As an Austinite, the whole think looked more like a childish pissing match rather than some real debate on regulation vs the free market. Austin City Council took up a fight where there wasn't a problem, and Uber paid 9 million to fight something that they are already doing 3 hours down the road. http://www.driveuberhouston.com/fingerprint-background-check...
The whole thing makes no sense to me. The City Council won a fight, but gained nothing, Uber/Lyft lost a market but will happily move on to some other place. Meanwhile, the only real losers are the people living in Austin who are stuck in some of the worst traffic in the nation and now have a worse on demand ride system. What a waste.
You might consider that the citizens of Austin voted on the measure that passed.
This wasn't Austin City Council against Uber and Lyft. It was the citizens of Austin voting for provisions Uber and Lyft needed to comply with (and choose not to).
Only 17.3% of the voters turned out. Hardly the will of the people, just the ones who cared enough to vote, or were literate enough to understand what day of the week the vote was, or had a way to get to the voting station.
Shall the City Code be amended to repeal City Ordinance No. 20151217-075 relating to Transportation Network Companies; and replace with an ordinance that would repeal and prohibit required fingerprinting, repeal the requirement to identify the vehicle with a distinctive emblem, repeal the prohibition against loading and unloading passengers in a travel lane, and require other regulations for Transportation Network Companies?
Then there are two boxes below that. Next to one it says “For the Ordinance” and on the other, “Against the Ordinance.”
The writer points out that it's not clear which ordinance the boxes are referring to, or what the net effect of your vote. Usually, on ballots I've seen over the decades, there's a summary phrase on the ballot like "if you vote YES, you are supporting gay marriage" or something like that, nice and clear.
If a clear phrasing had been provided, I wonder whether it still would have gone that way.
"For the Ordinance" would be against the repeal - wouldn't it? So if you wanted to say "Yes, I want to repeal" and saw a positive answer it would be very easy to support not repealing the ordinance by saying you were "for it". Or is it to approve a new ordinance to repeal the existing ordinance?
Shall the City Code be amended to repeal City Ordinance No. 20151217-075 relating to Transportation Network Companies; and replace with an ordinance that would repeal and prohibit required fingerprinting, repeal the requirement to identify the vehicle with a distinctive emblem, repeal the prohibition against loading and unloading passengers in a travel lane, and require other regulations for Transportation Network Companies?
Then there are two boxes below that. Next to one it says “For the Ordinance” and on the other, “Against the Ordinance.”
That is extremely interesting, thank you for posting that.
Which is about 7% more than usually turn out for May elections, and about the same as chose the currently sitting governor. Please don't suggest it wasn't a valid election.
As to confusing ballot language, I've never seen anyone write any clearer language that passes legal muster. It has to talk about two ordinances, one to be repealed and one to replace it, and the major points of difference between them. Go ahead, give it a shot.
You said "the citizens" when in fact it was less than 20% of the voters. Technically you are correct, but really, this vote was hardly representative of the citizenry.
Then there's the whole vague wording thing as explained above. For all we know, half of the voters didn't understand the ballot question. I'm not so sure I would have voted correctly either. What a fiasco.
I actually saw articles on mainstream news sites saying Uber/Lyft had threatened to leave if the vote passed. I'm sure plenty of people's votes weren't what they intended.
Taxis, traditional, or Uber-flavoured, actually make traffic worse. Unlike a private automobile, they add to congestion because they need to travel to their pickup point.
If you actually want to fix traffic, tax cars, and add some buses/trains.
Perhaps there are situations where this is true, and I'd be open to studies on this, but my experience says otherwise.
I know people who did not own a car and instead mostly used buses and/or bikes to get around Austin. They knew they always had a reliable Uber ride to fill in the gaps. Taxis adjust to demand terribly in Austin so they are not reliable or pleasant to use. So, now these people are using cars more often because they don't have a reliable way to fill in the gaps.
2) Uber reduces the need for parking which means more parking lots and garages, which pushes business further away from each other, making walking between places more difficult. As far as I know, increasing density is a reliable way of reducing traffic because it makes alternatives more attractive.
3) I would love to see more buses and trains in Austin. Unfortunately, Austin has failed to pass much on that front largely due to incompetence in government all over the place. If I had my way, we would be investing heavily in buses, trains, walkways, all of it. Uber is a great way to fill in gaps between these. I see the fingerprinting battle as a giant distraction from real traffic problems.
> I would love to see more buses and trains in Austin. Unfortunately, Austin has failed to pass much on that front largely due to incompetence in government all over the place. If I had my way, we would be investing heavily in buses, trains, walkways, all of it. Uber is a great way to fill in gaps between these. I see the fingerprinting battle as a giant distraction from real traffic problems.
Looks like its time to get involved in your local government! Have you considered campaigning and running for the next city council seat that goes to election?
