The Uber company released an advertisement called “Boxes” recently, illustrating the traffic problem in Asian cities.

In the video, each of the “driver” is in a car-sized box and wanders around on the road. Some of them are finding parking places, some are waiting for the lights and some are just stuck on the road. There are also some shots to reveal the storage problem: A lady is walking through piles of boxes to find her own “car” (in reality, it is hard to find your car in big parking lot), a man was smashed by the boxes from above when trying to take his “car” at the bottom (as sometimes your car is stuck by other cars in the front or at the back, you need to wait for the owners of these cars to move theirs first in order to drive out). At the end of this short video, lots of the boxes leak out of the parking building. (which shows the overload of cars in the parking buildings in large Asian cities)

I really like this advertisement from UBER, not only because it is hilarious, but also it really illustrate the problem in a more straightforward way, and more importantly, it expressed the main idea of UBER: Ride together.

The main reason of the traffic jams in big cities is the inefficient use of the car. For example, a four-door car could contain about 5 people, however, most of the cars you could see on the street just contain the driver him/herself. Just imagine, if 4 colleagues could drive to work in one car instead of 4 separate cars, there would be 3 cars less on the road, if this concept is wildly-accepted by the public (for example more than one person in each vehicle on the road), the road situation would be much better in every city.

Moreover, some governments also released some legislations to limit or stop the growth of cars. For example, the government in Beijing introduced a policy that every potential vehicle buyer need to participate in a lottery in order to get the license plate. Similarly, in Singapore, where is the most expensive place in the world to own a car, the government would like to maintain zero growth of the total car amount in the future.