Do Uber and Lyft really care about being environmentally sustainable corporations?

In my role as director of Mobility Lab, I got interviewed for this CityLab article. Here are some tidbits:

For Paul Mackie, director of communication and research at Mobility Lab, which studies transportation behavior and policy, the announcements are another sign of how these companies are adopting roles as “societal partners” rather than just ride-hailing services—ones that can change the way public transit is marketed to the masses. In moving into the bike- and scooter-sharing markets, Uber and Lyft are also encouraging more people to ponder driving alternatives, and making it easier for them to change their behavior.

Lyft’s campaign resembles the new subscription service the firm is experimenting with in Salt Lake City, in which participants pay a flat $200 every month for 30 rides. But by integrating bikeshare and public transit, Lyft’s “Ditch Your Car” initiative goes one step further, potentially demonstrating how public transit agencies could benefit from a new payment model. “You think of these other smart industries—like Netflix or food recipe subscriptions—those are working and it's showing that it's what people want,” Mackie said. “Why is public transit so slow to have that model?”

 ... “It would be naive for anyone to think that Uber and Lyft aren't thinking about what’s best for their bottom line,” said Mackie. The two companies also want a seat at the policy-making table, with both ramping up their lobbying spending over the last few years. (Uber’s backing of congestion pricing, as CityLab previously reported, could be a win-win for both company and city.) Uber is still scrubbing its brand after the multiple scandals associated with former CEO Travis Kalanick, while its smaller competitor Lyft is sticking with its famous “better boyfriend” strategy, donating to the ACLU and giving voters free rides to the polls.

But the companies are still leaving out the one thing cities really want: data. Uber’s gift to SharedStreets may be a gesture toward handing over more of this precious resource, and Mackie thinks this could be another win-win for both sides. “Cities have curb space and parking—things that could really help Uber and Lyft,” he said. “We like to think that if they did share their data, then the governments can work with them to make cities much nicer working grounds.”

 And Mackie also credits Uber and Lyft with encouraging more people to consider sustainable transit options. Despite the rise of ride-hailing, Americans are largely still holding on to their private cars, and the concept of shared mobility remains novel to many.  “So it’s another thing to be a bit of cheerleader for Uber and Lyft because we want them to incorporate this sharing mindset in all of us,” he said. “It’s a noble experiment in behavioral change.”

How Uber and Lyft are scooting their way to global domination of transport

I got the last word in this solid roundup from the San Francisco Chronicle of the latest news on Uber and Lyft's plans heading into the future of transportation.

“Not many people in our country take bikes and scooters for utilitarian trips, for going to work, the grocery store, out at night even though it’s a low-cost healthy way to get around,” said Paul Mackie, director of research and communications at the Mobility Labs think tank. “It’s great that Uber and Lyft are putting money and publicity and building interest in these other great ways to travel. It lends credence to them as mobility companies, not just tech companies.”

On-demand “flying Ubers” could ease East Coast traffic

This article originally appeared at Mobility Lab.

What would happen to congested urban traffic if some trips could simply be picked up and moved into the air?

That’s a question players from Uber to Airbus to NASA are seriously studying. But to Bruce Gunter, who often has to take unnecessarily long car trips from his home in Virginia Beach to Richmond to visit family, some of the pieces of this “on-demand urban air transportation” puzzle are missing.

“I’m frustrated because most of the research is being done in California and there’s nothing in Virginia along the Interstate 95 corridor. It’s almost comical because almost all the work is being done by NASA [from its offices in] Langley, Va.,” Gunter laughed.

Gunter has more than a passing interest in what can no doubt be simply referred to as flying cars. He is managing director of Veetle, a company that is producing these VTOLs (vertical take-off and landing vehicles). But he also has deep knowledge of lengthy Federal Aviation Administration processes, especially from his days working at Cirrus, which has gotten extensive news coverage about its parachute-deploying small planes.

“We’re a very small company, with big ideas.” Gunter said Veetle is operating on about $1 million in its first year but that once it starts marketing and gathering investments, it could be a $200 million to $300 million effort. “Unless you’re a legacy company like Boeing or Airbus, this is all about putting tons of companies together to put the planes together.”

On-demand air travel in Virginia

Uber, in a report it released last year, predicted:

Daily long-distance commutes in heavily congested urban and suburban areas and routes under-served by existing infrastructure will be the first use cases for urban VTOLs. VTOLs will have greatest appeal for those traveling longer distances and durations [and] a small number of vertiports could absorb a large share of demand from long-distance commuters since the “last mile” ground transportation component will be small relative to the much longer commute distance.

