Privatization of Temporality in the Infrastrucutral Experience of Uber

• In Event: The Temporal Repertoire

Abstract

Public transportation has historically structured our everyday experience of time bureaucratically. Buses and trains are organized according to predetermined, inflexible schedules and routes. This temporality invokes constraints on passenger time, often requiring individual routinization and resulting in a forcibly synchronized (and thus potentially frustrating) collective experience. On the other hand, the rise of transportation platforms like Uber and Lyft, with dynamic “expected wait times,” have yielded a qualitatively different experience of time. Ostensibly, both drivers (via flexible labor) and passengers (via on-demand transportation) can instead conceive of time as more individual and responsive to their own needs. Thus, the temporality of the infrastructural experience is no longer collective but privatized. As transportation infrastructure splinters into tiers of service (Graham & Marvin 2001) --- premium, state-of-the-art services sold by enterprises to the wealthy vs. legacy public utilities for the poor--- so too is temporality splintered by class. As Star & Bowker (1999) note that infrastructure becomes more visible during moments of breakdown, temporality becomes especially salient when passengers are kept waiting. Thus, Uber passengers experience infrastructural breakdown alone; bus passengers experience it together. The affordances of the digital in its application to real-time tracking and reporting of public transportation (via physical infrastructure at bus/train stops as well as Google Maps and other apps that scrape city websites) complicates this dichotomy. Our understanding of how people experience temporality via splintered transportation infrastructures can be applied to predict future temporalities, as autonomous vehicles become increasingly technically feasible and integrated into public transportation.

Author

• Sanna Jamila Ali, Stanford University