Service Disruptions: TNCs as Public Transit Providers
by Molly Tran
“Move fast and break things” could be your local bus service’s next motto.
If Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft have their way, Silicon Valley-style “disruption”—i.e. externalizing risk on workers and consumers while maximizing profit for the company—could be coming to a public transit agency near you.
TNCs have made no secret of their desire to enter the mass transportation market. In 2018, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi pitched Uber as the “Amazon of Transportation,” a one-stop shop for all your mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) needs (Bliss 2018). To reach this goal, the company has trialed a feature called Mode Switch, an in-app tool that lets people see what modes of transportation the company offers in that location. You can plot your route and decide whether to take an (Uber) shared car, an (Uber) bike share, an (Uber) scooter, or buy transit tickets (with Uber getting a share).
“I want to run the bus systems for a city. I want you to be able to take an Uber and get into the subway...get out and have an Uber waiting for you.” —Dara Khosrowshahi, Hawkins 2018
But the company is not stopping there; Khosrowshahi wants to take over public transit: “I want to run the bus systems for a city. I want you to be able to take an Uber and get into the subway... get out and have an Uber waiting for you” (Hawkins 2018). They are advancing towards that goal on multiple fronts. Riders may be familiar with Uberpool, Uber’s cheaper, shared service option. However, they have also piloted an even more bus-like service called UberHop, a cheaper option that groups riders going to similar destinations, but requires them to walk to set pickup points before catching a ride and takes them to a set dropoff point near their destination. In some markets, subsidized Uber rides have replaced transit altogether, such as Innisfil, Ontario and Altamonte Springs, FL.
It is easy to overlook the importance of the bus. Riding the bus is virtual shorthand for “uncool,” after all. But that bus means access for all to the things we value: to jobs, healthcare, social and civic opportunity, school, healthy food, better air quality, improved social capital and physical activity. Transit is a covenant between stakeholders—the government, the agency’s employees, and the public—to deliver those things with equity, sustainability, safety, accountability, and reliability. Beyond this, transit provides eyes on the street, builds community, and allows us to explore our communities rather than getting in, getting on our smartphones, and not looking up until we arrive at our destinations.
TNCs fundamentally cannot fulfill this role—they have a different relationship to the public, workers, and government. I have studied Uber and Lyft and the effect they have on their drivers’ health and the safety of the public, since 2014. In short: it’s not good.
The simplest difference between TNCs and public transit agencies is that TNCs have a profit motive. That means their stakeholders are not the people in the cars bearing their logos—neither drivers nor passengers. Their stakeholders are their shareholders. This means that even if they simply act as a one-stop transportation app, they have motivation to steer consumers to the most profitable option. If they become a full-fledged transit provider, this motivation could have devastating consequences for neighborhoods and routes deemed not profitable enough.
But it is not simply being beholden to shareholders that makes this a bad deal for the public. TNCs have repeatedly demonstrated that they believe themselves to be above accountability. Khosrowshahi may say he wants to run a bus system, but when it comes to employing workers or complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act the company changes its tune. TNCs have maintained they are mere technology companies, not transportation companies, in order to get around regulation. (Rosenblat & Stark 2016). They have established a strategy of overcoming cities’ efforts to block or regulate them by entering a market illegally if necessary, then using their early adopters to advocate for them when cities try to enforce regulations against them (Calo & Rosenblat 2017). They also have a pattern of distancing themselves from any negative outcomes. Witness how quickly they placed the blame solely on the safety driver in the death of Elaine Herzberg, who was hit by an Uber autonomous vehicle in March 2018, or to peg Michael Hancock, the driver who shot a passenger to death in 2018 in Denver, as a lone bad seed.
Then there are the problems that stem from the apps themselves and the way the TNCs use them. This is known as algorithmic management—“a diverse set of technological tools and techniques to remotely manage workforces, relying on data collection and surveillance of workers to enable automated or semi-automated decision-making” (Mateescu 2019)—and it has serious consequences for workers and the public. While your city may have public safety announcements warning against fatigued driving, if city government partners with TNCs, they are supporting the opposite. In my own research, as well as that of Alex Rosenblat at Data & Society, drivers—who are theoretically free to set their own schedules, given they are independent contractors—are manipulated by the app to work long hours and drive fatigued. In addition to the simple arithmetic of making ends meet on a cut of the profits, which is low and frequently changing, TNCs drive workers to work long hours by using gamification (“Are you sure you want to log off? You’re almost at $40!”) to keep drivers on the road when and where the company wants (Tran 2017).
Another example of algorithmic management’s problematic nature is the ratings system. While it might seem the same as rating a restaurant on Yelp or a product on Amazon, the in-app rating system outsources the human resources functions of a boss to consumers. Below approximately 4.6 stars—the companies never make the cutoff explicit—drivers can be “deactivated,” the gig economy equivalent of being fired. In my research, this makes drivers feel powerless to control what happens in their vehicles for fear of getting a bad rating. So they cope in other ways. They cope by carrying weapons or by avoiding dangerous situations altogether by making snap judgments about who to let in the car and who to drive on by. These decisions are often based on racial and other biases which reproduce the same issues of passenger discrimination taxi companies have been accused of for years.
