Uber Ride Sharing

If I were the gubment (and this falls under the auspices of that genius Dunc Gay of the NSW liberal party) I’d let Uber operate …

BUT

I’d make them include ride sharing in their app.

That is, a page on the app where users can post upcoming rides they need a host for, or are doing in their own car, and then let other users ride share with them through the app, free of payments to Uber.

Say I’m going to Canberra this weekend. I’m only an Uber user, not a driver. I post the Canberra trip and a couple of other users want to come along. We share petrol. No money to Uber. All they did was let users share info. And no liability to Uber either.

This is called car-sharing mixed with crowd sourcing. The benefit of doing it through Uber is that everyone is already a signed-up user; having enough users is the problem that haunts all crowd sourcing concepts. Especially ones without a business model.

This would be tough for Uber to swallow because it inherently shrinks their market and they don’t get paid.

The irony in my suggestion is that Uber is doing what’s it doing, it says (ha ha), in the interests of the user. They’d say no to such a suggestion (as above) of course.

And then the government could tell them to get fucked and be seen to be doing so in the customers’ interests and not in the interests of their mates with brown paper bags in the taxi industry.

This is a blog about good politics. A how to, if you like. That is, how to be a sneaky and effective politician. Like say Neville Wran – will we ever see his like again?

And the other irony is that there’s nothing good about Uber. As Jim Clark said, the Ubers of the world are just one big asshole in the middle replacing lots of little assholes in the middle.

Once they have the market wrapped up you wait and see how they decide to exploit their monopoly. It won’t be pretty.