Please remember that Uber, Lyft, and the like envision a future where they control a basic need--transportation. And remember that they envision this system operating in the not-too-distant future with driverless cars, already being tested in tech-visionary Austin. Their dream: no drivers to be paid, and no competition. They would be positioned to transfer a slice of the ongoing cost of every person's transportation needs out of Austin and into their corporate profits, indefinitely.
This report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and
McKinsey & Company came out last October. Here is a statement from that report: "Electric shared autonomous vehicles will revolutionise transport in the world’s cities over the next 15 years” (from An Integrated Perspective on the
Future of Mobility, 10-11-2016.) The full report is here: “An Integrated Perspective on The Future of Mobility .”
This corporate vision raises many questions:
- Would such a dispersed system displace rational and affordable public-transit route design?
- Alternatively, could a system managed by urban policy provide an affordable well-designed interface between public transit and a driverless network?
- Could Austin Energy optimize charging-discharging driverless-cars' batteries to utilize the fleet, and electric buses, as a dispersed battery storage system for a clean-energy future for Austin?
- Is there a potential for Austin to have a first-class public transit system, affordably serving the Austin- and Travis-county residents who are most dependent on public transit, maximizing instead of displacing the efficiency of buses (which can also be electric), while self-driving cars fill the gaps that buses serve less well?
In addition, we should consider this: The reason there is a market for rideshare companies is that Austin, like most American cities, lacks a comprehensive public transit system good enough to compete with owning cars. Uber spent uber-amounts of campaign money in Austin to make an example of us and scare other cities into capitulation--like Genghis Khan obliterating a village but leaving a survivor to go tell other villages that resistance is futile (pardon my mixing of Genghis Khan with Star Trek metaphors here).
Transportation is a basic necessity--I hate to see any mega-corporate ridesharing company sucking profits via the power imbalance over the drivers and riders. Ridesharing companies should meet very high standards as a regulated industry or better yet, it should be a public-private partnership, or best yet, a city-owned utility just as Austin Energy is a city-owned utility, responsive to public debate and values, and providing profits to the City's coffers.
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