In Defense of Uber the Idea

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opinion/uber-travis-kalanick-lyft.html

Version 0 of 1.

This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox.

I’m grateful that Travis Kalanick started Uber.

Before he did, I often found myself at the mercy of a taxi company that dominated my neighborhood. The night before a flight, I’d call to reserve a cab, and it might — or might not — arrive. Monopolies generally don’t excel at customer service.

Uber busted open the local taxi monopoly in many places. It brought down prices that those monopolies had kept artificially high, and it gave travelers a new option. Because I don’t own my own car, I’ve used Uber hundreds of times.

But I’m not blind to its problems.

The company has mistreated its drivers. It engages in shady behavior toward competitors. And it has had a toxic corporate culture tolerant of sexual harassment.

Despite all the bad publicity from these problems, Uber’s growth has continued unabated. When Kalanick — the volatile company founder who just announced a leave of absence in response to the problems — was having a rough day in recent months, he would look at a graph of the company’s revenue to cheer himself up, Reeves Wiedeman reported in New York magazine.

As Randall Stross wrote in a recent op-ed, “As long as the company keeps growing, the founder can be forgiven almost anything.”

So what is someone like me supposed to do?

Farhad Manjoo of The Times had the best answer I’ve yet seen to the Uber dilemma. “So far,” he wrote, “we’ve been failing at holding Uber accountable.” For all the talk about #DeleteUber on social media and about switching to Lyft, another app-based car service, most people, like Manjoo and me, have kept on using Uber.

Now is the time to make a change.

I opened the Lyft app on my phone yesterday for the first time in months. I plan to start using it as my default. I encourage other Uber users to do the same. Zacks, a research firm, has published a list of alternatives, beyond Lyft.

I’m perfectly willing to go back to Uber if it improves its behavior. I still support the idea of Uber, just not the execution.

As Manjoo wrote: “Ride-sharing, as an industry and a civic utility, is too big an idea to be left to a company like the one Uber is now. The company that wins this industry is bound to become one of the world’s most powerful corporations. Its executives and culture will indirectly shape how we build cities, how we use energy, how we employ and pay people.”