With today’s news that Travis Kalanick has stepped down as chief executive of Uber, the ride-hailing giant has reached a crossroads on whether it will sink or swim.
Its many months of trials and tribulations may be too much to overcome, and the boorish company culture that has come to light again and again will no doubt prove too much for many former customers to overcome.
When Uber’s board essentially fired Kalanick, it wrote that he had “always put Uber first.”
That is not a good thing; that is part of the problem. By always putting Uber first, at all costs, he forgot that there’s a context to all this. What we’re learning from the early days of Uber is that perhaps the best way to fit into a particular universe is not to make enemies with everyone else in your immediate orbit (in this case, to name a few, taxicab companies and drivers, transit providers, and the occasionally unhappy customers you treat with disdain like mosquitoes).
In Uber’s quest to take over the world of tech-transportation, Kalanick and other leaders there have forgotten the many ways the company should be contributing to a better society.
We can thank Uber and other so-called “sharing economy” transportation companies (although the only part of Uber that truly meets this qualification is UberPool) for getting people to realize they don’t always have to drive everywhere, alone in private vehicles. Uber has become a powerful tool to persuade people to give up car ownership altogether.
Many cities have been working to integrate Uber, Lyft, and other companies into extending the reach of their fixed mass-transit systems. Hopefully that work continues because it really could improve problems created by pollution and traffic jams. Perhaps even better, transit agencies themselves, after years of sluggishly moving into the 21st century, are starting to copy the ways Uber has made travel so effortless because of information obtainable through technology.
In the end, if services like Uber can cut total vehicle trips in congested areas, then they can play a major role in helping city governments and planners design much more livable places. After all, if a city could reduce car ownership by 15,000 vehicles, $127 million could stay in the local economy.
That’s where Uber and its board could take a step back to think about how it wants to get, to cop a phrase from D.C. Metrorail, “back to good.”