Management re-sit assignment block 2 Date: April 2017 Course: IBLMAN01R1(E) Authors: S. Winkler, N. Jovanov, S. de Vos Contents: Introduction 3 Background information for the assignment 3 The assignment 3 Grading 4 Attachment 1: Uber rival Grab leads in Southeast Asia race for ride-sharing……………….............……5 Attachment 2: Contempt for Rules Is Catching Up With Uber……………………..…………………………….….7 Attachment 3: Taiwan's War Against Uber…………………………………………….………………………….……….…9 Attachment 4 Uber and Lyft Want to Replace Public Buses…………………………………………………………12 1   Introduction In the first block during your management classes you have worked on the first 6 chapters of the book (except chapter 4). This has given you insight on how organizations and external environments influence each other. You have learned about several management models and management approaches. Now we ask you to apply this knowledge to a real-life situation. The assignment is an individual assignment. It is worth 30% of your total grade. You must score at least a 5,5 to pass this assignment. Check the rubric for the grading. General conditions: • The assignment must be handed in on N@tschool as a word or PDF document; • Deadline is Tuesday 18-4-2017, 23.59. If you miss the deadline your grade will be a 1; • The document contains a front page with your name and student number; • The document contains a table of contents; • The document has page numbers on each page; • The document contains APA references and a bibliography; • Plagiarism will result in failing the assignment; • The content should be limited to a maximum of 1500 words (3 pages). Meeting the general conditions is 10% of your grade. Background information for the assignment The taxi services industry is an old business model. It is a simple concept. Someone needs transportation services that are of a higher quality than public transport and taxies have been around for decades to provide this service. However, in recent years a new market has been developed with the creation of a taxi app. This is a relatively new business concept that has grown very rapidly and has changed the whole taxi services business environment. The taxi industry just like the hospitality industry is changing rapidly, travelers come from all over the world, competition is fierce and new concepts are introduced at a fast pace. There are several industry wide developments occurring at the same time. Just a few examples of these developments are the fact that people like to travel more and more, cities are increasing in size, taxi services have until recently remained quite expensive and new technology is developing rapidly. These developments have opened new market space for innovative types of transport services to be introduced. To be able to answer all the questions you can read the attached documents for more insight. However, you will also need to find your own sources so do not limit yourself to the sources provided in this assignment. The assignment The assignment consists of three questions. Make sure you provide an answer to these questions and an argument supporting your answers. Question 1: One example of a company that has changed the whole industry is Uber. Even as recent as 5 years ago the taxi services business seemed like a very saturated market without a lot of room for improvement or innovation. Nevertheless, a new concept was pioneered by Uber and the company value has sky rocketed creating a $68 billion company. This innovative (disruptive) change has had a big effect within the taxi transportation services. The official description of Uber is that it is an e-commerce services business that provides e-commerce services for car hire. The company offers a website that allows users to request a car for hire from any mobile device text message. If you apply the 7S model, which three factors have contributed most to the success of Uber and make sure you clearly state the arguments about why you think these three factors have been important for Uber. To answer this question you can look at the attachments 1-4 below but please do your own research as well in order to have a better understanding of the internal organizational environment of Uber. Question 2: Apply the Porter 5-forces model to the taxi services industry in South-East Asia. You need to tell something about all forces, reference to your sources and comment on the importance and the strength or weakness of all the forces. Last but not least you need to give an overall judgement over the industry with a particular focus on the Asian market (see Attachment 1 and 3). When you provide your overall judgment of the industry please consider that traditional taxi companies and many governments have complained about unfair competition from Uber and other similar companies and a lot of legal issues have arisen (see Attachment 2 and 3 as a starting point). Question 3: Give an example of another (existing or future) transport industry concept and explain why you think this is or could be successful in the future. When you provide your answer please consider the competitive forces in the industry which you have already considered in question 2 for the Asian market. To answer question 3 you can focus on the taxi services but you could also think of other more traditional examples (airlines, trains, boat etc.). See Attachment 4 as a starting point to generate some ideas for answering this question. You research should go