Uber betting its global empire is key for rolling out bikes, scooters

Rachel Holt,
head of New Modalities at Uber, and Ryan Rzepecki, the
founder of Jump Bikes, speak during Business Insider’s IGNITION
conference 2018.
Business
Insider

• Uber wants
  to be the one-stop app for transportation across the globe.
• Two executives — Uber’s head of New Modalities and the CEO of
  a bike-share company purchased by Uber last year — spoke at
  Business Insider’s IGNITION conference on Monday.
• The company hopes to expand its presence from ride-hailing to
  rolling out bikes, scooters, and other new vehicles.

With nine years and more than 80 countries under its belt,
Uber
is hoping its
experience and ubiquitous presence in cities around the world
can help it win on micro-mobility as well.

Speaking at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference, Rachel Holt,
Uber’s head of New Modalities, said these relationships will be
key as the company seeks to expand Jump, a bike-share company
that
it purchased last year.

“Many of us have done this before,” Holt said, referring to its
now 16,000-strong workforce. “The ability for us [to] recognize
that this is a new business, and different from businesses from
one we’ve run — to bring that to the infrastructure that we have
at Uber is pretty compelling.

“When you couple the hardware expertise and relationships with
cities that [Jump CEO Ryan Rzepecki] and the Jump team have
brought, and coupling it with the operation … we’ve got at Uber
— with these global teams on the business and policy side, it
looks like a pretty exciting. You’ll start to see a pretty
massive ramp-up in scale over the next half.”

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“For now, Jump’s bikes are only in 13 cities around the country,
with scooters in an even smaller subset, but the company has big
plans for its expansion. It’s got plenty of catching up to do if
it wants to beat Lyft, which now owns the US’ largest bike and
scooter system through its acquisition of Motivate and its
systems in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C. and
others.

“It all comes down to building necessary tools in cities for
bikes and scooters to augment cars,” according to Rzepecki.

“It all gets back to ‘how do we take this and scale it,'” he said
at IGNITION. “Cities need these big investments and make it safer
for people to bike, and have places for these vehicles to park at
the end of their trip.”

At the end of the day, Uber wants to empower people to go
car-free, Holt and Rzepecki said. That means helping people
connect transit trips with walking, bikes, or any new development
in micro-mobility.

“Jump, even before the acquisition, has invested in hardware
expertise to make the best-in-class vehicle,” Rzepecki said. “For
scooters right now, everyone’s sourcing from the same folks and
there’s not much differentiation. We have a chance over the next
year or two to stand apart in the actual vehicle design.”

“You’re going to see a lot of different kinds of vehicles,” Holt
added.