Can Uber survive the pandemic by helping transit authorities serve people better?

Attitude is no substitute for learning.

Uber is licensing its ride-hailing software to three more public transit agencies

Uber is expanding its software as a service (SaaS) business with three additional public transit partnerships. The ride-hailing company announced that it would be selling the software that powers its ride-hailing business to transit agencies in Denver, Colorado; Cecil County, Maryland; and Porterville, California. The news comes amid Uber’s broader push into public transit.

– I am doing a lot of interviews these days about my new book, about the year+ I spent driving for Uber, and the question of Uber’s future nearly always comes up. Do I think the model can survive the…

And calling drivers violent road users

When you depend so much on tips, are you even considered paid?

How low an hourly wage do you have to get before you’re considered underpaid? How does $2.13 an hour sound? Pretty wretched, right?

Ending the subminimum wage for tipped workers such as bartenders, waiters, and hairdressers would decrease poverty and inequality, a new analysis by the Center for American Progress shows.

The analysis looked at wages in the eight states that have already eliminated the tipped minimum wage – California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Montana, Minnesota, Alaska and Hawaii – finding that in those states workers and businesses in…

Et oui, faisons du fleuve une personne

Expand the social safety net to protect all workers

There is no question freelancers and other gig economy workers toil hard. And often for crumbs. I should know; I’ve been a freelancer for decades and I drove for Uber just over a year (new book alert!) between mid-2018 and late 2019, after a separation left me with few (haha) immediate job options. Freelancers and “giggers” work. Hard. Most of them don’t mind. I know I didn’t. Most of them also know there is no safety net under them. You get no paid vacations, no sick leave, no pension, no nothing…

No, Uber isn’t more efficient than the bus

Some people feel like it would make sense to replace low-ridership transit routes with subsidized Uber. And you can see why: Running a big bus is expensive (also noisy and smelly), surely there are better and cheaper ways to move small numbers of people around other than those big buses so why not subsidize Uber for those passengers? I mean, obviously, right?

In a report done by Uber itself, it says replacing low-ridership routes with subsidized individual rides makes a lot of sense. But there’s a catch: by low-ridership routes Uber means…

Road safety, empathy for parents who lose a pregnancy and heating your shower with lettuce

Slowing down cars

Some good news:

In Massachusetts, new rules require state highway engineers to incorporate facilities for pedestrians, wheelchair users, and mass transit patrons as basic components of highway construction projects, and Virginia legislators are considering a bill that would let the state’s cities and counties set speed limits as low as 15 miles per hour in commercial and residential districts.

Among the new rules for roads in Massachusetts are five-foot-wide sidewalks, buffered bike or shared-use paths on bigger roads with high traffic, and mandatory consultation before changing transit routes.

And soon, in Virginia, it will no longer be…

We can’t afford not to invest in children

Nick Kristof in the Times makes an impassioned plea for President Biden to continue pushing the idea of universal pre-K education and affordable child care. You know, like what most advanced countries have.

Can we afford this Biden revolution in child programs? It will indeed be expensive. And there is a perennial debate over whether it’s better to have programs that are targeted at the neediest (which are more cost-effective) or those that are universal (which are politically more sustainable).

But I’ve written about the heartache in my hometown in rural Oregon…

The pandemic is the best opportunity to reduce the number of cars on the road, whether they’re moving or not

Every single time anyone mentions the need to remove cars from the roads for the benefit of human beings not in private vehicles you get the same complaint: But how will businesses survive without parking spots right outside their door?

World’s. Tiniest. Violin.

I’m old enough to remember when everyone, everywhere, smoked. I got my first job, at a suburban McDonald’s in Quebec City, in 1986 and back then, the restaurant was 4/5 smokers.

Of the 100 or so seats, about 80 were in the smoking section. Yes, the indoors smoking section. The non-smoking section, maybe 15 feet away with…