Uber CEO Travis Kalanick at a press conference in Beijing earlier this year. (credit: Getty Images)
VANCOUVER, BC—Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of Uber, came to TED 2016 to talk about the “future of human-driven transportation.” How can we cut traffic, congestion, and parking using technology? Kalanick suggests the problem isn’t so much technology; rather, it's regulations. And Kalanick believes that history is on his side.
There was “an Uber before there was Uber,” Kalanick said during his presentation today. He referenced a service called the jitney, a shared ride endeavor that was popular more than 100 years ago (the word “jitney” was slang for “a nickel” at the time). In 1914, an enterprising LA man grew tired of very long trolley lines and simply put a sign on his car advertising five cent rides. It exploded. As difficult as it may be to believe, Kalanick said Uber does as many rides in LA per day in 2016 as the jitney did in 1915.
Clearly it was something people really wanted then, but the jitney wouldn’t last. The urban transportation monopoly at the time was the trolley industry. Trolley owners and operators hated jitneys, and they lobbied across the country to slow down the service. Although LA’s nascent jitney service climbed to 50,000 rides in a single day, trolley operators were eventually successful in shutting them out. The ride-sharing pioneer died out entirely in just five years.
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