Uber Adding Shared Bikes, Rental Cars, and Public Transit Tickets
Uber is looking to be virtually a one-stop transportation shopping app, saying on Wednesday it will add new services, including car-sharing and train tickets. The company will also share more of its data on traffic patterns and curbside usage with cities in an effort to become “true partners to cities for the long term,” Khosrowshahi said.
Later this month in San Francisco, the ride-hailing firm will launch Uber Rent in collaboration with Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing service that offers privately owned cars for rent.
“We’re going beyond cars. We are about mobility – making mobility available to everyone, everywhere,” Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said at a forum on Wednesday in Washington. “We want to be part of the solution.”
Uber also announced a partnership with Masabi, which offers mobile ticketing services for public transport, to let customers book and use tickets for train, bus and ferry services in the app.
It sounds like Uber wants to do it all.
The company is also adding bicycle-sharing services in some cities after acquiring dockless bike-sharing service Jump earlier this week. It started with San Francisco. Next up is Washington, D.C.
Going forward, Uber will be less about simply booking a car but traveling “from Point A to Point B in the best way” with a variety of transit options, he said.
One big challenge, he added, is the future of the world’s 1.2 billion vehicles. “We have to solve the issue of car ownership,” Khosrowshahi said.
