So, there was this show called “Real Housewives of Vancouver”. There’s no reason you would have heard of it because it was on television, a medium that no one watches anymore because it was disrupted by online video streaming services like YouTube, which is what people watch now.
Sensing this new cultural reality, one of the characters on the show, a woman named Mary Zilba, who is obviously not an actual housewife but played one on television, has taken to YouTube in order to sing a song for Über, the ridesharing company that has disrupted the taxi industry, which no one uses anymore for the same reason that no one watches television.
Mary Zilba, or the “real housewife” character that she played on television, has released her song just a couple days ahead of April Fool’s Day.
Zilba, looking to align herself with those who would disrupt Vancouver’s taxi industry, sings lines like, “I know there must be a way to get me home. I really need an Über right now, I really need to get there somehow,” and, “If I hailed a cab, I would feel so sad. There’s a better way.”
If Zilba’s song were real, and not satirical, it would be an astonishingly tone-deaf expression of pure sociopathic entitlement, sung by the fictional caricature of a person who believes that public spaces and public transit and taxis and people who walk on sidewalks are all icky and sad.
Part of the song’s charm is that it clearly cannot be real, but is instead performed in the voice of the character that Zilba played on television.
If Zilba’s song were real, and not satirical, it would be an astonishingly tone-deaf expression of pure sociopathic entitlement, sung by the fictional caricature of a person who believes that public spaces and public transit and taxis and people who walk on sidewalks are all icky and sad.
Which is why the song is so special. Everyone is in on the joke.
And what of the subject matter? Über, whose presence would probably benefit the average Vancouverite, is not a taxi service, the company says with a wink.
Über is the kind of company that might have “played a taxi service on television” if it weren’t so disruptive that it, true to its kind, doesn’t even know what television was.
The problem being that if Über were to say that it was a taxi company, then it would have to play by the rules of the taxi industry, going through the onerous process of paying its drivers some kind of wage, who themselves have to pay steep prices for taxi medallions and are required by law to take out special insurance, and all of these regulatory hurdles, none of which is disruptive.
Speaking in Vancouver in February, Über co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick said that if the city were to legalize his company, “Your city opens up, people don’t own cars and at the same time we are creating tens of thousands of jobs in the city inside of 18 months. I would say if you want to create jobs, if you don’t like traffic, if you don’t like drunk driving, if you don’t like pollution, then I think Über is a good solution for Vancouver.”
“Tens of thousands of jobs” sounds amazing, if you can ignore the fact that Über drivers are technically not employees, which means that not only have no actual jobs been created, but all of the old taxi jobs will be gone, very likely as Kalanick predicts within 18 months.
The stuff about drunk driving and pollution is an appeal to fear, which is usually very effective.
There are a few particularities of the Vancouver market that makes Über a more natural fit than it would be in most cities.
I don’t know if things have changed substantially since the last time I tried to hail a cab there, but it has to be said that the Terminal City is not the kind of place where a person can simply walk along any major thoroughfare and stick their hand out to successfully hail a taxi, as it is possible to do in any other urban centre without wasting more than three or four minutes.
No, that theoretical person will very likely walk the entire distance of Broadway from Fraser Street, and then a few blocks down Main Street, without so much as glimpsing a taxi, as I was to discover in painful reality, cursing under my breath that Vancouver must be a city in training.
“Oh, no,” I was told later. “You’ve got to call in advance. Nobody hails cabs in Vancouver.”
Given this culture of no taxis except by advance booking, it is obvious that Vancouver needs Über. But how can it really be called disruption, when there is basically no taxi industry to disrupt?
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