I definitely plan to be more involved in future elections. That doesn't change my opinion that Austin is headed towards being a rather dysfunctional large city instead of the unique interesting medium sized city I've lived in for years. I'm not saying there isn't democracy or that there is some great injustice going on. I'm just mostly sad that a nice place to live is being slowly replaced by a poorly run place and it doesn't seem to be able to solve it's own problems. This Uber/Lyft deal is just one small example of moving in the wrong direction and fighting the wrong fights.
Consider that Austin citizens who have been there longer than tech workers might have thought they had a nice place that is turning into a poorly run place due to the tech scene influence. Not an insult, just a consideration. Something to consider for anyone who decides to move to a new locale.
The effect is more complex and there are more dynamics at play.
Certainly, any one car being used is less people-dense than a bus or train. But people are more likely to "take the leap" to a lower-car-use life when they have the option of being able to call an Uber to get to a destination that's not well served.
What? Private automobiles have to travel to their pickup point too. You just forgot about this because they usually do so at the end of the previous trip.
If you count it like that you get at least four trips for turf car service where you have two for the private car. That's not counting potentially cruising around in areas where you have a higher likelihood of finding customers but no parking.
Yes, cruising around looking for customers is EXACTLY what you're counting when you include a "return trip" extra for a taxi. If they find another customer right after dropping off the prior then there are zero wasted miles.
Taxis use up more road spacetime the more time they spend looking for a customer, while private cars use up more road spacetime the more time they spend parked or looking for parking. Realistically, in dense places, private cars spend a lot of time looking for parking, and almost all of their lives parked, but cabs are occupied more often than not. On the other hand in sufficiently undense places, a cab would have to spend a lot of time looking for passengers while private cars never have to look for parking and have off-street parking -- but these kinds of places have low traffic anyway, so who cares? In the places where traffic is actually a pain, cabs improve it.
Houston is much larger than austin (different market category). Uber also does fingerprints in nyc. Uber earlier left san antonio over fingerprints for 6 months, until san antonio compromised with optional finger prints.
If Uber was still in austin, i would think about taking the bus from houston instead of driving (or not bothering because its too much trouble).
With Uber, I frequently car pool with my wife, as i can always take uber back on the way, if our times don't match.
With Uber, I much more frequently consider bus / train, as i don't have to worry about transportation to and from the metro station.
Slanted is an understatement. The following words are from the article, written by the author, and take the article out of the realm of actual reporting, and into the realm of bullshit --opinion--
This link was originally dead but I vouched for it as I was just a few paragraphs into reading it. If I read all the way through, I would have left it dead.
The content started just fine but progressively gets worse and worse with the authors opinions and vitriolic anger coloring the work.
Go check out the rest of The Federalist's articles. For example, The Federalist Editors And Friends Discuss Kim Kardashian's Butt, Why Bernie Sanders Supporters Should Vote Trump, How Environmentalists Opened The Door For Zika, and my favorite, America’s War On The Confederacy Is Really A War On The Past.
+1 - not an analytical article / bit of authorship.
The author labels as "onerous [regulations imposed by Austin City]" (in the linked article he wrote) avoiding providing detail for the regulations he judges as onerous:
"It seems there’s no new product or service that meddling liberals won’t figure out a way to regulate out of existence under the pretense of knowing what’s best for you.
"Over the weekend in the liberal bastion of Austin, Texas, a handful of pro-regulation voters opted to keep in place a host of petty, irrational, and burdensome regulations the city council imposed on ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft in December."
Ironically ending the unanalytical article with: "I know it sounds crazy, but it’s almost like they don’t care about solving these problems."
Forcing people to use illegal transportation does victimize people, and if the city is forcing the transportation to be illegal, said victims are the city's responsibility.
So a tech company is "facilitating" a "BLACK MARKET" for ride-sharing... what? Was Uber a "black market" too?
The Federalist view generally only has an inkling of the truth to whatever fits their conservative narrative. So if there is a story here, I doubt it is the full message
I find it hard to trust anything on the site when one of its founders, Ben Domenech, plagiarized articles while working at WaPo and had to resign. This was also on top of him lying and saying he had permission from one(?) of the authors.
Not that I support the Austin's City Council about the Uber/Lyft situation. But at the sign of anything happening they instantly write an article to reflect how "bad" the city council's decision was. See also: anything about Seattle's increased minimum wage.
In Baltimore, the black market cabs are called "hacks". They exist mainly because people don't have enough money to afford cabs and there aren't enough bus routes.
"Hacking" involves driving along popular roads looking for people who use their index and middle finger to claw at the air ("hawkin'") to indicate they'd like a ride. Fares are hashed out before the ride begins, usually a flat rate, and well under the price of a cab. These illegal cabs sometimes take advantage of the riders because they can't complain to the police. Though in many cases one might develop a relationship with a particular hack and call them directly for rides.