beyond the provided material! Make use of internet, databases, books e.g. Grading The assignments will be graded according to the following rubric. Part of the assignment Insufficient (<5,5) Sufficient (5,5-7) Good (7-8) Excellent (>8) General conditions 10% (pass or fail) fail pass Question 1 (30%) Incomplete (not all asked aspects are given) All aspects + argumentation Strong argumentation based on facts (incl. sources) Extra Question 2 (40%) Incomplete (not all asked aspects are given) All aspects + argumentation Strong argumentation based on facts (incl. sources) Extra Question 3 (20%) Incomplete (not all asked aspects are given) All aspects + argumentation Strong argumentation based on facts (incl. sources) Extra Attachment 1: Uber rival Grab leads in Southeast Asia race for ride-sharing Uber Technologies is locked in major tussles with local rivals in China and India, but a homegrown upstart is also grabbing an advantage in the race for another Asia prize. A start-up called Grab is winning ride-hailing turf in Southeast Asia — home to 600 million people, almost double the population of the US. The start-up serves more cities in the region than Uber and, according to mobile-app analytics firm App Annie, is beating the world’s most valuable start-up in the race for users here. The region’s ride-hailing market is forecast to grow more than five times to $US13.1 billion ($17.4bn) by 2025 from $US2.5bn last year, according to a recent report on Southeast Asia’s internet economy conducted by Alphabet’s Google and Singapore state-investment firm Temasek. Singapore-based GrabTaxi, as it is formally known, launched in 2012 and offers locally tailored services such as motorcycle taxis — a popular method for negotiating the region’s traffic-clogged cities — package deliveries and cash payment. It also has a pilot carpooling service allowing people living in southern Malaysia, where living costs are lower than in neighbouring Singapore, to share rides into the city-state. In four years, the company, valued at $US1.6bn in its most recent funding round last year, has expanded to 1600 employees. It operates in 30 Southeast Asian cities — twice as many as Uber — in six countries. Even so, Grab faces a tough fight against Uber, a global powerhouse valued at close to $US68bn. It has raised $US14bn in debt and equity, providing it with a massive war chest for global expansion — and local turf wars. A spokesman said Uber was “part of everyday life forms across Southeast Asia”, where the company is “led by local teams”. Grab has some significant investors in its corner. In addition to US hedge fund Coatue Management and Tiger Global Management, it has received funding from Uber’s biggest competitor in China: Didi Chuxing Technology, the country’s largest ride-sharing company. Grab has also joined Didi, ANI Technologies’s Ola in India and San Francisco start-up Lyft in a global alliance of Uber rivals. They work together to allow users of each company’s app to hail rides from the other apps’ drivers in other countries. Grab’s co-founder, Anthony Tan, a 34-year-old Malaysian who dreamt up the venture with a classmate at Harvard Business School, said he envisaged the company as a sprawling, web-based platform, leveraging its location data to offer services beyond rides, such as digital payments. “We don’t think only about transport,” said Mr Tan, also Grab’s chief executive, in an interview at the company’s Singapore headquarters, a modest space in an office park where new taxi drivers come to sign up. “How do we build a Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent?” he said, referring to China’s three leading internet companies, which dominate that country’s search, e-commerce and social media markets. Grab had banked close to two-thirds of the almost $US700m it had raised from investors and wasn’t in need of additional funds at the moment, Mr Tan said. The company was profitable in some cities in which it operated, he said, though he declined to forecast when the company would turn a profit overall. In a region where few people have credit cards and many lack bank accounts, Grab first offered cash payments for users and drivers alike. It recently added motorbike taxis in cities like Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta, so commuters could weave through traffic gridlock. Uber has since followed. Grab also offers a package-delivery service designed to assist the region’s e-commerce start-ups, which sometimes struggle to get items to customers in places that lack traditional addresses or where roads are poor. Uber has a delivery service, but it isn’t available outside the US. In Indonesia, Grab has worked to augment third-party maps by adding points of interest for pick-ups and drop-offs at locations not otherwise covered, like warungs — roadside stalls where people often congregate to buy goods or socialise. Uber’s innovations include the UberEats on-demand food-delivery service, which gained its first Asian location in May with a launch in Singapore. The company’s carpool service, UberPool, was expanded from Jakarta and Manila to Singapore last week. Uber’s huge cash pile means it can afford to hire top engineering talent and develop cutting-edge technologies. It could also allow it to spend money for longer than Grab, analysts said, potentially wearing it down over the long haul. Then there is a technological barrier both companies face: while Southeast Asia’s