Treehugger’s Lloyd Alter comments on Uber’s latest venture – shredding e-bikes:
One of my co-workers asked for some advice on buying an e-bike; I suggested a few brands and she checked them out, only to find that it would take months to get delivery. Finally, she found one that she could get in six weeks. Everywhere in North America, there is a shortage of bikes and e-bikes because of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, as you can see in this Twitter video, Uber is shredding about 20,000 Jump e-bikes. This is after Uber gave up on Jump and sold it to Lime, the scooter company. …
Uber says they only kept the old models and had no choice but to scrap them.
We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes, but given many significant issues—including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment—we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them.
After exploring and disputing the question of whether those older models were truly a burden, Alter goes for the sordid truth:
Apparently, it is all about killing Jump, “destroying every bike they can, and slowly taking Lime down in the process.” Kurt of Bikeshare Museum describes what we have been saying about Uber forever:
We also can’t emphasize enough how disgusting it is for UBER to scrap 20,000 bicycles in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic where bicycles have literally become an object of survival. Heavy as they are, these could be transportation for the many who have been brought to financial ruin during COVID-19.
… But Uber has become so adept at screwing people and burning through billions of their investor’s money that they probably didn’t give a moment’s thought to doing the right, sustainable or even possibly profitable thing by selling or donating the bikes.
I’ve never used Uber, and I’ve been dismayed by stories of personal danger for both passengers and drivers in the Uber service. While it started out to better utilize vehicle transportation while keeping prices low, it appears to have morphed into a corporation which believes it can create markets by destroying environmentally better modes of transportation.
I’m unlikely to ever use Uber.
