Uber declares war on car ownership

Monopoly dressed up for good of society

Were it not so evil, U ber’ 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. That’s small fry compared with the seemingly innocuous tweet Andrew Salzberg, the company’s head of transportation policy and research, sent out last Thursday in support of something called the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities.

Essentially it is a document produced by sharedmobility principles. 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 pollutionfree flow of people and goods, while also providing affordable, healthy and integrated mobility for all people.”

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Indeed, it’ shardt odisagree with shared mobility principles’ 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 “zero- emission and renewable energy” future lacks any real revolutionary zeal, since electric vehicles make perfect sense for inner-city public transportation.

Where this delves into dystopian, however, is the recommendation which states with disarmingly bland equanimity that, in future, “autonomous vehicles in dense urban areas should be operated only in shared fleets.”

I’ ll repeat that. “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.”

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 they may deem as “dense,” without which the “promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion” cannot be fulfilled.

That promise might require the abolition of the private car ( you think that in this Brave New World, if they’re banning you from owning a self- driving car, that you’ ll be allowed to drive your own Buick?), necessary for Uber’s completely altruistic dream of congestion-free motoring.

A few weeks ago, naysayers decried my proposition that self- driving cars would result in the banning of hu- man drivers as paranoia: 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 privately-owned vehicles.

So, that’s the evil. The irony is that baloney about “well-regulated.” As I understand it, “well-regulated” was pretty much what Uber exCEO Travis Kalanick decried when he was trying to put cab companies out of business. I think when Kalanick in 2014 said “the opponent is an asshole named Taxi,” he pretty much summed up his views of “well-regulated.”

As to why Uber wants to control inner city streets, just follow the money. It’s hard to know whether shared mobility principles ’“dense urban areas” include just inner city cores or larger metropolitan zones. But let’s take a conservative estimate. Let’s assume that only half the cars in America operate exclusively in downtown cores and that only half of their miles are purely urban in those densely populated cities. That would mean Uber and friends would control somewhere between 1 trillion and 1.5 trillion kilometres of taxi fares. Maybe Uber’s seemingly insane US$ 50 billion valuation isn’t so phantasmagorical after all!

So, that’s why Uber wants a monopoly. As to why wellregulated, well, analysts have long been positing some new great technology is on the horizon, technology that would allow individuals to set up low-cost sharing groups able to dispatch our privately owned cars in search of the very fares Ubervia-shared mobility principles 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,” you might know it better as blockchain. If that’s not ringing any bells, then how about bitcoin?

It turns out that bitcoinnee- distributed- l edger is useful for more than just 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 “central authorities” with bitcoin- like “trusted decentralized networks.” It might help if you think of it as the “open source” equivalent of Uber’s centralized control of ride-sourcing data. In other words, Uber et al see you and me — and our privately owned, self-driving cars of the future — as primary competition.

Palmer says this challenge to Uber may be imminent, requiring a few motivated code writers, seed money and “enough chocolate- covered coffee beans” to keep the nerds awake while they work on it. More importantly, if — or more likely when — bitcoin coding becomes as simple as managing a website ( or better yet, someone develops a $ 2.99 “Nuber” app) then Uber’s US$ 50billion market cap becomes worthless faster than you can say Bre- X. And that’s why Uber et all want a “wellregulated” monopoly, all that mamby- pamby about congestion and the environment 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.