This article offers a first comparative discussion about ride-sharing (ride-sourcing) practices and informal transport. It focuses primarily on Uber, and marshrutkas – a socially and economically crucial mobility offer prevailing in many post-Soviet cities. The absence or evasion of state regulations, low labour standards of transport workers, and high safety risks for passengers unite the high-tech globalised corporate ride-sourcing sector and low-tech localised marshrutkas. The digital technological leap has made it infinitely easier to recruit transport workers to de-territorialise coordination activities, to advocate for avoiding regulations and draw significant capital investments. In cities of the Global North this leads to an informalisation of formerly relatively protected labour relations. In cities of the Global South, this can involve the loss of horizontally embedded modes of shared transport, in favour of corporate ride-sourcing: further fragmentation and alienation of the labour force, without solving issues of negative externalities.

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Transport workers are conspicuously absent from both mobilities and urban studies literature. This paper therefore starts out with a double critique. First, transport workers, primarily drivers, are largely disregarded in mobilities and urban transport research. Second, the literature we find on transport workers—mostly based in empirical settings in the global South—remains outside recent and ongoing debates in critical urban transport studies. Providing empirical insights from post‐Soviet Central Asia, this paper strives to close these gaps and delve into the struggles and cleavages that structure informal transport workers’ positions and livelihoods. We argue that the diverse and contradictory logics that govern urban mobility affect the livelihoods and working conditions of informal transport workers, as well as their choices and motivations. These, in turn, significantly shape mobility provision, in terms of urban transport's (lack of) affordability, accessibility, convenience and safety.

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