Uber for Lagos

Solomon Elusoji writes that with uber taxis gaining acceptance in Lagos, the way people move from one point to the other around the megacity is bound to change, but safety concerns continue to abound

“Hello, this is Temidayo from Uber.” “Oh great! I’m standing in front of the BRT bus-park in Obalende.” “Okay, I’m currently at Mosley. I will get to you in a couple of minutes.” “I’ll be waiting.” The phone went into my pocket to let me look at my tablet with one hand and hold a bottle of water, a small jotter, and a copy of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man on the other hand.

I was standing at the edge of a curb bordering a BRT bus-park, directly opposite the famous Obalende Roundabout. The traffic was light, aged women with bowls of bottled water steadied on their heads streamed past, glancing at my direction, hoping for a sale.

Barely three minutes after the dropped call, my pocket buzzed.

“Hello, I’m in front –” A bus horned, blurring the voice at the other end. “Hello?” “Can you see the . . . station . . . behind you . . .”

“Hello, I can’t hear you.” I ended the call and hurried west along the curb, away from the roundabout. The phone buzzed again and I answered on the second ring. “Hello.” “Yes, I can hear you now. I’m standing in front of the BRT bus-park. Where did you say you were?”

“Okay, I can see you now. You are wearing a suit and holding a bottle of water.”

I looked around, vaguely, feeling vulnerable. “Yes.”

“Just look towards your right, can you see a dark Toyota Camry?”

The road to my right, which linked Marina, was lined with dusty yellow buses and weather-beaten cars. The Camry was easy to spot. It glinted like a precious stone, in the earth scorching sun of Lagos.

Inside, the Air conditioner was chilling. The driver, a swarthy man with a fine teddy (a thin line of hair that runs from the sides of the head to meet at the chin, and sometimes extending towards the skin beneath the nostrils), was chatty, bubbling with enthusiasm. He looked like he was in his late-twenties, maybe early thirties.

He apologised for the bad phone connection before I had the chance to tell him it wasn’t his fault, confirmed my destination, and then launched into sparkling tales of his most memorable passengers.

“White people like to talk,” he said. His English wasn’t crisp, fluent – a Yoruba accent lurked beneath – but it was comfortable, confident and perfectly understandable. “I picked up one man at a Hotel in Anthony the other day and we didn’t stop talking until I dropped him off somewhere around.” We were now cruising the streets of Ikoyi, where the air held the whiff of the ocean, and houses were built differently. “So, you like your job?” “Absolutely,” he told me. His enthusiasm made it easy to believe. “I work seven to seven, I don’t do nights, and all I have to do is to go and pick up my clients. Yes, the work is tasking when I have several customers to pick up, but I enjoy it.”

Within the less than 20 minutes drive to Alexander, Temidayo conversed brightly. He told me about a white woman who clawed at his dashboard after she gave him wrong co-ordinates, and they, of course, ended in the wrong place. He told me about young University ladies who finish the sweets he usually offers to his passengers.

“Whenever I get a client,” he said, “the client becomes the boss until they drop off at their destination. You see that white woman that did this to my dashboard, I still had to beg and pet her, because she was threatening to open the door and walk away. But when she figured out she was wrong, she said ‘I will give you five stars’.”

He dropped me off at 20, Alexander, Ikoyi, which happens to be Uber Home, in Lagos.

“Uber is a technology platform that connects riders with drivers, and the goal is to provide a reliable and affordable and, of course, a convenient way to move around,” General Manager of Uber Lagos, Ebi Atawodi, told me. We are seated in a boardroom, the AC is off to prevent us from becoming icemen, the door is closed to shield off the sound of impending rain.

Wearing a low-cut, and a quick, sleek accent, Ebi hummed a sparkling personality. I had previously met her at the recently concluded NASA Space App Challenge held in Lagos. It had also been my first time of getting to know Uber was in Lagos. Apparently, they have been operating in the city for the past eight months. I was intrigued. Why?

Because, in major cities across the world, Uber is changing the way people move around. What the San Francisco-based company does, connecting riders and drivers, has created a quiet revolution in the transportation sector. Now, if you want to get from point A to point B, all you need to do is to open the Uber App on your smartphone, hail the nearest available taxi to you, agree on the rendezvous, the time, and you are on your way. Of course, in reality, it’s not always that straightforward (Temidayo still had to call me to confirm rendezvous and waiting time), but it is astonishingly easy, convenient, and cheap.

Uber rides, usually, are either a Toyota Camry, Kia Cerato, Hyundai Elantra or Honda Accord with a base fare of N500, N10 per minute and N110 per kilometre. Uber is a completely cashless system, meaning an Uber rider’s fare is charged automatically and electronically to their credit or debit card, protecting both riders and drivers, and ensuring that all payments are traceable.

The rides also have a GPS tracking system which sees where the rider is on the map, making pickup more efficient than alternate means of transportation. Riders have access to a live GPS-enabled map throughout their journey and can share this with a third party – such as family, partners or friends – who can track their progress to their destination.

Founded in 2009 as ‘UberCab’ by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has managed to raise over two billion dollars in funding, and is already available in 57 countries and hundreds of cities across the globe.

“Whenever we go into a new city,” Ebi told me when I asked her how Uber hopes to survive in a tough climate like Lagos, “we like to approach it as a new environment. We bring in a local team and ensure that our people are those who know and understand the city. Yes, we are an international business, but we localise the workforce.

“We all know that Lagos has traffic, but you could also argue that any city has traffic. What we do is that we build the supply to a point where you get a car one minute away, two minutes away, three minutes away, not fifty minutes away. So, if the driver is just one minute or two minutes away, the traffic becomes not so much an issue. Being in the car, riding to your destination, there will be traffic regardless of which vehicle you take. But in terms of picking up the passenger, it’s about building enough supply. In Lagos, we’ve dropped the time to about seven to six minutes.”

But how does the company manage to strike equilibrium between supply and demand?

“So, there are times when demand increases,” Ebi replied. “Most of the time, it’s due to events that happen in the city. There might be a concert that a lot of people want to attend, or fuel scarcity, when people don’t want to drive, and this leads to an abnormal spike in demand. Of course, when that happens, the demand then outweighs the supply. So, that’s when we go into a dynamic pricing model to make sure that it’s worth the driver’s while to come out, and get more cars on the road.

“We earn based on a commission of the driver’s earnings, so we are constantly trying to bring on more supply. What we’ve seen is that when we’ve got more supply, the product becomes more reliable, and people use it more – it becomes a reliable mode of transport. And if people ride more, the driver