I want to talk about the future of human-driven transportation

about how we can cut congestion, pollution and parking

by getting more people into fewer cars

and how we can do it with the technology that's in our pockets

And yes, I'm talking about smartphones ...

not self-driving cars

But to get started we've got to go back over 100 years.

Because it turns out there was an Uber way before Uber.

And if it had survived,

the future of transportation would probably already be here.

So let me introduce you to the jitney.

In 1914 it was created or invented

by a guy named LP Draper.

He was a car salesman from LA, and he had an idea.

Well, he was cruising around downtown Los Angeles, my hometown,

and he saw trolleys with long lines of people

trying to get to where they wanted to go.

He said, well, why don't I just put a sign on my car

that takes people wherever they want to go

for a jitney -- that was slang for a nickel.

And so people jumped on board,

and not just in Los Angeles but across the country.

And within one year, by 1915,

there were 50,000 rides per day in Seattle,

45,000 rides per day in Kansas

and 150,000 rides per day in Los Angeles.

To give you some perspective,

Uber in Los Angeles

is doing 157,000 rides per day,

today ... 100 years later

And so these are the trolley guys,

the existing transportation monopoly at the time.

They were clearly not happy about the jitney juggernaut.

And so they got to work

and they went to cities across the country

and got regulations put in place

to slow down the growth of the jitney.

And there were all kinds of regulations.

There were licenses -- often they were pricey.

In some cities, if you were a jitney driver,

you were required to be in the jitney for 16 hours a day.

In other cities, they required two jitney drivers for one jitney.

But there was a really interesting regulation

which was they had to put a backseat light --

install it in every Jitney --

to stop a new pernicious innovation which they called spooning.

All right. So what happened?

Well, within a year this thing had taken off.

But the jitney, by 1919,

was regulated completely out of existence.

That's unfortunate ...

because, well, when you can't share a car,

then you have to own one.

And car ownership skyrocketed

and it's no wonder that by 2007,

there was a car for every man, woman and child in the United States.

And that phenomenon had gone global.

In China by 2011,

there were more car sales happening in China than in the US.

Now, all this private ownership of course had a public cost.

In the US, we spend 7 billion hours a year,

wasted, sitting in traffic.

160 billion dollars in lost productivity,

of course also sitting in traffic,

and one-fifth of all of our carbon footprint

is spewed out in the air by those cars that we're sitting in.

Now, that's only four percent of our problem though.

Because if you have to own a car

then that means 96 percent of the time your car is sitting idle.

And so, up to 30 percent of our land and our space

is used storing these hunks of steel.

We even have skyscrapers built for cars.

That's the world we live in today.

Now, cities have been dealing with this problem for decades.

It's called mass transit.

And even in a city like New York City,

one of the most densely populated in the world

and one of the most sophisticated tremendous mass transit systems in the world,

there are still 2.5 million cars

that go over those bridges every day.

Why is that?

Well, it's because mass transit

hasn't yet figured out how to get to everybody's doorstep.

And so back in San Francisco, where I live,

the situation's much worse, in fact,

much worse around the world.

And so the beginning of Uber in 2010 was --

well, we just wanted to push a button and get a ride.

We didn't have any grand ambitions.

But it just turned out that lots of people

wanted to push a button and get a ride,

and ultimately what we started to see

was a lot of duplicate rides.

We saw a lot of people pushing the same button

at the same time going essentially to the same place.

And so we started thinking about, well,

how do we make those two trips and turn them into one.

Because if we did,

that ride would be a lot cheaper

up to 50 percent cheaper

and of course for the city you've got

a lot more people and a lot fewer cars.

And so the big question for us was: would it work?

Could you have a cheaper ride

cheap enough that people would be willing to share it?

And the answer, fortunately, is a resounding yes.

In San Francisco, before uberPOOL, we had

-- well, everybody would take their car wherever the heck they wanted.

And the bright colors is where we have the most cars.

And once we introduced uberPOOL,

well, you see there's not as many bright colors.

More people getting around the city in fewer cars,

taking cars off the road.

It looks like uberPOOL is working.

And so we rolled it out in Los Angeles eight months ago.

