work when they’re able. One former Uber driver reported some frustrations with the gig, including damage to her car and some unpaid trips, and yet the authors call her “effusive” in her defense of the experience overall: “If she lost her job as a police officer or needed extra income, she would sooner go back to working for Uber than return to the fast-food industry.”
Of course, there are plenty of narrow points one might make about all this, from perspectives ranging from lawand-order conservatism to pro-labor populism to technocratic liberalism: Uber should have followed the law when it entered America’s cities. It should pay its workers more. It should face more congestion and climate regulations. The authors certainly believe all that, but they don’t dig too deeply into the policy intricacies of those topics.
Instead, their far broader argument is that Uber benefited from a set of low expectations about what cities could provide, and indeed lowered those expectations even further, cultivating a sense of “just let Uber do it.” Americans, they believe, should have high expectations of the public sector, demanding a bigger welfare state and better services — a government so big and so good that it makes Uber far less attractive, both as a transportation service and an employment opportunity.
Sounds nice. Yet one can’t help but fixate on the fact that, by the authors’ admission, people take Ubers because they’re better than the existing alternatives, and people drive Ubers because those jobs are better than the alternatives, too.
Rather than pining for more government, the ardent capitalist might point out that this illustrates the very beauty of free markets: Because all transactions must be voluntary on both sides, a business acquires workers and customers only by outperforming the next-best option. Capitalism is a road to steady improvement, and as Washington’s experience shows, strict regulation and government control can promise no such although we can certainly debate how much redistribution of capitalism’s bounty is ideal.
Seen in that light, the story of why Uber succeeded is simple and inoffensive. With Uber, Washington residents fed up with the Metro and the legacy cabs didn’t have to wait for social democracy to arrive or even for their public officials to become less apathetic and corrupt. They just had to download an app to make their lives better. And so they did.
Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
License to Explain By Gustav Jönsson
Ibelieve it was the critic Dwight Macdonald who first pointed out the prevalence of “how-to-ism” in American literature. It isn’t just that there are lots of practical manuals for cooking or gardening, succeeding in business or love, but that the instructional mindset permeates even the most celebrated novels. If you’ve read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, you’ll know enough about the sea to board a whaler yourself. And Henry James spent a good deal of his time telling young Americans how to comport themselves in European society. The instructional tendency is perhaps especially strong in Ernest Hemingway. Much of his writing consists of tips for how to booze or kill bulls or go to bed with women. All worth knowing, to a greater or lesser degree.
Didacticism needn’t be obnoxious, but of course it often is, in particular on literature’s lower slopes. I’ve just slogged through one of the most egregious examples I’ve ever encountered: The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes. Hayes is the British-born Australian Hollywood screenwriter whose spy thriller I Am Pilgrim scaled the bestseller charts 10 years ago. It followed an American intelligence officer tasked with preventing a Saudi terrorist known as “the Saracen” from unleashing a terrifying bioweapon on the West. The new novel — eagerly awaited and an instant bestseller that has very likely been purchased an order of magnithing,