Longread: Inside Uber’s Public Policy Fights

A new Forefront takes a deep dive into why a new app that connects riders with drivers is roiling the transportation industry.

Credit: Darcy Padilla.

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One of the challenges about writing a profile of Uber is that it’s not clear what to call the company. Their self-conception is of a tech company that connects people to high-quality transportation options, but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It’s something rather new and different that isn’t well captured by the ways that history has taught us to think about public transportation, which is one of the reasons that cities across the country are struggling to figure out what to make of them.

In a new Forefront, we do a deep dive into Uber’s public policy battles, with a particular focus on the heated one in Washington, D.C. A taste:


In the winter of 2008, Kalanick and fellow entrepreneur Garrett Camp were hanging around Paris for the tech conference LeWeb, dreaming up their next great idea. Kalanick had just finished a yearlong stint at Akamai, the Massachusetts-based tech company he’d sold a firm to, and Camp had just sold his firm StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million. Kalanick would later recall that Camp’s big vision was to fix San Francisco’s broken taxi market: “Look, I just want to push a button and get a ride.” Kalanick is soft-spoken and solidly built with a thick mop of dark hair graying at the temples and narrow, deep-set eyes that suggest earnestness. But Camp likes the high life. He wants, Kalanick says, “to roll in style, comfort and convenience.”

And so Camp’s original vision was appropriately high-end: Buying up 10 Mercedes Benz S-Classes (sticker price: $95,000), hiring 20 drivers and purchasing a parking garage.

But Kalanick had little interest in bogging himself down with cars, garages or drivers. So the pair came up with a lighter-weight plan: An app, accessible only by private code handed to a hundred friends, that would instantly summon a black car. They’d simply be the cleverly engineered software layer between riders and existing black cars on the road. “It wasn’t about taking over the world,” Kalanick has said. “It wasn’t about taking on corruption in every city around the world. It was actually just about being baller in San Francisco.”

Just a handful of years later, Uber is disrupting the taxi industry from coast to coast. If that’s of interest, read this.

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: shared city

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