A decade ago, Uber and Lyft’s arrival transformed transportation in D.C. While ride-hailing brought convenience, it also brought negative consequences to the city.

Katie Wells is a researcher at Georgetown University and co-author of “Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City”, which came out Tuesday. The book focuses on how the city’s resistance to the new technology was defeated and how Uber’s plan in D.C. became the blueprint for entering other cities. Wells interviewed politicians, policymakers, and more than 40 drivers for the book.

Wells spoke with WAMU’s Michael Scherer about the book and ride-hailing’s impact on the District. She and co-author Kafui Attoh will be joined by journalist and author Malcolm Harris for a book talk on August 22 at Politics and Prose in Chevy Chase.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Scherer: Set the scene for us. What was the transportation landscape like in D.C. in 2013 when Uber arrived… and how did ride-hailing fill some of the gaps?

Katie Wells: There are two things to keep in mind about what was happening a decade ago. On one hand, we had a deregulated cab system that was plagued with all kinds of issues about corruption, racism, and even what we can call ableism, or an inability to offer accessible rides to folks in the disability community. It also no longer served as a stable job for working-class African-Americans, as it had in decades past.

A second important piece to keep in mind here is that the public transit system was crumbling in many ways. There was even a website called “Is Metro On Fire?”

But there’s also a non-transit condition that I think is important, which is that we had increasingly high numbers of income inequality, which means in the wake of the Great Recession, we had underemployment for a lot of folks.

We also had an increasing number of smartphone users who were very able to use their disposable income on this new thing.

Scherer: Not all city regulators and politicians were pro-ride-hailing. How did Uber establish its foothold in D.C.?

Wells: Uber was able to, in a 24-hour period, email everybody that had ever downloaded its app and sort of flood the city council and regulators with 50,000 emails, 37,000 tweets. And what happened is that Uber was able to sort of turn this question about brand loyalty into this new kind of political citizenship, to kind of convince a city to move fast, break things, right. Don’t move slowly or thoughtfully and fix problems.

Scherer: Many in the city are Uber users because of its convenience. But what are some of the downsides of the service?

Wells: The city lost its ability to regulate itself to figure out whether this was a good addition to the region. Did it, you know, cause pollution or congestion? How safety with traffic accidents or pedestrian fatalities and even questions about racial equity sort of got washed under the bridge.

Not being able to evaluate (what a service is doing) is a negative outcome. Increasingly, research shows that these ride-hailing giants cause congestion, pollution, and idling.

D.C. added a recent tax even this year to offset… these companies are not paying their fair share. And it’s about time, after a dozen years for regulators and policymakers to, you know, make sure this is a really good addition to the city.

Scherer: This is a transportation story but also a labor story. You talked to 40 Uber drivers for the book. What were the common themes you heard from them over time? 

Wells: A lot of drivers felt they were in a black box.

We asked them, have you ever had coffee with another Uber driver? Have you ever talked to one? Do you know any by name? And the resounding story over five years of interviews and surveys was “no.”

And as a result of this intense isolation, a lot of them internalized any failures they had on the app as problems of themselves. “Oh, I wasn’t smart enough to make it work” as opposed to “I was set up to fail.” And so one of the things that we know what’s happening with the Uber app is that workers are given personalized pay, which means that if you and I are both signing up to drive today, I might get a lower offer for a job than you would. And so workers are often struggling to try to figure out, are they getting fleeced? Are they getting decent pay?

It’s really tough to be in a black box.