Digital Platforms, IRL Impacts: The Good, the Bad and the Disruptive

Since the launch of Uber and Airbnb in 2008 and 2009, platforms have impacted urban communities in various positive, disruptive, and negative ways.

Platforms have provided urban residents, workers, and visitors with user-friendly digital services, offering new conveniences and consumer choices, including new ways of navigating and traveling through cities, new options for rental accommodations in neighborhoods, access to new on-demand labor markets, access to consumer information via crowdsourced review or ranking tools, and new low-barrier opportunities for primary and secondary sources of income. Some of these services, such as micromobiliy, can be seen as a good in and of themselves, providing mobility options that have positive externalities for air quality and carbon emissions.

Platforms have also posed risks, driven disruptions, and brought about more negative externalities for the city. Such impacts include stressing or overloading urban infrastructures like streets and sidewalks with large fleets of vehicles; driving negative systemwide impacts like traffic congestion, or environmental impacts like automobile emissions; or disrupting important markets such as housing in ways that drive up costs for renters.

Urban platforms have also raised concerns over regulatory fairness and tax evasion, inadequate consumer protections from scams to ensure financial and physical safety, labor rights of gig workers classified as contractors rather than employees, and concerns about surveillance capitalism and the privacy of users whose movements, preferences, transactions and other behaviors are increasingly tracked and quantified with information in the hands of yet-unproven startup companies like Uber, with concerning track records on appropriate handling of sensitive user data8 or disclosure of data breaches.9

8 “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide - The New York Times,” New York Times, accessed April 6, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 9 Bill Chappell, “Uber Pays $148 Million Over Yearlong Cover-Up Of Data Breach,” NPR, September 27, 2018, sec. Business, https://www.npr.org/2018/09/27/652119109/uber-pays-148-million-over-year-long-cover-up-of-databreach.