population is large, many consumers still lack web access, meaning they can’t use the apps. Grab’s app topped Uber’s in first-quarter downloads in every market in which Grab operates, according to App Annie. (Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/uber-rival-grab-leads-in-southeast-asia-race-for-ridesharing/news-story/f9899d3df9ae3b39e76a145e650cfe5d) Attachment 2: Contempt for Rules Is Catching Up With Uber Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru. Feb 28, 2017 By Leonid Bershidsky Uber is facing a perfect storm. Nothing appears to be going right for the ride-hailing company in recent weeks, and while each individual setback appears fixable, together they attest to a culture within the company that may be far harder to change. Here's a list of the setbacks and Uber's reactions to them: • A series of non-U.S. court decisions challenging the company's business model, from a U.K. tribunal's ruling that Uber drivers are employees, not independent contractors, to a recent Australian ruling forcing the company to pay value-added tax like the "legacy" taxi services. Uber has been relatively successful in fighting off similar challenges in the U.S., but courts in the rest of the world tend to see it as another taxi service, not a tech company, and apply treatments that level the playing field. Later this year, the European Court of Justice is set to decide a landmark case on Uber's identity as a platform or a transport company, which will determine the company's tax and labor-law treatment in Europe. If previous practice is any indication, Uber will get no free ride. Uber's response: Appeal, appeal and appeal. • After Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick joined President Donald Trump's business advisory council and ignored a New York taxi drivers' strike in response to Trump's Muslim travel ban, the company was hit with a boycott. Hundreds of thousands of people deleted the app and switched to Lyft and other competitors. Uber's response: Kalanick condemned the travel ban and resigned from the advisory council. • Software engineer Susan Fowler described her year at Uber as one marked by sexual harassment and callous treatment by the company's human resources department, which allegedly retroactively changed her performance assessment for the worse. She also described a company with office politics run amok and managers jockeying for position to the detriment of the product. Uber's response: Kalanick promised an "urgent investigation" into Fowler's claims and dismissal for everyone who misbehaves toward women. Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder has been hired to conduct the investigation. (Uber's senior vice president in charge of software development, Amit Singhal, appears to have been the first victim of the purge.) • Waymo, the Google self-driving car spin-off, has sued Uber for allegedly stealing its trade secrets by acquiring a company set up by an ex-employee who'd taken valuable designs with him when he left Waymo. Uber's response: A promise to look into the allegations in the lawsuit. • The self-driving program, run by the former Waymo employee in question, Anthony Levandowski, has been problematic in other ways, too. Apparently to save time and avoid reporting accidents, Uber failed to apply for regulatory permission to run road tests, though regulators in California specifically told it to do so. In the two months the loudly announced testing program ran in San Francisco, Uber's self-driving cars ran through six red lights -- a fact acknowledged in internal documents but not publicly. Uber's response: After California revoked the registration of the test cars, the fleet has been moved to Arizona, where the state authorities have been more accommodating. All these problems have something in common. They stem from a fundamental disrespect for rules. Uber's initial approach is to ignore rules and then to deal with them as a nuisance -- sometimes an expensive one -- once noncompliance becomes a problem. Kalanick said this about rules in an interview last year: Any rule has the right to become an old rule and be replaced by a new one. Ultimately, all rules have to bend towards people and progress. Cities, states, countries that allow rules to move forward see quicker progress. This is a sweeping generalization and, if applied literally, it covers rules on handling employment, safety, the work environment, gender equality, intellectual property, fair business practices, and dealings with investors and governments. Some of these rules may be obsolete, and all of them hold back the development of an international, multibillion-dollar business. Uber, with seemingly unlimited access to other people's money -- $11.6 billion in investor funds raised up until this point -- can afford to cut every possible corner and then try to deal with the fallout retroactively. The investors who are already in are incentivized to accept this, because they want Uber to start making money. In the third quarter of 2016, however, the company lost $800 million on $1.7 billion in net revenue, raising the nine-month loss to about $2.2 billion. It's not clear whether there's a path to profitability; in recent months, some banks -- including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan -- declined to sell Uber shares to wealthy clients because the company had failed to provide enough specifics about its business. This