Written: January 28, 2017
It appears to have been a major plank of Uber’s strategy from the beginning to ask for forgiveness rather than permission to operate in various cities around the world. Where there have been official bans or opposition to Uber and services like it, the company has often entered a market anyway, built up a critical mass of drivers and passengers and then used those stakeholders to put pressure on local lawmakers and others to give it official permission to operate.
This strategy has mostly worked out for Uber – it’s been able to argue that it provides significant benefits in terms of job creation, safer rides, lower costs, increased taxi capacity, and more for the citizenry. And both drivers and users have backed up these claims, putting pressure on municipalities and those who run them on the basis that they’re holding back progress.
This strategy hasn’t been without its speed bumps – Uber doesn’t always get what it wants (as in the case of Austin, which required fingerprinting drivers and eventually drove out both Uber and Lyft), and in some cases Uber has made exaggerated claims about how good it is for the local economy and been caught out.
Though there are relatively low risks to the strategy when it comes to ride sharing alone, the stakes rise considerably higher when it comes to autonomous driving, as Uber recently discovered in San Francisco. There, Uber attempted to launch a trial of self-driving cars without official permission from the California DMV, perhaps hoping that its general approach to regulation would win out here too. But its trial was quickly shut down, and Uber left San Francisco for Arizona. The fact that one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles ran a red light on the first day of the trial (though allegedly with a human driver) is an apt symbol of the greater risks of flouting such regulations relative to those governing taxi use. Most of its extra-legal activities have risked fines, but rogue autonomous cars risk passenger, driver, and pedestrian safety.
Uber appears to have reined in the worst excesses of its anti-regulation stance in recent years, becoming more accommodating of local rules and finding alternative ways into markets where necessary, now that its business is mature enough and it no longer needs to expand quite as aggressively. But its reputation for flouting regulation is well deserved and will likely stick around for some time to come even if Uber takes its foot off the gas a bit.