Uber is betting that its global empire will be key to winning the bike and scooter wars

Rachel Holt Uber Jump bike CEO IGNITION

Uber wants to be the one-stop app for transportation across the globe.
Two executives — Uber's head of New Modalities and the CEO of a bike-share company purchased by Uber last year — spoke at Business Insider's IGNITION conference on Monday.
The company hopes to expand its presence from ride-hailing to rolling out bikes, scooters, and other new vehicles.

With nine years and more than 80 countries under its belt, Uber is hoping its experience and ubiquitous presence in cities around the world can help it win on micro-mobility as well.

Speaking at Business Insider's IGNITION conference, Rachel Holt, Uber's head of New Modalities, said these relationships will be key as the company seeks to expand Jump, a bike-share company that it purchased last year.

"Many of us have done this before," Holt said, referring to its now 16,000-strong workforce. "The ability for us [to] recognize that this is a new business, and different from businesses from one we've run — to bring that to the infrastructure that we have at Uber is pretty compelling.

"When you couple the hardware expertise and relationships with cities that [Jump CEO Ryan Rzepecki] and the Jump team have brought, and coupling it with the operation ... we've got at Uber — with these global teams on the business and policy side, it looks like a pretty exciting. You'll start to see a pretty massive ramp-up in scale over the next half."

"For now, Jump's bikes are only in 13 cities around the country, with scooters in an even smaller subset, but the company has big plans for its expansion. It's got plenty of catching up to do if it wants to beat Lyft, which now owns the US' largest bike and scooter system through its acquisition of Motivate and its systems in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C. and others.

"It all comes down to building necessary tools in cities for bikes and scooters to augment cars," according to Rzepecki.

"It all gets back to 'how do we take this and scale it,'" he said at IGNITION. "Cities need these big investments and make it safer for people to bike, and have places for these vehicles to park at the end of their trip."

At the end of the day, Uber wants to empower people to go car-free, Holt and Rzepecki said. That means helping people connect transit trips with walking, bikes, or any new development in micro-mobility.

"Jump, even before the acquisition, has invested in hardware expertise to make the best-in-class vehicle," Rzepecki said. "For scooters right now, everyone's sourcing from the same folks and there's not much differentiation. We have a chance over the next year or two to stand apart in the actual vehicle design."

"You're going to see a lot of different kinds of vehicles," Holt added.

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