Uber announces the arrival of UberPool in Argentina

This Wednesday, Uber announced the deployment in the metropolitan area of ââBuenos Aires of UberPool, its shared travel platform.

Through this new feature, passengers can share their trips with others, reducing the final price of the fare up to 25%. For the driver, on the other hand, the income will be higher when collecting up to three different users in a single journey.

The function will be available from 4pm. According to the company indicated in its presentation, it will work from Monday to Friday from 7 am to 11 pm, and Saturdays and Sundays, 8 am and 11 pm.

In a first stage, only users who have a high rating and frequently use the platform will be able to use Uber Pool. Then, it will be extended to the rest.

The differences
UberPool is a different proposal to Uber X, the "traditional" transportation service offered by the San Francisco firm in all the markets in which it operates. When a passenger chooses the shared trip, the application assigns a route between points A and B that can also be used by other users.

Once the route is closed, the meeting points are defined; this means that, in order to speed up the trip, the user must sometimes move up to two blocks (250mts) from the point where he is to take the car. Uber waiting to pick up each person will be two minutes.

What is the benefit for the driver? The commission charged by Uber for this feature is only 10%, so, although each passenger will pay less for their trip, in the total you can get a higher income.

At the Latin American level, this variant of "carpooling" is already successfully implemented in Mexico, Peru and Brazil. Those responsible for local operations said that in those markets one in five Uber trips are of this type.

A consolidated local market
The announcement of this Wednesday joins other high-profile initiatives faced by the company in recent months. The most recent was the confirmation of the closure of an alliance with the AFA to be the sponsor of its digital platforms, a marketing move that puts it in the foreground, at least in the eyes of local consumers.

Strictly speaking, the startup will promote its services in the association's social networks, the official website, and in the training apparel.

Its local expansion does not end there. In Mendoza launched Uber Eats, a delivery service that already offers in 350 cities around the world and here competes against giants such as Rappi, Glovo and Orders Ya.

That this platform works in the Cuyo region is not coincidental: the Mendoza government approved a new mobility law this year that allows private transportation.
The regulation implemented in the province of Cuyo includes the creation of a fee for each trip that is carried out (1%) that goes to a fund managed by the provincial administration. This fund will serve so that the taxis and remises companies of the province can obtain, through their intermediary, facilities to renew the fleet and other issues related to the activity.

Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, justice resolved weeks ago that the service is a "private contract"; therefore, it is legal. "The activity is constituted in a private innominated transport contract regulated in the Civil and Commercial Code of the Nation with related contracts," said judge Javier Buján.

The magistrate recalled in his ruling that the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation ratified the legality of the Uber company, "considered in the previous instances as a legitimate commercial activity," when it rejected the complaint of the Union of Taxpayers in August.

However, not all are good news. Simultaneously, a law in Federal Capital governs that hardens the sentences to those who transport passengers illegally, with which it seeks to stop the advance of Uber Buenos Aires streets.

The proposal, presented by Cambiemos, aggravates the penalties for unlicensed drivers, with penalties of up to 200,000 pesos and the retention of the driver's license.

It also provides for economic fines for the "owner or responsible of a vehicle that transports passengers and exploits it without the authorization and / or authorization to provide the service established by current regulations."

It also proposes fines of up to 10,000 fixed units -equivalent today to amounts of around 200,000 pesos, since its value depends on the price of a half-liter of higher octane gasoline- and the inability to drive from five to ten days.

Upward operations
Argentina is today the fastest growing market for Uber worldwide. According to the company, the economic crisis and the growth of unemployment, in addition to the reduction of purchasing power, led to an ideal scenario for the development of the transport app at the local level. In the AMBA it is already a success: 30% of the users are from the Federal Capital and 70% are from the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where the proposal grows in giant steps.

"The crisis prompted many people to find us as an alternative source of resources," Felipe Fernández Aramburu, Uber's business director in the country, said in an interview with Reuters this year. According to their data, 20 percent of drivers from Buenos Aires joined the fleet immediately after losing their job.

In addition, it is estimated that, each week, between 2,500 and 3,000 people download their application to be drivers, while, in the same period, 45,000 do so to use the app as passengers.

Only in the last three months, more than 55,000 drivers already generated revenue with the application and more than 5 million Argentines downloaded the service to their phones.

In total, there are already more than one million active users of the platform in the country, which confirms that, despite the "sticks in the wheel", it is here to stay.

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