And since then, we've taken 7.9 million miles off the roads

and we've taken 1.4 thousand metric tons of CO2 out of the air.

But the part that I'm really --

But my favorite statistic

remember, I'm from LA,

I spent years of my life

sitting behind the wheel,

going, "How do we fix this?"

my favorite part is that eight months later,

we have added 100,000 new people that are carpooling every week.

Now, in China everything is supersized,

and so we're doing 15 million uberPOOL trips per month,

that's 500,000 per day.

And of course we're seeing that exponential growth happen.

In fact, we're seeing it in LA, too.

And when I talk to my team,

we don't talk about,

"Hey, well, 100,000 people carpooling every week...

and we're done."

How do we get that to a million?

And in China,

well, that could be several million.

And so uberPOOL

is a very great solution for urban carpooling.

But what about the suburbs?

This is the street where I grew up in Los Angeles,

it's actually a suburb called Northridge, California,

and, well -- look, those mailboxes,

they kind of just go on forever.

And every morning at about the same time,

cars roll of out their driveway,

most of them, one person in the car,

and they go to work,

they go to their place of work.

So the question for us is:

well, how do we turn all of these commuter cars --

and literally there's tens of millions of them --

how do we turn all these commuter cars into shared cars?

Well, we have something for this that

we recently launched called uberCOMMUTE.

You get up in the morning,

get ready for work,

get your coffee,

go to your car and you light up the Uber app,

and all of a sudden,

you become an Uber driver.

And we'll match you up with one of your neighbors on your way to work

and it's a really great thing

There's just one hitch ... it's called regulation.

So 54 cents a mile, what is that?

Well, that is what the US government

has determined that the cost of owning a car is per mile.

You can pick up anybody in the United States

and take them wherever they want to go at a moment's notice,

for 54 cents a mile or less.

But if you charge 60 cents a mile,

you're a criminal.

But what if for 60 cents a mile

we could get half a million more people carpooling in Los Angeles?

And what if at 60 cents a mile

we could get 50 million people carpooling in the United States?

If we could, it's obviously something we should do.

And so it goes back to the lesson of the jitney.

If by 1915 this thing was taking off,

imagine without the regulations that happened,

if that thing could just keep going.

How would our cities be different today?

Would we have parks in the place of parking lots?

Well, we lost that chance.

But technology has given us another opportunity.

Now, I'm as excited as anybody else

about self-driving cars

but do we have to really wait

five, 10 or even 20 years to make our new cities a reality?

With the technology in our pockets today,

and a little smart regulation,

we can turn every car into a shared car,

and we can reclaim our cities starting today.

Thank you.

Travis, thank you.

Thank you.

You know --

I mean the company you've built

is absolutely astounding.

You only just talked about a small part of it here

a powerful part

the idea of turning cars into public transport like that,

it's cool.

But I've got a couple of questions

because I know they're out there on people's minds.

So first of all, last week I think it was,

I switched on my phone and tried to book an Uber

and I couldn't find the app.

You had this very radical, very bold, brave redesign.

Sure.

How did it go?

Did you notice other people not finding the app that day?

Are you going to win people over for this redesign?

Well, first I should probably just say,

well, what we were trying to accomplish.

And I think if you know a little bit about our history,

it makes a lot more sense.

Which is, when we first got started,

it was just black cars.

It was literally you push a button and get an S-Class.

And so what we did was almost what I would call

an immature version of a luxury brand

that looked like a badge on a luxury car.

And as we've gone worldwide

and gone from S-Classes to auto rickshaws in India,

it became something that was important for us to go

to be more accessible,

to be more hyperlocal,

to be about the cities we were in

and that's what you see with the patterns and colors.

And to be more iconic,

because a U doesn't mean anything in Sanskrit,

and a U doesn't mean anything in Mandarin.

And so that was a little bit what it was about.

Now, when you first roll out something like that,

I mean, your hands are sweating, you've got --

you know, you're a little worried.

What we saw is a lot of people --

actually, at the beginning,

we saw a lot more people opening the app

because they were curious what they would find

when they opened it.

And our numbers were

slightly up from what we expected.

OK, that's cool.

Now, so you, yourself,

are something of an enigma, I would say.

Your supporters and investors,