The race to the bottom needs to stop

Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft have made it easier for people to summon and pay for trips in a private vehicle. Unfortunately, the lack of sensible regulation and the exponential growth comes with serious side effects. Digital platforms offered the promise of easy mobility but ended up contributing to clogging up city streets, rising carbon emissions and pollution, proliferating precarious work and causing more dangerous environments for cyclists, pedestrians and other road users.

With fares subsidized by international venture capital, ride-hailing companies like Uber have also undercut public transit. By moving public transit users into thousands of individual cars, they are eroding transit authorities’ capacity to provide (and grow) an effective public transit network.

Like other internet-based companies, ride-hailing platforms seem to play by their own rules. They extract value from our communities by using public infrastructure, but don’t pay anything back in taxes or decent jobs. They facilitate a race to the bottom that needs to stop.