Alain Bertaud: belief

Transcript context

…Question from the iPad: “I work for Uber. Tell me what you think we’re doing wrong.” [laughter] I don’t think Uber is doing anything wrong. I mean, maybe at the same time if they don’t pay their drivers enough, they may run out of drivers, but then the market will show us that very quickly. I think that Uber has increased, again, probably even increased affordability in a certain way because it has made some areas of New York, which were not accessible to job in two or three hours, suddenly much less. Now, some people say they are clogging streets so the traffic has slowed down a bit. Wait a minute here. If you look at the streets of New York — I calculated it in my book — I think something like 25 percent is used by cars which are parked full time, free of charge, in the street. If you are serious about congestion and the congestion created by Uber, you leave the curb for loading and unloading, and you still have two lanes for circulation. Where in fact, you have now only one lane, and usually you have loading and unloading — by the way, not on the Uber, but Amazon and other things. So, you are blocking. If really the concern is about congestion and traffic, please use valuable space for traffic or pedestrian or bicycle or whatever. But parking cars on street is a scandal. [applause] Next question at this mic.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.