reticence, of course, is another symptom of the same contempt for accepted practices that Kalanick's company has shown in every other area. This contempt is wrongheaded. Technological change may defy certain rules -- but there's nothing inherent in Uber's largely commoditized technology, used by many other ride-hailing companies throughout the world, that allows the company to challenge every rule it encounters. There's nothing new, technologically advanced or progressive about pure chutzpah and hubris. If Uber is to succeed as a business, not just a narrative, these will have to be reined in. (Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-28/contempt-for-rules-is-catching-up-with-uber) Attachment 3: Feb 24, 2017 Taiwan's War Against Uber By Eli Lake Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI. This should be a good time to be an American Internet company in Taiwan. The new president, Tsai Ing-wen, has pledged to build an Asian Silicon Valley on the island. And the new American president, Donald Trump has threatened a trade war with Taiwan's rival in mainland China. The stars would appear to be aligned. So it's surprising that on Feb. 10, one of America's most successful digital companies, Uber, had to suspend its operations in Taiwan. At issue was a new law to impose fines up to $800,000 on unlicensed transportation services like Uber Technologies Inc. "We have never seen anything like this, ever," Damian Alexander Kassabgi, Uber's director of public policy for the Asia-Pacific region, told me last week. "We received fines in total of $8 million. We felt we had no other choice but to suspend our service until the government gave us some other options." So far that hasn't happened. The problem for Uber is that Taiwan's taxi industry has a lot of influence with the government in Taipei. At least this is Uber's perspective. The company had offered its ride-sharing service for three years in Taiwan, but in August it became a target. At first the government threatened to take away Uber's business license. Then in January, the legislature passed the new law that imposed the fines. "What we see in Taiwan is a conservative bureaucracy who has not shown willingness to accept or update laws accordingly," Kassabgi said. "The taxi industry won the day." The Taiwanese government tells a different story. A Taiwanese government memo from December on the Uber controversy defends the government scrutiny of Uber. "Most countries regulate public transport businesses because these services affect consumer rights and basic transportation safety," it said. "An appropriate level of government intervention is thus needed to maintain market order and protect the public interest." Right now the fate of Uber in Taiwan is in limbo. Kassabgi said that while the State Department has been helpful in pressing Taiwan's government to reconsider the anti-Uber legislation, so far nothing has changed. There are a few reasons this is important. First, Taiwan is one of America's closest allies in the Asia-Pacific region. The U.S. is the island's main supplier of military equipment and weapons systems. During the transition, Trump broke precedent and took a phone call from Tsai, raising the prospect that Trump rejected the longstanding "One China" policy, under which the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as an independent nation-state. Trump has since affirmed that he does accept this policy. "Of all the countries, you'd think they would not target U.S. companies," said Derek Scissors, an economist who specializes in Asia at the American Enterprise Institute. He added: "If an American friend will do this, why wouldn't countries where the U.S. has less of a relationship do this as well?" The Uber saga in Taiwan is also a reminder that protectionism is a two-way street. Trump himself has threatened tariffs on companies that sell products in the U.S. market produced outside the U.S. In one of his first acts as president, he withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multi-lateral trade deal with Asian countries that did not include Taiwan. At the same time, Taiwan's anti-Uber law bolsters Trump's arguments that America's trading partners take advantage of the U.S. in trade deals. A spokesman for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the U.S. told me that Taiwan was not worried about retaliation. He said Taipei's goal is to keep companies compliant with local laws. In this case though it looks like this argument is a smoke screen to protect Taiwan's taxi industry. But this is not a zero sum game. It's true that Uber disrupts the taxi business in all the countries where it operates. But at the same time, it's not taking jobs away from the local economy. Taxi drivers lose jobs, but new jobs are created for drivers who use Uber's ride-sharing application. For now, the controversy has the potential to chill trade between Taiwan and the U.S. Earlier this month, Michael Beckerman, the president and CEO of the Internet Association, which includes Uber and America's other largest Internet companies, warned Tsai that the fines against Uber would have wider ramifications. He wrote in a letter from Feb. 9, "Taiwan’s hard line against innovative new digital services like those in the peer-to-peer sharing economy will have a chilling effect on your goal of establishing Taiwan as the Silicon Valley of Asia, and will likely have negative effects on U.S. investment in