Can genuinely say that back when I was in Austin for a couple years, partying hard and occasionally linked up with some other go-getters, most of them had business cards for Taxis or Town Cars that would cater to well-to-do individuals, mostly college-aged party scene people. This was about a decade ago and I thought it was quite useful at the time.
The decision by Uber and Lyft to temporarily abandon Austin (game theory suggests that both will be back, I suspect within months) may backfire on them, as the drivers discover that they really don't need them. All the drivers need is a dispatch service to coordinate the data from their phones. What makes an Uber driver? A sticker and an app on your phone? That's precious little value to deliver for the large bite Uber takes out of the driver's earnings. My prediction is that dispatch services like Uber and Lyft will become commodities, and the events in Austin will only accelerate that process.
Pardon my amusement at the observation this conflagration is eerily like the City of Austin imported more California culture than it wanted - oh sure, everybody likes tech start ups, but the whole wasteful socially progressive government style that appartently tagged along isn't so loved. Hm, funny that.
Startup culture is more libertarian than socially progressive. Socially progressive would be Austin providing a robust public transportation system, thereby removing the need for ridesharing.
Wouldn't it be more efficient for public transportation to be provided via taxes and user fees versus Uber and Lyft siphoning off of the flow of transportation payments for their shareholders? That seems inefficient to me.
More efficient? By what measurement? Certainly not the consumer's time nor the taxpayers' money!
Billion dollar light rail trains that roll empty are not a terribly efficient use of money. Buses are more flexible, but waiting for a bus then having to walk from the bus stop home is apparently an unsatisfactory use of time to many passengers.
A system that connects a passenger with the nearest available driver and doesn't take too much for their part in the transaction would seem to be efficient in time and money for both the passenger and driver. In addition, it provides a source of employment for people who are looking for work and meet the criteria.
Not saying that Uber, Lyft, and other "ride sharing" services are all on the side of the angels, but their success points to a need which they are meeting.
You're post makes a whole lot of assumptions about ridesharing.
1. Uber drivers are compensated sufficiently for their time and expenses (research has shown this isn't true, Uber drivers scrape by just like cabbies)
2. That a consumer's time is more valuable than having public transportation available to everyone (Ridesharing > Buses/bike shares/etc)
3. That expensive rail is one of the only options.
The solution is a mix of buses, bicycle sharing, and electric self-driving cars. How we get there is the tricky part.
Didn't assume either 1, 2, nor 3.
1. Perhaps your definition of "compensated sufficiently" doesn't jibe with those of the thousands of drivers who voluntarily choose to drive for Uber and similar services.
2. SOME consumers consider their time too valuable to take public transportation as you have defined it.
3. I mentioned light rail AND buses in my decidedly non-encyclopedic comment about efficiency of ridesharing. Those are two of the main options currently available in Austin.
Definitely, "the solution is a mix", but the components and proportions of that mix are best left to the consumers, not solely to central planners, whether in governments or in large corporations. Indeed, since the vote, local rideshare companies have sprung up in Austin, perhaps better suited to the needs of Austinites.
It's the other way around. Tax-fleeing Californians who moved to Austin expected an anti-regulatory climate, and found that the city is more conservative than they wanted. Austinites are fine with tech startups but don't try and strong-arm them into changing their laws to suit the needs of out-of-state corporations.
Austin may be socially liberal but it is classically conservative. It is conservative to look at new industries with skepticism and pass common-sense regulations that give everyone a level playing field.
And I was replying to the parent who referred to ex-West coast liberals migrating to Austin. If these people expected a "progressive" government like they might find in San Francisco, they were probably disappointed by the actions of the Austin City Council and its support from Austin voters.
Uh huh. Listen. I've been around the world doing "black market ride sharing", where the ride is actually shared, for years. There aren't any regulations on it, other than "don't stand in the road asking for a ride". Government regulation isn't preventing anyone from sharing anything. It may give you some extra rules to follow if you're running a business though.
I think this is great. However, if you are Austin and you're idea was to strong arm Lyft & Uber into allowing background checks to make ride sharing "safer", one would imagine spawning a comleteley unregulated black market would be "suboptimal" to the desired outcome.
correct. I agree with you as well as parent to some degree. However, chiefly, it shoud be noted that
Business Owners and Gun Owners operate in the free market and presumably use the internet. Wherease everyone who is operating within a freemarket or active on the internet may not be a gun owner or business owner.
The parent is talking about at a system level. You are talking, at least my charrachterization of it, about a layer of abstraction within a system.
> Arcade City, the “Uber killer” ride-sharing company, as it’s known, says it’s developing a peer-to-peer ride-sharing app that will connect people who need a ride with people who have a car, and eliminate “concern about red tape or corporate BS—just people providing people a needed service.”
