WASHINGTON — Uber reached a new milestone early Thursday morning, and a D.C. Uber driver helped do it.
At 7:29 a.m. GMT, or 3:29 a.m. D.C. time, a total of 156 Uber drivers around the world simultaneously picked up what equaled Uber’s 5 billionth ride.
The D.C. Uber driver picked up his fare at the U Street Music Hall for a one-mile ride to the Washington Plaza Hotel, on Thomas Circle.
The D.C. driver, and all 155 others, will get $500 from Uber for helping hit the new milestone.
Some of the other simultaneous 5 billionth rides were also worth noting.
Six of them were taken by riders on their first trip. One driver was on his first trip, and picked up his fare on a motorbike in Jakarta.
The shortest of the trips was 2.5 blocks, in San Francisco. The longest was 27 kilometers, in Singapore.
And 85 percent of the 156 riders gave their drivers five out of five stars, Uber says.
The 156 rides that marked 5 billion were taken in 24 countries.
Uber, founded in 2010, took five years to get to a billion trips, and hit 2 billion a year later. It went from 2 billion rides to 5 billion in less than one year.
