Uber and Lyft are trying to be something other than, well, Uber and Lyft. Both companies are positioning themselves as “mobility platforms” instead of just ride-hail services.
How, you ask? Uber is incorporating mobile transit ticketing into its app, with partner Masabi. Uber is also letting people rent strangers’ cars in some cities, with the platform Getaround. And both Uber and Lyft are buying up the dockless bikeshare and scooter-share worlds like crazy.
“It’s almost ironic that scooters — until recently a niche product mainly the province of schoolkids — suddenly became so key to the companies’ visions of global transport dominance,” writes Carolyn Said for the San Francisco Chronicle.
More from Said, with a quote from our director Paul Mackie:
In San Francisco, about 58,000 ride-hailed trips a day, a third of all Uber and Lyft trips, are single-passenger hops of less than 3 miles, according to an analysis by SherpaShare.
Theoretically, those trips could be supplanted by bikes and scooters, although in reality many people will still prefer the convenience of car trips — and San Francisco’s initial caps on scooters (1,250 for the whole city) and dockless e-bikes (250) will limit usage.
While Lyft declined to comment for this story, it pointed to its scooter application, which stresses that it will provide incentives for scooter users going to or from public transit, while its app will use “real-time transit data to help scooter riders plan and execute multimodal trips using Muni, BART and Caltrain.”
Transit advocates, who often fret that Uber and Lyft clog roadways and create hazards for bicyclists, welcomed the companies’ entry into greener two-wheeled transport.
“Not many people in our country take bikes and scooters for utilitarian trips, for going to work, the grocery store, out at night even though it’s a low-cost healthy way to get around,” said Paul Mackie, director of research and communications at the Mobility Labs think tank. “It’s great that Uber and Lyft are putting money and publicity and building interest in these other great ways to travel. It lends credence to them as mobility companies, not just tech companies.”
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