London Tom Younger Uber North Cities Lead Leeds Manchester Liverpool Hull Huddersfield

Ride hailing services can complement public transport, Uber’s North of England lead has claimed.

Tom Younger, Cities Lead – North of England at Uber said in his keynote speech that the company had conducted an analysis of journeys made by the company’s passengers following the introduction of round the clock services on London Underground. 

He told delegates that following the roll out of the ‘night Tube’, Uber is being used by many passengers as a ‘first and last option’ before boarding or getting off the Underground in the suburbs: ”We saw a massive decline in trips in Zone 1 but there were really huge pick-ups in Zones 2 and 3. We want to be a complement to public transport: the idea will be to partner with public transport.”
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More broadly, Younger said that services like Uber could tackle the congestion problems resulting from drivers making single occupancy journeys.

He said that partly due to congestion, the typical motorist spends two weeks each year in a car, helping to fuel the 22% of global carbon emissions accounted for by motor vehicles.  Younger said that previous efforts to encourage car-pooling had not really taken off.

But pointing to a study predicting that the introduction of self-drive cars would reduce the total number of vehicles on the road by 90%, he said the advent of driverless vehicles could encourage motorists to share trips. 

And with the average car parked 95% of the time, the spaces they currently occupy could be liberated for more socially worthwhile uses such as housing and hospitals, he said: “If we can get people to share rides our cities will look entirely different. He said: “It’s easy to demonise the car but the car itself is not the problem it’s how we use it.”

But he cautioned that this transformation is unlikely to happen in the short term: “Automation of vehicles has a long way to go and we’re not too close to having them in the UK to do with regulatory and technological advances.”

During his appearance on the infrastructure panel later at the conference, Younger said that Uber’s ‘phenomenonal growth’ in Leeds reflected the willingness of the city’s population to embrace new technology.
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