As the urgency of the COVID-19 crisis would decrease, transportation will be getting an upgrade due to Uber offering its software expertise to the public transit system. So, starting from next month, passengers in the San Francisco Bay area will be able to book trips through the Uber app. And, they will be riding wheelchair-accessible public vans instead of private cars.
When they first started, Uber, Lyft Inc and other ride-hailing companies were competing with public bus and train services for passengers. However, in the past two years, around 120 U.S. transit agencies are collaborating with ride-hail films.
David Reich, Uber Technologies Inc’s head of transit, says that they’re leveraging the technology that they’ve been building for years and that providing software is a higher-margin service for them. Moreover, Uber is in talks with worldwide transit agencies to work on software-based projects.
In the midst of the ongoing pandemic, they are depending on each other to save cost and look for new business opportunities, with increasing cities deciding to implement on-demand services such as ride-hail companies. This will let cities to divert their buses from lesser-used routes to the more profitable ones and increasing passengers may just use them to save money, leaving their cars at home.
Lockdowns may be starting to become lesser strict, but trips are still very much lower than pre-pandemic days. Public transport is not so frequently used for which the transit officials are suffering. And, so when passenger count decreased 80%, the buses got replaced by the subsidized vans.
Miami-Dade is now planning on making this a permanent option. And, with information being integrated from around 15 cities worldwide, users in Las Vegas and Denver are being able to buy transit tickets via the Uber app.
Moreover, Uber is collaborating with at least 30 global transit agencies that will be using its ride services to connect passengers to their transport, replace less frequently used buses and offer wheelchair facilities.
