The Phoenix Chapter of Young Professionals in Transportation and Downtown Devil hosted a panel discussion Tuesday evening about change and innovation within the ride-sharing industry.
The panel included Tru Cab owner Eric Mulvin, RubyRide car service owner Jeff Ericson and Aaron Golub, an ASU professor that focuses on transportation policy.
Mulvin, who started the taxi company Tru Cab nearly three years ago, said the cab industry’s biggest problem is competition with companies like Uber and Lyft.
“The big challenge for the cab industry is the definition of the cab, a vehicle for hire that takes someone from point A to point B,” Mulvin said. “If you look at Uber or Lyft it’s pretty much the same thing — it’s just they’re using an app.”
Mulvin said he started his company to improve the image of cab drivers, and his company became the highest-ranked cab company on Yelp.
Tru Cab went out of business last week. Mulvin said a large reason for that is the tough competition with other ride-share services.
“The convenience of Uber really makes it challenging because it’s really hard for a small company to try and build up enough vehicles to put out there,” Mulvin said. “Everyone wants a vehicle in five or 10 minutes, and when it’s busy on a Friday or Saturday night you can’t get that.”
Companies like Uber and Lyft often avoid regulations because they do not operate like traditional taxi companies. Mulvin said he feels his business suffered because he followed rules and didn’t want to perform unethical practices.
“There are a lot of regulations that cab companies have to follow that Uber and Lyft are not following,” Mulvin said. “If both continue to go down this path you are not going to see any more cab companies because it is not going to be profitable for them to operate.”
ASU professor Aaron Golub said that many of these regulations today are set from the 1930s, when taxis caused a lot more accidents.
“Most industries go through cycles of regulation and deregulation depending on changes in technology,” Golub said. “As society changes you gain or lose the ability to manage things in different ways.”
Golub said it is likely that drivers for Lyft and Uber will eventually be required to have some of the stricter insurance and the driver’s licenses that taxi drivers have. Just as Lyft and Uber become more like cab companies, Golub said, cabs will also continue to incorporate technical features like apps.
On the other end of the ride-sharing spectrum is RubyRide, a new subscription-based car service that allows its customers a scheduled allotment of rides for a monthly fee.
Jeff Ericson started RubyRide after working as an architect for 15 years.
“I came into this (industry) mostly out of frustration from a design standpoint, realizing that we don’t design our cities for people, we design or cities for cars,” Ericson said. “There’s no such thing as a good parking lot, but that’s what we design.”
Ericson said he has found there is a drastically changing attitude toward the car in general. He said the number of 16-year-olds that get driver’s licenses today has declined compared with the number in recent decades.
“The car culture is really changing, so the opportunities for transportation are really significant,” he said.
When he was coming up with the RubyRide concept, he said he thought about why the current transportation system in Phoenix doesn’t have better options.
“Transportation is a nail and we have handed (transportation board officials) a bunch of screwdrivers to solve the problem with. And they are using those screwdrivers in really ingenious ways, but they are still using the wrong tools to solve the problem,” he said.
Although he said the car culture has changed, the car is still the preferred mode of transportation.
“The car is still the easiest way to get around. I wanted to create a service that was as close to driving yourself as possible,” he said.
RubyRide operates on a network system that is zone-based, meaning that its drivers can more efficiently organize ride shares between different riders.
“(Customers) are fine with car-sharing, they would love to be more economical, but what they don’t want is having to manage the process and so what we are doing is managing that process for them,” Ericson said.
Ericson said he is excited to see how RubyRide will fit into the industry that continues to evolve, but he also hopes that eventually society can reduce the need for parking lots.
“We design these buildings to be more and more efficient and productive, but they are still only built on 25 percent of the land, so it’s just not a long-term smart way to do it,” Ericson said.
As far as the future of the rest of the ride-sharing industry goes, the panelists agreed that self-driving cars may ultimately end the transportation debate. But until then, there is still a lot of change to happen in a time of industry-wide upheaval.
Contact the reporter at taylor.brightwell@asu.edu
