There have been a bunch of threads about Uber on these boards, and several mentions of the term “ride sharing”.
I can find lots of examples of that phrase being used to describe Uber and Lyft, but I can’t find a case where Uber uses it to refer to themselves. They’re always a “car service” or a “transportation network” or something. But the only reference I can find on their website to “sharing” is for UberPool, which is where multiple fares share a single car. So, not sharing in the sense of a driver sharing with passengers, but in multiple passengers splitting the bill.
It seems they don’t use the term Ride Sharing for their service. You are right. My guess is that with their powerful legal team they are being very careful in what terminology they use so they are safe from falling under any type of regulations regardless of the jurisdictions where they operate. (which is everywhere on the planet).
And the bottom line is, no matter what they claim, the fact is the most common type of Uber which is UberX are taxicabs.
Ride sharing, AFAIK, has no legal definition and is purely a colloquial term. In California, Uber and Lyft are regulated as Transportation Network Companies and other states are enacting similar regulations.
Uber’s communications team is notoriously decentralized (many of the Uber communications scandals stem from over-zealous city managers rather than Uber HQ) and someone somewhere may have used ride sharing in a document but Uber itself tends to prefer the more precise, legal definitions.
Uberx is what they call their most basic/lowest cost level of service, what most people take most of the time when they “uber”…they have other levels of service where (for more $) you can be picked up in a big SUV if you need the room for more passengers/luggage, a high end luxury car, etc.
At least in NYC, the higher-end service is what came first. It cost more than a cab, but you got a fancy black luxury car – paying extra for a better service. It was only later that they started the lower-cost taxi-competing-with service.
Who else? The media. When these services started, some journalist differentiated between Uber’s “professional” (i.e., taxi) service and “sharing,” with donations, (like Sidecar), such as Tomio Geron in this Forbes article, but soon writers, such as this blogger, Brian Chen, in the NY Times, were using it as a blanket term, including for Uber. To be fair, the California Public Utilities Commission press release referenced in this blog also refers to Uber as “ride sharing.” Part of the problem, too, is that long before these services, there was the term “sharing economy,” and so sloppy journalists just adapted it indiscriminately.
The reason that the references to Australia on the uber website use the term “ridesharing” is because uber were arguing for a “sharing” tax exemption. I don’t know if they used the term “ridesharing” in their submissions to the Australian tax department, but it was the basis of their claim, as documented on their website,
Not to mention, if they’re a taxi service (which they are) then they’re flagrantly breaking the law in most (all?) states, since they haven’t paid for taxi licenses.
As has been explained in other threads, they’re not what most jurisdictions define as a taxi service because they can’t be directly hailed on the street. They are what is known as a “car service” or “livery service,” which is regulated differently.