Taiwan more broadly." That's something for Tsai to consider. America now has a president who has threatened to respond in kind to countries that punish U.S. companies to protect their own industries. Is Taiwan's taxi industry worth protecting, if the cost is a trade war with the island's most important ally? Uber would like to know. (Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-24/taiwan-s-war-against-uber) Attachment 4: Uber and Lyft Want to Replace Public Buses Pressed by tight budgets, some towns are cutting transit lines and subsidizing car rides. by Joshua Brustein @joshuabrusteinMore stories by Joshua Brustein‎ ‎15‎ ‎August‎ ‎2016‎ ‎ Pinellas Park, Florida, isn’t the kind of place where you'd expect to gain insight about the future of mass transit. The suburb of Tampa is as car-crazy as your average stretch of Floridian sprawl—the local landmarks include the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum and a drag racing strip—and anyone who can avoid the bus does. But recently the agency responsible for the area’s public transportation began a novel experiment: It stopped running two bus lines and started paying for a portion of Uber rides instead. In Uber’s early days, it said it wanted to be “everyone’s private driver.” Now the company and its main U.S. competitor, Lyft, are playing around with the idea of becoming the bus driver, too. Uber has partnered with a handful of local public transportation agencies to strike deals like the one in Pinellas Park, which it expanded earlier this month. Later this month Lyft plans to launch a partnership with Centennial, Colorado, its first deal where a local government will subsidize its rides. The company also said it has helped a dozen transit agencies apply for federal grants that would pay for a portion of Lyft fares in situations where its drivers would effectively become part of the public transportation system. Each of the current projects is tiny, but they could eventually be combined into something big, said Emily Castor, director of transportation policy at Lyft. “This is an area that has the potential to be a very significant part of Lyft’s work in the future,” she said. “How quickly will it progress from small pilots to being institutionalized in transit agencies? I think that’s harder to predict.” Over the past several years, ride-hailing companies and local government officials have often had an uneasy, sometimes outright hostile relationship over regulation. The public transportation deals have been an oasis of rapprochement between them. In part, the ride-hailing deals are too small to seem threatening, according to Kyle Shelton, a program manager at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. “It may affect some routes; it may affect service overall; but it’s not going to replace the main lines that carry thousands of riders per day,” he said. Governments already pay for taxis in some situations, but the deals with Uber and Lyft could usher in more fundamental change, and with it, tensions. What happens to people without smartphones? How do Uber and Lyft serve disabled riders? What happens if the cities come to rely on the apps, only to have the private companies decide the partnerships are no longer a sensible business venture for them? And do public governments want to encourage the replacement of public sector jobs with the contract work that defines the sharing economy? It quickly became apparent that in areas with few riders, paying for part of a private ride was cheaper than running a bus. As officials grapple with those questions, it’s hard to ignore the real savings for governments—and real revenue for Uber and Lyft. In 2014, Americans spent $15 billion in fares on public transportation at the 850 public transit agencies that share data with the Federal Transit Administration. The operating expenses at those agencies was $42 billion. Much of the remaining 65 percent of the cost of running the systems came from public subsidies. Suburban areas with less density and lower ridership are particularly expensive to run, making ride hailing an attractive alternative, said Adie Tomer, a fellow at Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “If they can provide better outcomes for your population and do it at either the same cost if not lower, that’s a win-win for society,” he said. “This could start spiraling very fast.” In late 2014, Pinellas County voters rejected a referendum that would have increased local taxes to fund more bus lines and a light rail system. The Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority would have to cut back. It drew up plans to cut off the least popular of its four-dozen bus lines. Residents in Pinellas Park, a relatively dense working class area, and East Lake, a richer area that had a publicly run van service, complained they’d be stranded. So the transportation agency decided to share the cost of Uber rides for anyone traveling those two routes. Earlier this year it started a pilot program where people received a 50 percent discount for rides, with a maximum subsidy per ride of $3, to help riders connect to the transit system. It quickly became apparent that in areas with few riders, paying for part of a private ride was cheaper than running a bus. The program will cost $40,000 a year, or about a quarter the cost of the two bus lines it replaced, according to the PSTA. The PSTA declined to give statistics about its ridership, other