Uber, the mobile-device application for ride sharing, might lead people to ditch their cars to save money, says New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo.

The company said last week that it was valued at $18 billion in its latest funding round. Uber may fail like most startups, Manjoo writes. But it also "could transform transportation the way Amazon has altered shopping," he says.

That means "using slick, user-friendly software and mountains of data to completely reshape an existing market, ultimately making many modes of urban transportation cheaper, more flexible and more widely accessible to people across the income spectrum."

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The end game of this could be a decline in private car ownership, Manjoo explains. "In its long-established markets, like San Francisco, using Uber every day is already arguably cheaper than owning a private car."

With Uber facing heated worldwide competition from companies like Lyft, prices for rides will certainly plunge, he contends.

"The competition is likely to result in more areas of the country in which ride sharing becomes both cheaper and more convenient than owning a car, a shift that could profoundly alter how people navigate American cities," Manjoo notes.

"Over the next few years, if Uber and other such services do reduce the need for private vehicle ownership, they could help lower the cost of living in urban areas, reduce the environmental toll exacted by privately owned automobiles (like the emissions we spew while cruising for parking), and reallocate space now being wasted on parking lots to more valuable uses, like housing."

But not everyone is enthusiastic about Uber, particularly traditional taxi drivers. Thousands of them stalled traffic across Europe Wednesday in protest against Uber and its competitors. Cities seeing protests included London, Paris, Berlin and Madrid.

"I'm protesting because I respect the future of the London taxi trade," driver Nick Warren, who helped block traffic near Trafalgar Square, tells The Wall Street Journal. London officials say 4,000 to 5,000 taxis participated in the action.

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