Transportation

Uber expands to car rentals and all things transportation

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Photo by Victor Xok on unsplash

This week Uber announced expanded services that move them into more modes of transportation. From the Uber press release: “Having a greater variety of transportation modes at your fingertips helps make it increasingly easy to live without a car. That’s why we want to provide alternatives to personal car ownership by bringing together multiple modes of transportation right in our app.” They’re calling this collaboration with cities. To me it looks like some new ways for Uber to sell services to customers. But in a very smart integration as Uber tries to become people’s go-to app for all transportation needs. (Up next: Uber for flight booking?)

Most interesting is the new service: Uber Rent. In partnership with GetAround, a company that helps people earn money renting out their cars to strangers, Uber users will now be able to rent a car within the app. This peer to peer rental partnership is great exposure for GetAround. It will be interesting to see if Uber users will embrace peer to peer car rentals when it becomes easy through the Uber app.

At the same time Uber is expanding their dockless bike rental service, JUMP, to Washington DC. This service was first rolled out in San Francisco a few months ago.

And if cars and bikes aren’t enough for you, Uber also announced a partnership with a company that offers mobile ticketing services for public transportation services. This will enable Uber users to book tickets for trains, busses and ferries within the app.

While people love to hate Uber, they continue to move towards greater dominance in the transportation space. If they can stop putting up their own roadblocks with horrible reputation blunders, Uber is bound to become a major player in all things related to local transportation.

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