Uber is working hard to get New Yorkers on board with its carpooling service, by—how else?—bribing them.
“From cooking classes to rock climbing, every prize has been specially curated to help jumpstart a great 2015,” gushes an email the company sent to users this morning, offering anyone in New York City who uses UberPool this week a chance to win an array of goodies.
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UberPool was already up and running in San Francisco and Paris when it launched in New York in December. The service allows users to share their ride and its cost with strangers requesting cars along a similar route, cutting what each rider pays by up to 50 percent, according to Uber. Major competitor Lyft launched a similar service in San Francisco in August called Lyft Line, which has since expanded to Los Angeles.
Uber has called UberPool “a bold social experiment”
Uber has called UberPool “a bold social experiment” and released an “etiquette guide” for riding with people you don’t know, which includes not taking a sweaty shared car home from the gym. Although UberPool is advertised as a much cheaper alternative to the standard Uber services, some users apparently need extra incentive to hop in a car with randos, which is where this week’s promotion comes into play.
So, with New Yorkers already shuttling around in UberX (cars driven by regular folks trying to earn cash on the side), UberT (which calls a city-certified cab), and the company’s other livery services, why would Uber want passengers to double up?
One potential answer is that Uber has long touted a goal of making its services so cheap and accessible that people will actually sell their cars. In a statement announcing the service in August, Uber billed the carpooling option as “an important step” on the road to this goal.
For every fully utilized UberPool car on the road in NYC, eight cars could be taken off the road, a company spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. Eventually, the company believes UberPool could replace as many as one million cars in New York.
“Fewer cars on the road mean less congestion, fewer emissions, and less time stuck in traffic,” the representative said. “We are very excited about the potential impact of UberPool and believe it can be part of the solution for solving cities’ tough transportation challenges.”
But what’s in it for Uber? For one, fewer car owners mean more potential customers. A future with fewer people driving means more people may rely the company for rides. And after taking heat for its surge pricing—most recently during an Australian hostage crisis—UberPool could help balance the ratio of drivers to users.
Benefiting from these changes under the guise of cheaper rides for users is a smart business move for Uber—but first it has to convince the riders to get in.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said UberPool launched in New York in August; it actually launched formally in December.
