Transitioning company-owned vehicles to electric may be more straightforward than getting drivers to do the same with their private cars, though the company says they will not immediately require a switch to an EV.The free newsletter covering the top industry headlinesDiscover announcements from companies in your industry.Want to share a company announcement with your peers? All news. "If other rideshare and delivery companies, automakers and rental car companies make this shift, it can be the catalyst for transforming transportation as a whole," Zimmer said.Lyft officials also threw down the gauntlet to their competitors in the transportation space, arguing that their efforts to fully electrify in 10 years "creates a path for others."
"The lack of extensive algorithmic regulation and the black-box nature of ridehailing fare pricing algorithms leads to the concern of whether they may be exhibiting bias towards riders based on their demographics," write the authors, Aylin Caliskan and Akshat Pandey, describing why they undertook the study in the introduction.What they discovered was that ride-hailing companies charged a higher price per mile for a trip if either the pick-up point or destination had a higher percentage of non-white residents, low-income residents or high-education residents.The team wrote in the study's conclusion that "While demand and speed have the highest correlation with ride-hailing fares, analysis shows that users of ride-hailing applications in the city of Chicago may be experiencing social bias with regard to fare prices when they are picked up or dropped off in neighborhoods with a low percentage of individuals over 40 or a low percentage of individuals with a high school diploma or less. A UCLA doctoral dissertation by Anne Brown of UCLA's Institute for Transportation Studies published in 2018 found that African-Americans faced longer wait times for taxis, Uber and Lyft – and more cancellations – in Los Angeles than whites, Asians and Hispanics.The ride-hailing companies use machine-learning models to forecast which areas will have the highest demand at a given time, based on prior demand. Lyft responded saying the "analysis is deeply flawed." 0. Press releases. Essential workers continue to need access to reliable transportation, and all employees are feeling stress and uncertainty about …
What We're Reading. 07/28/2020 | 12:11pm EDT *: *: * The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented effect on businesses and the way we work, including how we get to and from the job. "In fact, the study makes clear that speed and demand have the highest correlation with algorithmically generated fares and that individual demographic data is neither available to rideshare companies nor used in the algorithms that determine pricing. "The researcher acknowledges that the study was not based on actual demographic data of rideshare users," the Lyft statement read. There are many factors that go into dynamic pricing – race is not one of them. Silicon Valley Business Journal Self-driving industry …