Pittsburgh Finally Realizes How Uber Works

Here's a shocker. Uber has not lived up to its commitments to the city of Pittsburgh. It was less than a year ago the Uber selected that Pennsylvania city as a test site for its driverless car program. But the promises that Uber made to the city of Pittsburgh in order to become that test site remain largely undelivered.

Uber promised to hire people from the local community as part of its autonomous vehicle testing. But residents were just instructed to go to Uber's general jobs website and no one from the community in which the test track is located has been hired. Uber promised that rides in autonomous vehicles in the city would be free of charge, but went ahead and charged for them anyway. But the most important promise that Uber made was to help the city reform its public transportation system. To that end, Pittsburgh was relying on Uber's financial support to get a $50 million federal grant. Uber, however, withdrew support for the grant.

To be fair, Uber's Advanced Technology Center has helped revive an old steel district in the city and the company claims it has created nearly 700 jobs in the city. Unfortunately, the most lucrative of those jobs comes from Uber poaching the talent from Carnegie Mellon University, annoying officials there.

When the mayor of Pittsburgh welcomed Uber to his city, he did not get any of these commitments in writing. Instead, he relied on his personal relationship with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. So it is easy to say that the mayor was naïve and didn't properly protect the interests of the city. But that's probably a bit too simplistic. Because there can be little doubt that if the mayor had asked for these commitments in writing, Uber would have found some other city that had the same attitude as Pittsburgh instead and gone there. Uber will never pay for what it can steal.

As the mayor said, "When it came to what Uber and what Travis Kalanick wanted, Pittsburgh delivered. But when it came to our vision of how this industry could enhance people, planet and place, that message fell on deaf ears." Maybe without realizing it himself, the mayor perfectly explained Uber's business model - profit off of other people's work that they refuse to pay for.