Along Virginia’s stretch of I-95 or in other congested nearby cities like Richmond, Virginia Beach, and Washington, D.C., flying cars could certainly be an option worth exploring.

“This could broaden the scope of how people get around, even more than what Uber has shown us already with cars,” Gunter said, adding that passengers would reserve a plane just like an Uber, but would instead, unlike an Uber, head to a designated rooftop to jump in.

He added that it’s great Uber is one of the few players in the market, but that the ride-hailing company can’t do much until it has an actual product like the kind Veetle is developing. “Logistically, we could be the aerial Uber, for lack of a better term.”

Keys to making flying Ubers a reality

Some of the bigger keys, besides simply getting the public to change long-ingrained travel habits and developing policy guidelines, include making trips inexpensive, reliable, and shared in the sense so they would be more like transit than personal vehicles.

Uber further predicts:

In the long-term, VTOLs will be an affordable form of daily transportation for the masses, even less expensive than owning a car. Normally, people think of flying as an expensive and infrequent form of travel, but that is largely due to the low production volume manufacturing of today’s aircraft. The economics of manufacturing VTOLs will become more akin to automobiles than aircraft. Initially, of course, VTOL vehicles are likely to be very expensive, but because the ridesharing model amortizes the vehicle cost efficiently over paid trips, the high cost should not end up being prohibitive to getting started.

Another matter is whether the vehicles would create noise and air pollution. Gunter said the battery technology is still at least a decade away to make them powered fully by electric propulsion. Until then, they would need to be “some kind of hybrid” of gas and electric. But he added that the noise would be minimal because they would operate somewhat like drones, which the public already largely understands as being relatively quiet.

Also, would we simply be displacing traffic jams on the roads for ones in the sky?

“I’ve got 6,500 hours of flying and, in my experience, it’s rare if you ever see another airplane. If you do, it’s near the big airports by places like New York and Atlanta,” Gunter said, adding that VTOL traffic is mainly a matter of being managed effectively.

As science-fiction-y as it seems, we may indeed be hearing more about on-demand urban air transportation soon. Uber is sponsoring an invitation-only conference April 25-27 in Dallas.

Photo by Uber.

USA Today asks me about how Uber and Lyft leaving Austin could play out

As I've become more of a transportation-expert spokesperson for Mobility Lab, it's been a pretty good run lately, including twice being quoted in America's biggest newspaper, USA Today.

In my latest commentary, I was asked by the paper's Austin beat reporter, Rick Jervis, about the national perspective on Uber and Lyft leaving the Texas city because of a conflict over whether or not their drivers should be fingerprinted like traditional taxi drivers (the companies contend they should not be fingerprinted).

Mobility Lab's take on it is that this is a very disruptive time in the transportation industry and we're still in the very early days of seeing all this play out.

• Will the desire of Millennials for less car ownership (and ownership in general) than older generations translate into more carpooling, ridesharing, pickup services like transit, and quick-hop options like bikesharing? 
• Will electric and autonomous vehicles create the possibility of less ownership and more flexible public-transportation fleets? 
• And will others step in to provide the kinds of technology that have made Uber and Lyft so wildly successful, while playing more nicely with local governments?

When Uber and Lyft left Austin, a non-profit tech group called RideAustin was right there to take their place, within 15 to 20 days. That's pretty amazing, and my point that the USA Today author got across nicely was that other cities could very easily follow this lead if Uber and Lyft prove to be politically unpopular.

While it seems these options are every bit as safe as, if not safer than, traditional taxis, the public in Austin spoke through a vote that just being tracked on GPS is not enough and that drivers should be fingerprinted.

Here's the whole article, Austin hunted for solutions in run up to ride-hailing vote (it also ran in the Burlington Free Press and the Des Moines Register), and here's how I was quoted in the start of it:

Major cities such as Los Angeles and Philadelphia — where both companies currently operate — have faced similar clashes when trying to regulate the popular ride-hailing companies. But the Austin standoff is unique for the city’s resistance to the corporations and the innovative ideas spawned from the drama, said Paul Mackie of the Mobility Lab, an Arlington-based transportation think tank. 

“It’s kind of exposing Uber and Lyft,” he said. “It will show city leaders (across the USA) that there could be other options that could step in and do the same thing that Uber and Lyft can do.”