How about the city that replaced public transport with Uber



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Innisfil is a small town of about 40,000 people in the province of Ontario, Canada, born in an old rural area not far from Toronto that has experienced rapid population growth in recent years. A few years ago, the city administration was faced with a complex problem for a city struggling with the sudden growth of its inhabitants: how to ensure an efficient public transport service while controlling costs?

The main option on the table was the investment in three new bus lines, which would have cost about a million Canadian dollars a year (just under 700,000 euros): a figure that the city could not at that time -the. to permit. It was decided to try something completely different, which could have been an economy for the coffers of the city: rely entirely on Uber, the company best known for its service halfway between taxis and the car hire with driver, which connects drivers and pbadengers via an app.

"We wanted to put all the drivers in the city in touch with those who had to pbad by: we thought this could be the basis of our entire transportation system, and as Uber had already done, it seemed the most sensible ", says al guardian Paul Pentikainen, Urban Planning Manager, Innisfil. A collaboration with Uber was launched two years ago. Since then, anyone using the city app can choose the Innisfil Transit option to travel with a discounted Uber car.

As with traditional public buses, there are fixed stops at the points of interest of the city where you can find an Uber car: a trip for pbadengers has a fixed rate ranging from 3 to 6 Canadian dollars (between and 4 euros) depending on the route you want to travel, much less than it would normally cost because most of the costs are borne by the city.

Two years later, he tells the Guardian it can be said that the operation worked among the citizens, with 85,943 trips made in 2018 alone, who appreciate the convenience of Uber service compared to conventional public buses. But we wonder if it was really useful to the city and if it did not cause any other problems. The first question to consider is the cost that all this has had for the city's administration: if the goal to be achieved by working with Uber was to reduce the costs of public transport, we would end up spending more to pay Uber.

The service has become so popular among citizens that more and more people are using it, and costs have increased accordingly. In 2018, the city had paid Uber 640,000 Canadian dollars (570,000 euros), but in 2019, this figure should reach 1.2 million Canadian dollars (just over 800 000 euros): more than 900 000 dollars budgeted and more than one million. that it would cost the three bus lines.

For this reason, the city is trying to dissuade people from using too much Uber, limiting to 30 the number of trips that residents can make in a month – even if it is possible to request an exemption – and has also increased $ 1 a day. cost of each trip. For the time being, however, the efforts made have not resulted in savings, because, along with the increase in revenue due to higher rates, the number of residents who have managed to obtain an exemption from the monthly travel limit has also increased.

According to transportation expert Jarrett Walker, services such as Uber can work well in expanding, sparsely populated cities, such as Innisfil, where bus stops would be far from destinations, but at the same time when many people start making them. use the city budget is affected by the force. The intensive use of Uber cars also has an impact on the environment and on the pollution of cities. A recent study published in the scientific journal Science Advance have shown that services such as Uber and Lyft (another very popular transportation company in the United States) were the main factors behind the increase in traffic in the city of San Francisco, where it increased from 2010 to 2016 62 percent.

According to the most critical opinions, services such as Uber's in Innisfil can be helpful in managing urban transport, but can not completely replace public transport. Uber, among other things, is not doing very well economically, and its listing last May has not yet yielded the expected results. Entrusting all public transportation from a city to Uber could also represent a short-term economy (and the case of Innisfil shows that this is not the case), but the precarious economic situation of the company suggests that this is not an idea. very clairvoyant. According to some, investing in public transport is the best choice, as it remains the most economically and environmentally sustainable and the most reliable in the long term.

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