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These days, good publicity is hard for Big Ride to come by. This year has seen Uber and Lyft exposed for everything from sub–minimum wage compensation to widespread sexual assault among both drivers and riders. Hoping to burnish a flagging reputation, the companies have taken a series of steps to try to prove their deep concern about the issues. So this Friday, Lyft is generously opening its San Francisco offices for a stirring program put on by New America, entitled “How Will Climate Change Transform Our Democracy?” The event features best-selling climate writer David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth.
Lyft might not seem like a natural ally of environmental activists. In tandem with Uber and other rideshare companies, it has been a key player in creating a congestion crisis that has roiled America’s major cities. In San Francisco alone, traffic congestion increased by about 60 percent between 2010 and 2016, with ridesharing at the heart of more than half of that uptick. Meanwhile, average speeds decreased 13 percent. More cars, more idling, more exhaust—all of that invariably results in increased carbon emissions.
Simultaneously, Lyft and its ilk have siphoned riders from trains and buses in nearly every major metropolitan area, blowing budgetary holes in public-transit systems that have long been understood to serve a crucial role in decarbonization. Transportation, of course, is the largest individual producer of greenhouse gases, beyond even electricity and industry. Cars spew carbon at an astonishing clip, and few companies have put more cars on the road in recent years than Lyft. While it may not be an outright fossil fuel company, Lyft is certainly one of the foremost fossil fuel consumers. The planet burns in traffic jams.
Of course, the event isn’t just about a changing climate, but the ways in which an accelerating climate crisis is “creating a less stable world and threatening the underpinnings of American democracy: uprooting communities, destroying tax bases, and increasing racial and class inequalities.” If there was any uncertainty about Lyft’s contribution to the climate crisis (there isn’t), the company has a decorated record in the service of destroying tax bases and exacerbating inequality.
Just across the bridge from this event in neighboring Oakland, for instance, Lyft successfully lobbied municipal officials to kill a proposed tax of $0.50 per ride that would’ve generated millions to improve public-transit services. Though they couldn’t pony up to help expand public services, the company has been highly generous elsewhere: Its 2019 IPO generated nearly $1.5 billion for its investor partners General Motors and Fidelity, over a billion for venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and $1 billion for Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Earlier this year, its drivers, who are all independent contractors rather than employees, reported making as little as $3.75 an hour after expenses. And few things have increased “class inequalities” faster than Lyft’s reliance on employee misclassification, the expansion of a new underclass of workers who make up the bulk of the company’s workforce (none of whom have a desk or a cubicle in the ample office space surrounding the event).
None of this would come as a surprise to featured speaker David Wallace-Wells, whose book depicts a planet under emergency while rapacious actors charge headlong into profit-making, including chapters titled “Crisis Capitalism” and “The Church of Technology.” He writes, “Silicon Valley technologists have little more than fairy tales to offer.” One can’t help but wonder if that statement extends all the way up to Market Street in San Francisco.
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