Uber says Toronto ideal for car-pooling app
Despite injunction from city, company looks to use service to help curb traffic congestion
Ride-hailing company Uber believes Toronto would be the perfect venue to roll out its car-pooling app UberPool, given the region’s worsening traffic congestion.
“At full adoption, it can take hundreds of thousands of cars off the road,” said Uber Canada general manager Ian Black during a meeting with the Star’s editorial board on Monday.
“It takes some time to get there, but we are very much looking at rolling this out in Toronto in the near future,” he said. “We think Toronto is the perfect city and the perfect use case.”
Uber already operates taxi and limo services as well as UberX, where ordinary people are paid to drive passengers around in their own private vehicles.
Insurance officials have warned UberX drivers that they need commercial policies. Uber says it has a $5-million policy with AIG Canada to handle additional damages not covered by personal policies.
The city of Toronto has sought a permanent injunction to shut down all of Uber’s operations. A two-day court hearing was held earlier this month, but the judge has not issued his decision yet.
UberX prices are already cheaper than taxis, but an UberPool ride from Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave. to downtown would be $6 to $7, compared with $10 to $13 for UberX.
The company’s platform can track similar ride requests and link them together. The service is already operating in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In San Francisco, about half of all Uber rides are for the car-pooling service.
Uber drivers in Toronto were informed last week that UberPool could be in the works, and were urged to complete the required online training. When asked whether Uber would try to launch the new service during the Pan Am Games, especially given all the temporary high-occupancy lanes requiring three people in a car, Black refused to say.
“We don’t have a date at this point,” he said.
“Pan Am is a great time. So is a regular Monday in the summer,” he said.
“We definitely need high occupancy. It doesn’t make sense that most car trips only have one person in them.”
Black disputed the suggestion that introducing a new car-pooling service would dilute its business, arguing the key is to increase overall demand.
“What we see in our business is if you can make transportation more affordable, they will come to it in droves,” he said. “With UberPool, the average trip will cost $5 or $6.”
That could get people out of their cars and downtown parking lots. “We view it from a long-term perspective. We want to see people taking car pooling as a reliable option,” Black said.