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Uber's CEO has a plan to bring Uber to the suburbs — if only regulation would get out of the way

Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick at TED. TED Conference

It's easy enough to catch an Uber in most major American cities. The suburbs are a different story; it just doesn't make sense for drivers to go to a place where they have little chance of picking another person up after dropping someone off.

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At this year's TED conference, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said that he has a vision to turn every suburbanite into an Uber driver — if only regulation would get out of the way.

In 2015, Uber launched a new service called UberCommut— essentially a carpooling service that allows people on their way to work to pick up passengers along the way via the Uber app. But instead of launching in the U.S, the company piloted UberCommute in Chengdu, China.

The reason: U.S. regulation makes it difficult to launch the service here, according to Kalanick. Rules prevent drivers from getting paid more than a certain amount, disincentivizing people on their way to work from picking up passengers.

"54 cents a mile is what the US government has determined is the cost of owning a car per mile. You can pick up anyone in the U.S and take them anywhere in the U.S for 54 cents a mile or less, but if you charge 60 cents a mile you’re a criminal," says Kalanick. "What if at 60 cents a mile we could get 50 million people carpooling in the U.S?"

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Already, Kalanick says, UberPool — Uber's service that allows passengers to share their rides with people going in the same direction — is taking cars off the road and reducing carbon emissions in the U.S..  

UberPool rolled out in Los Angeles 8 months ago.  Since then,"We've taken 7.9 million [car] miles off the road, and 1.4k metric tonnes of CO2 out of the air," says Kalanick. 

"With a little smart regulation, we can turn every car into a shared car," he says.

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