✊🏙 Uber expands service offerings 📱 Tesla fails to automate production 🚗 Challenges facing Australian cities 🇦🇺

Uber will begin offering bike-share and vehicle-rental services, along with public transit tickets, in certain cities to expand options in its app. A stronger push into “mobility as a service” should come as no surprise, given that Uber experimented with other offerings in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and other ride-hailing companies have announced similar plans: Lyft has talked about being the app for all your transportation needs and India’s Ola recently made its own push into public transit ticketing.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also recently mused about Uber running bus services — which it previously announced in Egypt — proving that the company’s ambitions go far beyond being a taxi service enhanced by technology. Uber intends to dominate urban transportation networks through acquisition and attrition — the latter particularly in the case of public transit — though its financial situation is a major problem.

Counter to the dominant media narrative, Uber is wildly unprofitable, having lost $4.5 billion in 2017 with no path to black, and its low prices are only possible though VC subsidization. Using partnerships to expand into other areas provides new revenue sources because Uber will simply take a cut while the other companies manage their own financials. This move is unlikely to solve Uber’s cash troubles, but it may allow it to survive long enough to reach its planned IPO next year and the cash influx that should accompany it.

That isn’t, however, something we should eagerly await. Uber has an amazing PR team which positioned this as another move in its quest to reduce personal vehicle ownership, but as we should all know by now, what a capitalist enterprise says in public is not the same as what it’s planning internally. Uber wants a monopoly on transportation that would serve Uber, not its users, and this is just another step down that path.