than to describe it as a success. On Aug. 1, the agency began offering subsidies for all rides in the county that end at about 20 designated transit stops. “It’s not supposed to be something you’d take instead of the bus; it’s supposed to be something you’d take to the bus,” said Ashlie Handy, a spokeswoman for the agency. On the same day it expanded the initial program, PSTA launched a separate one to give free Uber rides to low-income residents traveling after 9 p.m., when buses don’t run. Molly Spaeth, a spokeswoman for Uber, said the company was pleased with the response to the project and would continue to look for ways to work with transit agencies. Officials in Centennial, a suburb of Denver, will launch a similar partnership with Lyft later this month, marking the first time a government will pay for Lyft rides using public funds. Through the program, Centennial will pay for Lyft rides to and from a regional rail stop from an area that has previously only been covered by a shuttle bus. The existing service costs the city about $20 per ride, according to Cathy Noon, Centennial’s mayor, far more than what it will have to pay for Lyft rides. The city projects it will handle 280 rides per day, or about six times as many rides as it currently handles through the bus service. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable group founded by Bloomberg LP founder and majority owner Michael Bloomberg, gave Centennial a grant in 2014 to work on urban innovation. Around the same time that Pinellas County launched its pilot, nearby Altamonte Springs, Florida, a suburb of Orlando, began paying for 20 percent of any Uber ride within city limits. For rides that ended at regional rail stations, the rate was 25 percent. City officials said Uber keeps them from sharing ridership numbers but that the program has grown quickly. They’re working to expand to several neighboring towns soon. “They were being fined, but at the same time, we’d say, let’s work together” In July, Miami-Dade County, Florida, applied for a $3.5 million federal grant to improve public transportation, $575,000 of which it plans to use to subsidize Uber and Lyft rides to two train stations, hoping that doing so will increase ridership at those stations by 5 percent. “Ride-sharing companies will mature in the Miami-Dade market but are unlikely to serve low ridership and low income neighborhoods without public subsidy,” the county said in its application. It is also working to incorporate ride hailing into its own mobile ticketing application. Miami-Dade’s cooperation with ride-hailing companies coincided with the end of a years-long fight with them over whether to allow Uber and Lyft to operate. Until a few months ago, Uber and Lyft were against the law, and the city handed out violations to drivers as they picked up fares. Carlos Cruz-Casas, assistant director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works, said it was odd to plan the area’s future around ride hailing while also debating whether ride hailing should be legal at all. “It was a friendly relationship,” he said. “They were being fined, but at the same time, we’d say, let’s work together.” Issues of control are going to test these friendships, said Shelton and Tomer. Local governments are eager for data about ridership that they can use to reconfigure services, and Uber and Lyft tend to see information about demand as trade secrets. If ride hailing does drive down car ownership, as both Uber and Lyft expect it will, that could increase demand for subsidized rides, leaving governments holding the tab for new forms of semi-public transit. Bridj, a startup that runs private bus service in some cities, is proposing a model that would leave more control with the governments. It has no set lines and instead responds to requests made on its app. Earlier this year, Kansas City Area Transportation Authority agreed to buy 10 vehicles from Bridj, staff them with drivers, and set and collect fares. Unlike the ride-hailing partnerships, which are largely designed to get people to another form of transit, the Bridj program aims to drop people off where they’re actually trying to go. Instead of sharing in fares, Bridj takes a service fee for the use of the technology that accepts ride requests and directs the vehicles on ever-changing routes. The Kansas City government gets to keep more control, and Matthew George, Bridj’s chief executive officer, said about three-dozen cities have inquired about partnerships since the Kansas City pilot started. The company plans to announce at least four partnerships before the end of the year. George thinks private, on-demand bus lines will prove to be more cost-effective than ride-hailing services that use smaller vehicles because they can move more people at once. George also criticizes Lyft’s and Uber’s spotty track records of cooperation with local governments, and points out that unlike at those companies, Bridj’s drivers in Kansas City are all union members hired by the transit authority. “On the one end of the spectrum you have the very traditional mode that we’ve done for 100 years, and on the other one, you have this Ayn Randian free market free-for-all that doesn’t have basic protections in place for the people who are most vulnerable,” he said. “We’ve shown that there’s something in the middle.” (Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-15/uber-and-lyft-want-to-replace-public-buses)