Thanks for Sharing by Eleanor Tucker

Author:Eleanor Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aurum
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

As with all of my sharing experiments, a delve into the past is in order to find out how long we’ve been doing some of these things that might seem new, but probably aren’t. I get in touch with Alan Pisarski, a US-based writer, analyst and consultant in transportation. From him I find out that almost as soon as cars arrived on the roads in any quantity, at the start of the twentieth century, their owners were on the lookout for a way to cash in on their ownership. This had everything to do with the financial side of sharing and absolutely nothing to do with the environment, of course: car ownership was increasing exponentially and very few people saw that as a bad thing. Enter the ‘jitneys’, which were private cars that picked up paying passengers for a small fee. In fact ‘jitney’ is slang for a nickel, or five cents, which was the fee charged when the idea took off in the 1910s in the US and Canada.

One of the first mentions of jitneys in the press was in the Toronto Daily Star on 29 January 1915, under the headline ‘The Jitneys Are Coming’. The article read: ‘A new form of opposition to trolley cars has arisen. It is the Jitney – or the five-cent auto ride . . . No franchise is granted, anybody that can buy one can operate it wherever he can get enough business to make it pay . . . It has been found that an ordinary auto can make money in the business, and everyday sees more and more of them engaging in it.’10

So this was more of a precursor to the ‘rideshare’ or ‘ridehailing’ model: we’re all familiar with these apps – they’re in the news often enough. This is a perfect opportunity for us to pause and talk about them, briefly. Because for many, when you hear the phrase ‘sharing economy’, a certain rideshare app is what springs to mind. I understand why, because when the concept was born, it was based around the ‘collaborative consumption’ that is also the basis of the sharing economy. In other words, technology allows people to offer services peer-to-peer, as well as goods – so in theory, drivers could make some extra income using their car as a taxi on the side.

A couple of big-name rideshare apps became successful in this area, and also became an example – rightly or wrongly – of the sharing economy, alongside of course Airbnb, which we’ll talk about later. This book isn’t about stories from Silicon Valley, but suffice to say, it got complicated. Low wages, lack of rights and benefits for workers, safety, and the impact on the competition are just a few of the other issues that have arisen for the platforms in this ridesharing space. It’s also worth considering if these apps should be thought of as part of the sharing economy at all: surely it’s only sharing, and not simply a taxi service, if the driver is going that way anyway.

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