Uber in Exurbia: Smart Urbanism, Infrastructure and the Public-Private Ridehail Partnership in the Toronto City Region

Abstract

Shortly after their legalization in numerous jurisdictions across North America, ridehail platforms Uber and Lyft embarked on a new stage of their respective business models: the initiation of a wave of strategic partnerships with local and regional transit agencies across the North American continent. This paper accounts for this trend by developing the concept of the public-private ridehail partnership (PPRP). Understanding the PPRP as a strategic instrument for Uber and Lyft to expand their services from inner-city cores to sub- and exurban terrains, I argue that the pervasive trend towards PPRPs in North America has been driven by two central socio-spatial dynamics: a winner-takes-it-all dynamic that fosters the concentration of PPRPs in areas of already existing economic growth and infrastructural investment; and a ‘short-term-benefits-over-long-term-use’ dynamic that risks to put fiscal rebalancing and ‘smart’ urban image creation over the actually existing mobility needs of local communities. Each of these two dynamics is explored through empirical case studies of two recent PPRPs in the Toronto city region: the Lyft-Metrolinx pilot carried out between July and December 2019; and Uber’s ongoing partnership with the town of Innisfil, located about 80 kilometers north of downtown Toronto. Across both of these cases, as I show, PPRPs continue and even exacerbate existing patterns of uneven urban development and the splintering of transport infrastructure.