Uber And Lyft Win Government Transportation Contract

The U.S. government is enlisting Uber and Lyft to help provide transportation services for public agencies and employees, Reuters reports.

The deal is worth up to $810 million and will be able to assist over 4 million employees of the government nationwide.

In the past, individual employees could use rideshare services, but the new contract will let the companies formally launch their services for individual agencies and work with officials to promote it, according to Reuters.

Veronica Juarez, Lyft vice president of social enterprise and government, said the last five-year award was issued by the General Services Administration (GSA) on Monday (Nov. 23), according to the news outlet. She said the award was the end result of a negotiation process that took up almost four years. Although she wouldn’t say what Lyft expected to gain revenue-wise, she did say the U.S. government was known to spend around $200 million on transportation every year. In addition, Lyft is hoping to gain more partnership on public health and equity projects involved with transportation, Reuters reported.

The awards were announced in April tentatively for both Uber and Lyft. Back then, the GSA said it had been working on discounts of 2 to 4 percent with the companies and that the companies had agreed to do away with some extra fees.

For Uber, the partnership will help its Uber for Business initiative, which serves larger organizations and companies. The work with Uber would be a “natural next step for us, and we’re proud to help federal agencies tackle some of the biggest administrative challenges they face,” Ronnie Gurion, global head of Uber for Business, said in the Reuters report.

Uber and Lyft had a win on election night in California, where voters approved Proposition 22. That made the ride share firms exempt from Assembly Bill 5, the motion passed last year that made gig work companies classify workers as employees rather than independent contractors. But laws around gig economy workers are still likely to be hotly debated going forward.