Uber positions itself as future of urban transit

In Quebec, Uberspends a lot of its energy making the case of its very existence amidst strong opposition from the taxi industry and back-and-forth negotiations with the provincial government.

Elsewhere, the ride-hailing service has been positioning itself as a key part of the public transportation model of tomorrow.

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Andrew Salzberg, Uber'sGlobal Mobility Policy Lead, spoke withCBC MontrealNews at 6 host Debra Arbecabout Uber's urban transportation vision.

The native Montrealer, who was in town for the New Cities Summit, talked aboutUber's ride sharing service UberPool (also known as UberHop), why new ideas cause friction with traditional governments, and the need to change the way we thinkabout public transit.

Q: For a city like Montreal that's always under construction and congested, how can Uber be part of the solution?

I think Montreal has a unique challenge with the summer period being short. We only have two season we have winter and we have road construction.

A lot of that is a necessary thing to do roads have to bemaintained, construction has to happen. What's exciting for us is that in a lot of cities around the world, we've been able to start being part of the conversation around issues like congestion. I think one of the ways that we've done that we're most excited about is UberPool essentially that's our shared ride product.

• Could ride sharing be the answer to reducing gridlock in Canada's cities?

We're now in more than 40 cities around the world with UberPool and the obvious to benefit to congestion is that if you have tworiders who used to take twoseparate cars and now they're only taking one car or ideally even threeor fourpeople that means you're taking those miles off the road that would've been separate cars and pooling them into one car. So the less traffic we have on the road, the more we can help fight congestion and [have] environmental benefits.

Q:Shouldn't we be encouraging people to use public transit instead of cars?

We're big fans of public transit. If you look even at a place like Montreal, which I think has one of the best transit systems in the world, 70 per cent of commuters in the Montreal metro area drive to work by themselves. So that's a huge market that we can help to make an impact on and the most obvious consequence of all that driving has is parking. If you drive to work, if you drive to a shopping centre, if you drive to wherever you're going, you require a parking space. And that parking eats up a huge amount of space.

There's studies out there that show that when we provide more parking, it encourages more driving, more driving requires more parking and there's this huge cycle over time.

Q: How does a company like Uber promote new ideas within traditionalgovernments?

There hasn't been a ton of innovation in the transportation space since the SecondWorld War. We built a lot of highway infrastructure, we built a lot of parking, we built suburbs and we kind of sort of stopped innovating. I think in the last fiveyears or so with companies like Uber and other ones in the space, we've seen a lot of new methods of getting people to take rides, to get out of their cars, to share rides, and when you do new things, there's always going to be some conflicts with what's happened before.

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There's a huge amounts of benefits for cities working together and I think we're hopeful that we're going to get to that place here as we have in many jurisdictions around the world.

Q: Do you see a day where you can work with taxis in Quebec?

Florida, in Pinellas county it's one of the first places we ever had a transit partnership. The agency there is providing discounts on Uber rides if you go to and from bus stations but you can also get the same discount on a taxi provider. So I think there's opportunities for us to work jointly in the right environment.

Q: Where do you think transportation will be in a decade?

Right now, the dominant mode is you get in your own car, you drive yourself, you park it at your destination and there's a lot of inefficiency in that model. If we can get to a world where every car on the road is shared, people are hopping in and out, I think that makes road space much more efficient, it makes cities more liveable, so that's the kind of world we're excited to build through UberPool.

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