I like water, meat, and medical services, but prefer some amount of regulation on them. I'm sure there's a fine line between reasonable regulation and protectionism or irrationality when it comes to these things.
> Here’s the big idea: We can cut out the corporate middlemen — and make government regulations obsolete — by transparently providing rider and driver with clear information about the other party to each transaction, including a strong reputation and ratings system where riders and drivers ‘level up’ after community-vetted good behavior on the platform.
Who's going to take a chance on the drivers and riders with no reputation?
Regulation is necessary for health and safety reasons. Need for regulation beyond health and safety is quite small. Not zero, but on a relative scale quite small.
Uber and Lyft's track record for safety in the US is quite strong. As is the willingness of riders and drivers to participate in the system from no reputation.
The need for regulation has not been justified. Regulations shouldn't be passed unless there is a clear reason to do so and measurable way to declare that regulation a success or failure.
Didn't Austin get rid of Uber and Lyft because of the entrenched/encumband 'taxi' industry and the big finance industry owning and financing taxi 'licenses'?
The author can't seem to keep his story straight. In paragraph 3 he makes this claim:
> When a ballot proposal that would have replaced the city ordinance failed, Uber and Lyft left town as promised. Since May 9, there have been no ride-sharing services available in this city of almost a million people.
and then a few paragraphs later makes this claim, directly contradicting the above claim:
> The city’s response is only making things worse. Last week it held a job fair for out-of-work Uber and Lyft drivers, at which it encouraged drivers to get fingerprinted and sign up for the only remaining ridesharing company in town, a local app called Get Me.
“My sense is we were innovating too quickly for Uber and Lyft. You get to be a big company, you’re less nimble. But these companies have to expect disruption.”
Gold. Reminds me of how Slowgle is getting disrupted by Paris.
How so, by requiring background checks for Uber drivers? When I lived there, they required the same livery license for pedicab drivers as well -- which was basically getting fingerprinted and paying a $25 fee.
Uber and Lyft were the ones who pulled out. The regulation that Austin passed was in no way overbearing; it just required fingerprints. They claim this "destroys the ridesharing economy" but in my experience, Uber is basically a part-time job for most drivers. Most people will go get fingerprinted for a part-time job. Very few people are ridesharing; but maybe this undercuts the argument that Lyft and Uber use for the drivers not being employees...
Were Uber and Lyft being required to perform a level of background check beyond what was required of existing taxi cab drivers? Or, were the new set of regulations simply bringing Uber/Lyft drivers in line with other professional drivers?
The whole thing is weird to me. I've used Uber a few times and the car that showed up has always been a licensed limo (just dumb luck, I suppose). Pretty sure I'd turn down a ride in some clapped-out Civic, should that be the car that showed up (but, perhaps that's why I usually use car services and not Uber).
They weren't even bringing them up to the same level as taxi drivers; they were just requiring a livery license -- which is a rubber-stamp process in Austin and again, is required even of bicycle-taxi drivers who are only allowed to work for tips.
Uber and Lyft threw a hissy fit because it undermines their complete control over the driver ecosystem. Best I can tell, they're afraid that licensing drivers would cause them to expect to be treated like employees, while making it ever-so-slightly harder for Uber/Lyft to recruit drivers. IMO it's more about labor relations than regulation.
> Most people will go get fingerprinted for a part-time job.
That's how it starts. Then the government starts mandating transdermal implants at birth that contain a GPS chipset, and a kill switch. We're headed to a level of dystopian control that would make a brutal banana republic dictator shudder.
Actually, we're not that far off from being chipped voluntarily. That's how it will start. "Let us chip you, and you won't need your badge to get through the front entrance anymore; and we'll give you a $50/week bonus."
In an era when the government has access to our cell phone data via easily obtained FISA court permission, we're already a good chunk of the way there.
Problem is, Craigslist is full of spam/scams. It's hard to filter through, and takes time and effort. Not something I want to do via mobile at $arbitrary_time when I may or may not be in a hurry.
And decentralizing eliminates one of the best things going for Uber/Lyft, the background checks and tracking.
Not sure about Germany, but in Austin, Uber wanted their drivers to carry auto insurance, although the company also has its own policy to cover drivers--many personal auto insurance policies explicitly do not cover accidents while the insured party is driving for hire.
About as well as you think, which is zero. If an insurance company finds out your injured/killed passenger was for-hire under the table, most standard policies don't cover this especially in the age of Uber. You're screwed.
The whole thing makes no sense to me. The City Council won a fight, but gained nothing, Uber/Lyft lost a market but will happily move on to some other place. Meanwhile, the only real losers are the people living in Austin who are stuck in some of the worst traffic in the nation and now have a worse on demand ride system. What a waste.