London-Uber’s new chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi will be in the UK on Tuesday for a meeting with Transport for London (TfL). He hopes the negotiations will stop the imminent revoking of his company’s license to run its ride-sharing business in the capital. When TfL, backed by Mayor Sadiq Khan, announced Uber would no longer be allowed to operate, the service’s 3.5m users, and 40,000 drivers, were aghast. Despite the very best efforts of the cab trade, Uber has become a valued way for Londoners to get around, particularly late at night. The same was true in Austin, Texas. It’s a city that shares few similarities with London, other than its own bitter tussle with Uber - the fallout from which could contain clues as to what might happen if, and it’s a big if, TfL follows through with its threat. Uber had been available in Austin since 2014. But on 10 May 2016, Uber (and rival service Lyft) turned off their apps and left. Less than 24 hours earlier, Austinites had gone to the polls to vote on Proposition 1. It was a law that removed a requirement on ride-sharing companies to gather fingerprints as part of their background checks on drivers, as well as sharing more data with city officials.
Uber didn’t want to do this. It argued that the fingerprint database drivers would be cross-checked against would be ineffective.
It’s also likely - though Uber never expressed this publicly - that adding a layer to the sign-up process would make it more time-consuming, and expensive, to recruit drivers.
It’s something the company, in all the markets it works in, constantly seeks to avoid - and in Austin it was prepared to spend big to avoid the restrictions.
Andy Tryba and his team got to work. “We basically stayed up all night for about four weeks or so to kind of get it up and going,” he told me.
“It’s to my knowledge the world’s only non-profit version of ride-share.”
He’s the co-founder of Ride Austin, a locally developed app that stepped in to take Uber’s place - one of about 11 eventual alternatives that popped up in the weeks and months after Uber’s disappearance.
Unlike Uber and Lyft, which take a percentage of a ride’s final fare, RideAustin takes a fixed $2 fee, regardless of how long or far the journey.
Riders are offered the chance to round up their fare and donate the extra amount to a number of charities - it has so far raised over $250,000.
“There were 125,000 a week or so that were occurring in the city when Uber and Lyft were operating here. Obviously, the day that they pulled out there was a bit of an adjustment period.
“But within a few weeks, there were several players that came into town. Very quickly that total number of rides were filled by those other players.”
Saturday night failure
There were teething problems with these new apps, said Mike Allen, who has driven in Austin for almost two years.
“It was a fun challenge to get them to a point where they were able to work for us as drivers,” he said. “But we got there.”
The real test came when it was time for the most famous event in Austin’s calendar - South by Southwest. The tech, music and film festival draws thousands to the city every year, and in 2017 it presented the new apps with their biggest challenge yet in handling the demand.