Washington (United States) (AFP) – Uber announced plans Wednesday to add mass transit, bike-sharing and other options to its mobile app, as it unveiled a vision for urban transportation integrating options in addition to ridesharing.
Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi revealed the plans during a visit to Washington where he said the ride-hailing pioneer would seek a more diversified model that offers users various transport options including car rentals on a partner peer-to-peer service.
“More and more, Uber is not just going to be just about taking a car, but is about moving from point A to point B in the best way,” Khosrowshahi told an event in the newly launched Uber driver center in the US capital.
Khosrowshahi said the Uber app would start including locations for electric bikes from its newly acquired bike-sharing group Jump, which is currently in Washington and San Francisco.
Uber also announced a partnership with the peer-to-peer car-sharing service Getaround to allow users to rent vehicles from individual owners, with a launch planned later this month in San Francisco.
The service will be labeled Uber Rent “so that you can use your Uber app if you need a car and you want to drive yourself, if you need a car for an hour, a day, etc.,” the Uber chief said.
For mass transit, the San Francisco startup said it would allow app users to see various options on its app and would launch a partnership with the e-ticketing service Masabi that would eventually allow the Uber app to be used instead of tickets or passes.
Masabi has partnerships with transit systems in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and train and transit operators in Europe.
Khosrowshahi said the new plans aim at helping Uber offer solutions for an increasingly urban world population and reduce the need for car ownership.
“Having a greater variety of transportation modes at your fingertips helps make it increasingly easy to live without a car,” he said.
“That’s why we want to provide alternatives to personal car ownership by bringing together multiple modes of transportation right in our app.”
The company announced it would make aggregated traffic data to help planners in 12 new cities worldwide under its Uber Movement plan, to bring the total to 21.
The new cites are Amsterdam, Bangalore, Brisbane, Cairo, Hyderabad, Melbourne, Mumbai, Nairobi, New Delhi, Perth, Pittsburgh and Toronto.
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