UPDATED 22:49 EDT / JANUARY 18 2015

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick NEWS

Bread and circuses: Uber promises jobs, environmental benefits if the EU will play nicely with it

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick

Uber Inc. has ramped up the sales pitch in Europe, with CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick telling an audience at the DLD conference Sunday that the company could deliver a range of benefits if Governments came to the table in making the service legal.

“We want to make 2015 the year when we create new partnerships with European cities,” said Mr. Kalanick. “If we can make those partnerships happen, we could create 50,000 new jobs.”

To those concerned about the environment, Kalanick also promised that along with the jobs growth, Uber could take 400,000 vehicles off the road.

The speech, though, wasn’t all bread and circuses for an audience that included EU regulators, with the presentation delving into how Uber came about, and it’s stratospheric growth since.

Kalanick told the audience that the idea for the service came after he and Uber’s other co-founder had trouble getting a taxi in Paris, and that when they returned to San Francisco they realized there was a similar problem locally.

“It wasn’t meant to be a big business,” Re/Code reported him saying. “It just turned out that everybody in our city wanted it.”

In stats, Kalanick said that in San Francisco, after four-and-a-half years, 1.6 million people had used Uber, and they had created 7,500 new jobs. In New York they now had 3.9 million riders, and had created 13,750 jobs; in London they had almost 1 million riders and created 78 full-time jobs, and had created 3,700 jobs in Paris.

“If we could go to the mayor of a city and find a way to partner, we could promise to create 10,000 new jobs inside four years,” he said.

Kalanick notably didn’t mention whether Uber had put any taxi drivers out of jobs.

The company has had regulatory problems in nearly every jurisdiction it operates, and although worth trying to pitch the benefits to the European Union, the offer is unlikely to be embraced on a continent well known for nanny state Governments that like to strangle free market innovations.

Image Credit: DLD/ Uber


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