The seductive nature of ride-hailing apps

Before May of this year, I had never used a ride-hailing app. I had been in an Uber before — precisely two times, when friends had called them after a night out — but never had I actually downloaded the application to my phone to get the full experience.

That changed when I went to South Africa. After having a number of people warn me about my safety and advise me not to use taxis, paired with how the malaria meds I was on were messing with my mental health, I finally gave in. I couldn’t bring myself to download Uber. Having written about its exploitative business model for a decade, that was still a bridge too far. So instead I opted for Bolt, the European alternative.

It didn’t take long for me to see how so many people have been seduced into abandoning taxis for ride-hailing services over the past decade and a half — their attacks on workers’ rights, harms to transportation networks, and exploitation of customers be damned.

The user experience of the ride-hailing app makes you feel like you are in complete control. You are Big Brother for the exploited drivers trying to make a meager living from driving people around.

When you open the app, you can see the cars plying the roads of the digital map on your screen. You choose which kind of driver you want, and can send them specific instructions. You watch them make their way toward you, until you enter the vehicle where very frequently you control the music and might even be offered snacks and amenities — all in the hope you’ll give the driver a good rating at the end. They likely won’t even try to speak with you unless you strike up a conversation. I’ve had some drivers tell me they can drive around for hours with customers not saying a word to them — an incredibly dehumanizing experience.

All of these design decisions and impositions on workers are designed to give drivers the illusion of control, authority, and ultimately of power. It doesn’t matter that Uber has been known to fake the vehicles shown on the screen, has fought being covered by disability legislation, has been sued for failing to address sexual abuse by drivers, has tracked customers, and even used the data it holds to push up fares while driving down driver pay. Once you get used to that feeling of control, it’s hard to quit — something I found myself even after I left South Africa.

Once I arrived in Lisbon, I wanted to stop using Bolt, but I found it hard to give up that sense of control. I downloaded a local taxi app and when I used it I was flooded with worries that weren’t previously there: Would the driver even find me? Would I know how long it would take them to get there? Were there even many taxis in the area? Would I be able to easily pay in the car? They were mostly foolish concerns, but were borne of giving back a certain degree of autonomy to the driver and the anxiety of being in a place I wasn’t familiar with.

Back in Canada, using taxis was no problem. I deleted the Bolt app — it wouldn’t work there anyway — and simply went back to the companies I was used to relying on. I didn’t think twice about it. But a few weeks later in Copenhagen, I needed to get a ride somewhere and my mind immediately went to downloading Bolt again. The sense of security it claimed to provide had worked its way into my psyche. I didn’t give in, but I was fascinated by the staying power it had over me.

The whole experience was an instructive one for me. My writing about the tech industry started with criticism of the gig economy, so I’ve long felt those services were not something I could reasonably use without a degree of hypocrisy. To this day, I still haven’t used a food-delivery app. But actually downloading a ride-hailing app showed me how so many people have gotten hooked on them and resist any pressure to return to using taxis, even as ride-hail prices have risen since the pandemic.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how the digital services and platforms we’ve come to rely on over the past couple decades have affected how we act, how we see ourselves, and how the world around us even functions. I feel like we’re all becoming familiar with that when it comes to things like social media apps, which is part of the reason the efforts to regulate them are getting so much attention. But there are so many smaller, pernicious ways our lives have been transformed by the screens and apps that have been pushed on us in recent years — and in most cases we don’t take the time to consider how they affect us.

I feel like the ride-hailing apps stood out so much to me because they’ve become so normalized for so many. Most people are used to the experience of using them now, and it’s been optimized over time to lock people in and make them overlook the drawbacks of these businesses. Yet, I was coming in after all that work had been done and the rapid way it affected how I saw taxis was startling as someone who’s never felt the need or compulsion to download Uber.

Very quickly, I was finding it hard to imagine doing anything other than using a ride-hailing service. I couldn’t help but think about how many other apps and services have affected us in similar ways that we never stop to question.