Uber's stock has done exceptionally well this year. At the time of writing this post, it's up over 60% year-to-date. But at the same time, it remains unclear to me what the relationship will be between Uber and this brave new world of autonomous vehicles.
I mean, right now, if you're in Phoenix, I'm told you can order a Waymo car through Uber's app. But if you're in San Francisco, Waymo customers must use the Waymo app. It's all bit mirky right now, but Uber is just trying to put "as many cars on Uber's network as possible."
There's also an argument that, for the foreseeable future, ride-hailing networks are going to need some mixture of both human and robot drivers. I get this argument. But beyond the short term, I think there will be strong incentives to completely eliminate human drivers.
Last month, the New York Times announced that Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the company's co-founder who got pushed out 8 years ago, to help him buy autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai.
It's a bit of an interesting story. Pony is a Chinese company, but because the US doesn't want Chinese tech to become too deeply embedded in the American economy — and has become increasingly hostile to such companies — it has been readying a clean US subsidiary of the business for sale.
This is what Travis allegedly wants to buy with the help of Uber. And it's particularly noteworthy because it could be an indication that Uber is worried about Waymo and wants to have its own AV unit (which it had previously, but then sold off in an effort to quickly reach profitability).
My sense is that Uber needs to do something along these lines. The risk of not having autonomous vehicle capabilities is simply too great.
Cover photo by Viktor Avdeev on Unsplash
Okay, so I haven't been (yet). But if you're an urbanist in search of a new city to check out, consider Pontevedra in northwestern Spain. Pontevedra is famous for its car-free city center. Starting in 1999, then-mayor Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores began making some radical changes to prioritize pedestrians and turnaround a city in decline. They'd still be considered radical today, so I can only imagine what they felt like back in the 90s.
The historic center of the city, which covers an area of about 300,000 m2 (or about 74 acres), was fully pedestrianized. The area surrounding it was also converted to a low-traffic zone, bringing the total size of the pedestrian-oriented area to more than 1.3 million m2 (or about 321 acres). To put this into perspective, High Park in Toronto is just under 400 acres.
The result is that vehicular traffic dropped by ~92% in the historic center and ~53% in the city as a whole. Today, walking accounts for over 65% of all trips and the average resident walks about 5 km per day (roughly equivalent to 6,000 to 7,500 steps). On top of this, over two-thirds of children now walk to school. And the city hasn't reported a single pedestrian death from cars in over a decade!
But how has the city performed economically since the change? Some 15,000 people have moved to the city since it became car-free and the total inventory of shops and restaurants has increased. It has also been reported that foot traffic went up (possibly by as much as 30%) and that retail vacancies dropped significantly. This is supported by research showing that well-designed pedestrianized areas do often drive higher retail sales.
Did you hear that Kensington Market?
Nationwide across the US, transit ridership is only at about 70% of where it was in 2019 before the pandemic. But this is not the case in all cities around the world. According to this recent Bloomberg article, Madrid, Hong Kong, and Paris are all above their 2019 ridership levels. Seoul and Shanghai are also close at just over 90%, and London is at 85%.
So this problem of fewer people riding transit seems to be a North and South American phenomenon. Rio de Janeiro is at 73%, Mexico City is at 70%, and San Francisco is somewhere near or at the bottom at 44%. The obvious explanations for this are that Europe and Asia are generally denser and less car-oriented, their return-to-office patterns have been much stronger (less WFH), and their governments probably care more about transit (and spend more money on it).
Broadly speaking, I think this is all true, but I'd love to know more precisely what's driving these differences. Because it's not exactly obvious. Consider, for example, Paris and London. Paris is at 103% of its 2019 levels, whereas London is only at 85%. Why is that? Both cities share a lot of similarities. They have a river that weaves through the middle, they're dense, they have lots of trains, and both are alpha global cities.
So why the delta? What exactly is Paris doing that is encouraging more transit usage?
Charts via Bloomberg
