Ridesharing

Background

The term "ridesharing" or ridehailing, can be used to refer to a variety of activities related to sharing space in a vehicle but most commonly references services such as Uber and Lyft, digital platforms that arbitrate vehicle spaces as a form of ride service. These and similar platforms connect willing drivers with prospective passengers, matching demanded passenger destinations with ride availability and taking a commission on each fare. While at one point controversial, ridesharing platforms quickly have become all but ubiquitous in most major cities of the world due to their efficiency and ease of use.

Ridesharing Platforms and the Government of Canada

Governments have tended to be more slow to accept ridesharing services, with many municipal governments having initially prohibited ridesharing platforms due to their non-compliance with rules put into place to govern traditional taxi companies. With the gradual recognition of their distinctive enterprise, over time ridesharing platforms have gained widespread acceptance by government and have become an acceptable form of transportation for employees of the government of Canada for many years (since 2016?).

Corporate Ridesharing in the GC

In 2018, the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS) became the first department to launch a departmental ridesharing option for its employees, specifically with Uber services. This allows employees to use the Uber ride-hailing app not only to hail vehicles but also as a payment method. CSPS employees would be able to use Uber to hail a ride and the details of the trip and bill would be sent directly to CSPS financial services, who would then tally and analysis the patterns from the previous month, and pay Uber directly for the sum total of all usage in the form of an invoice.

As the first department to use this service, CSPS imposed restrictions on the permitted usage of Uber in order to minimize risk. This included the limitation of the app's usage to working hours (7h00-18h00), the limitation of the fare to under $50, and the staggered roll-out of the app functionality throughout the department. For fares falling outside of these perimeters, it was still possible to use rideshare services but the employee would need to pay for them and expense the cost in the same manner as for regular travel.

Gradually more departments followed in CSPS's lead by authorizing departmental ridesharing and also steadily lowered the restrictions associated with the apps functionality as it became clear that the risks of abuse are marginal, or at least, significantly less than with existing systems. At the time of writing in early 2020, Transport Canada is the largest user of departmental ridesharing with several hundred users being permitted the full functionality of the app.

Why Uber?

There are several competing ridesharing services, of which Uber is the largest, however Uber's early adoption as a platform for ridesharing in the GC is for reasons of capacity. In Ottawa, Uber has traditional been the sole service platform with a fully developed and tested corporate service offering. Lyft has hoped to launch an equivalent service by 2020 and local taxi companies are developing their own ridehailing apps as well which will ultimately have a corporate service as well. Thus while it can be expected that there will be a multiplicity of platforms available to public servants in the future, Uber had initially started as the default platform for so many departments due to a lack of viable alternatives.