It’s seven PM and on Providencia Avenue, one of the most important thoroughfares of Greater Santiago, traffic is at a standstill. It seems that nothing and nobody wants to move.
In front of me, two stopped buses of Transantiago and a restless sea of cars form together one of the more stressful and repetitive scenes of daily life. When you pay attention you see that in addition to stress, everybody seethes with anger and frustration since the exclusive lanes reserved for public transit overflow with taxis with “Available” lights shining.
Yes, yes, those shitty taxi drivers: corrupt, disgusting, stupid and antiquated. We could add to the list an endless stream of insults and negative emotions but nothing that we say or think will the resolve the fundamental problem: our city is a disaster and people need to move across the city in the most efficient way possible.
Is UBER, then, the leviathan that has arrived to save our city and our lives and change what we understand as public transportation in the world?
Well, the first answer is no, the second is not even, and the third is NO FUCKING WAY.
¿UBER: the good, the bad or the ugly?
Last week everyone heard the “sad” news that the board of directors of UBER decided to part ways with Travis Kalanick, creator and CEO of the company.
Yes it is tragic but it is totally comprehensible when you think about the direction of the company and where UBER was headed
First of all, it is important to understand that their business is logistics. So even though they sell themselves as a virtuous solution to the problems of transportation and employment, that is just their marketing tool since their priority in the long run is to have autonomous vehicles on the road as soon as possible in order to reduce labor costs and increase their margins.
With this in mind, I return to my previous question. Can UBER save our cities, lives and public transportation systems?
NO, THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE. Even taking Kalanick out of the picture, none of these points are part of the obectives of the company because, really, UBER just wants to move things from one place to another at the lowest cost possible.
In fact, Kalanick wasn’t relived of his duties because of the sexism scandal, nor for his zero capacity to change UBER’s toxic corporate culture, nor for the scandal with WAYMO, nor for lying to governments, and not for the serious privacy problems with the application. Kalanick was permanently removed owing to his incredible ability to burn cash and for his idea that “it is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission”, which happens to be the mentality of a large part of Silicon Valley.
Innovation, technology and disruptive ideas. Everything is nice and pretty when seen in sleek PowerPoint presentation or heard at talks at business schools, but we can’t forget that laws don’t exist to frustrate business dreams. Rather they exist to protect people, especially the most vulnerable in society. Since UBER needs to improve its imagine, it shouldn’t hesitate to hire some pretty faces to do so.
For Bruce Sterling, our favorite cyberpunk author, this debate of taxis versus UBER is about much more than two worlds colliding. As he explained in FAB 10 in 2014, it is essential to understand the implications of delegating political control over our streets to a privately operated company in California. Assuming that we succeed in exterminating the hated taxis, this sheep that we have raised will show the wolf underneath by setting prices as it wishes owing to its monopoly position. Worse still, we won’t realize until it is too late.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYNaoMkY8qY
In Chile we have elections just around the corner, and even if our candidates have proven open to regulating UBER and other applications, their lack of understanding of the moral dimensions of this particular technology have us close to doing things “the Chilean way”. In other words, with zero foresight.
Today, rather than rewrite laws with UBER in mind, it is more important to redesign and modernize our network of taxis; rather than pray for the arrival of the revolutionary “UBER Pool” it is more useful to rethink our cities and incentivize carpooling. When a candidate understands the true dimensions of the problem, we will have someone that sees things as they are not as they were told things are at Sunday brunch.
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