What Uber Hath Wrought

The War on Cars

The War on Cars, LLC

Cars, Society & Culture, Culture, Bicycling, Politics, Urbanism, Walking, Transportation, Cities, Transit, News Commentary, News

4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For a few years after Uber launched in 2009, it seemed like the on-demand ride-hailing service might be an advance in the war on cars — a way for more people to share fewer vehicles and to reduce overall automobile dependence. Fast forward a decade, and the rise of Uber (along with Lyft) has instead resulted in increased congestion, reductions in transit ridership, and the exploitation of a precarious workforce that the company would love to make obsolete altogether. In this episode, we talk with New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac about his new book, “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” in which he chronicles the rise and fall of Uber’s co-founder, Travis Kalanick. We hear what Mike has to say about the cult of the founder and the way Kalanick’s winner-take-all mentality has negatively affected the streets of the world’s cities.

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SHOW NOTES:

Mike Isaac’s new book, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, is available everywhere, but you should get it at your local bookstore if you can. Follow him on Twitter @MikeIsaac.

Another study shows Uber and Lyft suck riders off transit (CityLab)

Everything bad about Uber and Lyft (Streetsblog USA)

Travis Kalanick argues with an Uber driver about his business model (Bloomberg)

This episode was directed and recorded by Josh Wilcox at Brooklyn Podcasting Studio, and edited by Matt Cutler. Natalie Jones taped Mike Isaac in San Francisco.

Find us onTwitter @TheWarOnCars, Sarah Goodyear @buttermilk1 Aaron Naparstek @Naparstek and Doug Gordon @BrooklynSpoke.

Email us: [email protected]

https://thewaroncars.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	Millions of people die a year in cars. They don't have to. Tens of millions of people get injured.
0:06.1	Trillions of hours are spent sitting behind a wheel holding that steering wheel, stressed out.
0:11.9	And we don't have to have traffic in our cities. You know that parking
0:15.8	infrastructure that's 15% of the land in a city could be given back to the
0:20.0	city. And by the way, imagine transportation that's so inexpensive that
0:24.9	everybody could have access to it like running water. That's what we're talking
0:29.8	about. That's super visionary, right? That was like the War on cars mission statement.
0:35.0	We should get that person on the podcast.
0:37.0	That might be hard because that was Travis Kalinik,
0:42.0	who is one of the founders of Uber.
0:44.0	Oh, there's a twist.
0:47.0	Yeah, exactly.
0:48.0	And he was actually even he was talking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, you know, the sort of rarified
0:56.6	rich person get-together in 2016, you know, raising more money for Uber. For cars so how does his vision work out well
1:06.2	that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode this is the war on
1:12.4	cars the Podcast about Cars, and how they ruin cities.
1:16.5	I'm Sarah Goodyear and I'm here with my co-host Doug Gordon and Aaron Naperstec.
1:20.9	Hello?
1:21.9	Hey, how's going?
1:23.0	So yeah, we're going to be talking this time about Uber, about Travis Kalinik, and just sort of more generally
1:27.8	about the way that these enormous venture capital funded companies have come into our cities and had a lot of really negative effects.
1:38.5	How the vision of these founders of, you know, fixing all the problems in the city gets distorted on the way
	...

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