Finally, TNCs have used the “God view” of the app—the assembled data about their consumers and their drivers—to experiment on the public without their knowledge or consent. They’ve used software called “Greyball” originally developed to deny access to those suspected of violating the terms of service of the app, to thwart government regulators and local authorities in the United States, Australia, South Korea, and China. Uber has also used their extensive knowledge about individual consumers to charge higher rates for those whose phone batteries are low and to experiment with giving different consumers different quotes for essentially the same trip to help them finely calibrate the maximum consumers are willing to pay for a given trip. In a widely-publicized move, they also were censured for tracking consumers after their rides were completed in order to gather even more data about them. Is experimentation without the public’s knowledge or consent really a precedent we want to set for any public service?
TNCs are clearly tapping into a dormant demand for better public transportation. It is understandable, in an era of ever-decreasing budgets, that transit agencies might be tempted to outsource the solution to this challenge. The experience so far has been underwhelming. A report from the Shared Use Mobility Center on three years’ worth of data from Pinellas County, Florida’s partnership with Uber shows...well, the county did not require a data-sharing agreement from Uber, so it is difficult to know exactly what it showed. As part of the program, Uber provided first-and-last mile service to a low-ridership bus line and subsidized fares on an eliminated bus route. From what they do know, problems of scale quickly become evident: ridership on the route fully replaced by Uber maxed out at about 40 rides per day, with 10 people accounting for 30% of the rides. On the line for which Uber was supposed to provide first-and-last mile service, Uber rides cannibalized the bus ridership and the route was eventually cut. Considering that the Uber service was still more expensive, even with steeper subsidies than the County was paying per-rider for the bus lines (and this on prices that are being artificially depressed by venture capital money), it is clear this model cannot scale to fit true public transit needs (Murphy 2019). A worst-case-scenario is that they are allowed to become transit providers and then fold: “Imagine if that day of reckoning happens after the company has pivoted into an all-encompassing MaaS-dispenser, absorbing more public transit systems into its operations, too. That could hurt communities for whom a dependency on shared modes is not chosen but forced by financial constraints. Any meaningful shift away from private car ownership will require alternative services to be affordable on a virtually unlimited basis.” (Bliss 2018).
A recent San Francisco County Transportation Authority report found the TNCs were collectively responsible for 47% of the increase in vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2016 and 55% of the average speed decline on roadways during that same time period.
Beyond this, we know that TNCs are not decreasing the number of cars on the road—or even the number of single-occupancy vehicles. Studies across multiple cities have found TNCs are operating primarily in areas that already have good transit service, increasing congestion, and that much of that increase comes from vehicles cruising for the next fare (Schaller 2017). A recent San Francisco County Transportation Authority report found the TNCs were collectively responsible for 47% of the increase in vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2016 and 55% of the average speed decline on roadways during that same time period (SFCTA 2018). They also contribute to an ever-growing competition for curb space and which can contribute further to congestion or lead to dangerous behaviors like parking in bike lanes to drop off passengers. At the same time, they are already damaging transit wherever they go—a recent study found bus ridership in San Francisco has dropped 12.7% since 2010, when TNCs entered the market. Furthermore, they have done nothing to improve equity, a study of New York data showed the distribution of Uber services is highly unequal, and Uber’s role in improving transport equity is insignificant (Jin 2019).
If, despite the evidence against doing so, municipalities are going to partner with TNCs, they must take care to do so in a way that maintains our civic values. Municipalities should set the tone for the partnership with very clear terms and boundaries around their values and how the TNCs will fulfill their obligation to public. They must also set strategic objectives and demand data sharing from the TNCs in order to fully evaluate what is being spent and who is being served.
But even this may not fully address the highest price we may pay for $5 Uber rides: sacrificing the role transit agencies play in civic society. Access to jobs, healthcare, social and civic opportunity, school, healthy food, better air quality, improved social capital and physical activity is too important to leave to the whims of Silicon Valley. If cities are really serious about improving public transit, there are many other solutions that will ultimately be more effective and cheaper than partnering with TNCs. Bus-only lanes and true bus rapid transit will get buses out of traffic and competitive with single-occupancy vehicle speeds. Using data to improve routes and exchanging hub-and-spoke routes for orthogonal ones can make the system more efficient. Simple upgrades like better signage and clear stop announcements can make riding the bus a more frictionless experience. We don’t need Silicon Valley to save us. With visionary leadership and some smart changes, transit can move fast again...no breaking involved.
Header photo credit: Quote Catalog, www.quotecatalog.com
Bibliography
Bliss, L. (2018). Uber Pivots to On-Demand Everything. CityLab.
Calo, R., & Rosenblat, A. (2017). The taking economy: Uber, information, and power. Colum. L. Rev., 117, 1623.
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Data&Society report, available at https://datasociety.net/wpcontent/uploads/2019/01/DataandSociety_AIinContext. Pdf.
Murphy, C., Karner, K., & Accuardi, Z. (2019). When Uber Replaces the Bus: Learning from the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority's "Direct Connect" Pilot. Shared Use Mobility Center Report, available at https://learn.sharedusemobilitycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/SUMC_CaseStudy_Final3_06.21.19-1.pdf
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