What exactly is being studied during the six-month City of Vancouver moratorium on new taxi licenses and rideshare apps and how does a six month ban possibly benefit Vancouver residents?
This isn’t simply a Taxis vs. Uber battle. It’s an important public transit issue. The Vision website says “Keep Vancouver Moving Forward”, but I can only see the ban as a move backwards. I’ve studied public transit with enthusiasm since I saw Expo Ernie on the monorail and my support of your Broadway Subway plan is borderline evangelical. But despite my subway fanboyism, I think the rideshare issue is potentially a far more important long-term public transit issue than even the Broadway Subway, ESPECIALLY when you combine
innovative carpool rideshare technology and autonomous vehicles,
which some of the smartest minds on earth predict will be here far sooner than most people realize. None of the Translink future rider prediction models account for changes to ridership behaviour due to emerging rideshare or self-driving car technology. NONE of them. You might say "it's too early to account for things like that!" and I agree with you, but in effect we're making 25 year regional strategic transportation plans like we’re Sam The Record Man opening new stores and some kid in his dorm room just released this thing called Napster.
Rideshare companies like Uber are just the start of massive transportation industry changes. Many of us have used these rideshare services elsewhere and can’t believe our own “progressive” city has banned these technologies. We’re certainly not proud Vancouver is ONLY city on the planet that Uber has ever retreated from.
We need a real answer on why you banned the rideshare companies.
1. Safety isn’t a real answer for the ban. We’re not buying that anymore. First of all, so called “safe” and “professional” drivers vetted by the BC gov’t with all their fancy permits and training are
driving taxis down staircases and
committing sexual offences. A taxi driver is one of the most dangerous jobs in Canada.
Taxi drivers are TWICE as likely to die on the job as police officers. People visiting downtown make the poor decision to drive their cars drunk back to the suburbs because Vancouver taxis both a)
refuse to allow suburban taxi companies to enter the city and then b) often refuse to drive people home to the suburbs. Many women find it dangerous at night, unable to find one of the extremely limited numbers of taxi that service the city.
We have the lowest rate of taxis per resident in the country. Despite the fearmongering that “unregulated” rideshare services are dangerous by people such as taxi mafia spokesperson Caroyln Bauer (
see: 1:06-1:27 of this vid), the exact opposite is true. Rideshare services offer MORE protections for the driver and the passenger. Unlike a taxi driver who all-too-often has a “broken” credit card reader, and prefers cash, no cash is involved in rideshare. This eliminates a prime motivator for assault: theft. Rideshare services have a peer rating system to boot shoddy drivers and riders from the system, encouraging both the driver and the rider to be responsible. Uber enacts better background checks and driving record cheks, and offers more than
double the liability insurance of taxi companies. In fact,
rideshare services are safe enough that large numbers of women are becoming drivers. With this in mind, there’s a pretty good argument that by blocking rideshare, the city has inadvertently blocked services that make the city even safer. But isn’t it just REALLY hypocritical that safety is held up as a reason for the ban but
The City of Vancouver’s very own ridesharing website mentions literally nothing about rider or driver safety?.
2. Protecting jobs isn’t a real answer for the ban. Banning Uber to protect taxi jobs is like banning Netflix to protect Blockbuster Video employees. Did Vancouver put a six month ban on online video services to “study” the issue? Did Blockbuster complain to the local media citing “unfair competition” of online video not being subject to the same “costs”? Nope. Because they would’ve looked absolutely ridiculous. Cough. Uber gets people out of their personal vehicles and CREATES driver jobs. The six-month ban reeks of over-influence by the local taxi mafia. The tightly restricted market has led to
taxi permits being worth nearly $1 million dollars on the open grey resale market. The artificially high value of these licenses translates into real costs for the consumer. Taxi drivers are paid poorly, it’s the permit owners who get wealthy. I honestly can’t blame the taxi companies for trying to protect their interest.
IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, TAXI COMPANIES MUST APPROVE NEW COMPETITION TO THEIR OWN MARKETPLACE. Isn’t this the exact definition of a conflict of interest? It’s akin to a Tim Horton’s needing Starbuck’s approval to enter a market.
The current taxi regulatory situation is a classic example of overregulation from vested interests that blocks the exact creative destruction and innovation that will CREATE more jobs.
Here’s an idea: why not do a real “study” of the effects of rideshare apps on Vancouverites by, get this, letting us try them out. For free. At literally zero expense to city hall. The results of that “study” will be pretty obvious in six months. Real world results are far better evidence than the subjective opinion of a completely undemocratic transportation approval board using completely skewed logic to protect their own interests.
It’s pretty clear to everyone watching that the six month moratorium on rideshare and new taxi licenses is really just an attempt to delay discourse of the issue until next spring, far after the election. But here’s the question right now. Right here. On the Internet. We’re not going to conveniently forget about it until April 1st, 2015.
So once again, what exactly is being studied during the six-month City of Vancouver moratorium on new taxi licenses and rideshare apps and how does this six month ban possibly benefit Vancouver residents?
TL;DR: The taxi industry sells encyclopedias and Uber is wikipedia. And unless Gregor can convince us otherwise, city council didn’t want to upset the influential vote of the taxi industry oligarchs….(which actually, and unbelievably, isn’t an exaggeration or term used for shock value - there are only four taxi companies that operate in the city and their collusion behaviour actually mimics that of oligarchs. (
See p. 28)....so council temporarily banned rideshare companies for selfish re-election interests instead of quickly working to create a simple and reasonable regulatory framework for rideshare companies to enter the market, as is happening in hundreds of actually progressive cities around the world, like
Austin, and
San Francisco. Before that there were some some random shout outs to Expo Ernie and Sam the Record Man to confuse the n00bs plus some ranting about driverless rideshare that I believe will eventually happen but we’re likely gonna hafta endure many few years of a predictible Taxis vs. Technology battle play out in the media before any of that. And make no mistake, the taxi industry isn’t keen on Car2go or a future bikesharing system either. Literally nothing was said in this post prior to this point about how there’s no pizza industry restriction on the number of pizza delivery vehicles.
BONUS “WOW...WTF? REALLY?” LINK:
You might think it was a personal attack or exaggeration when I referred to Carolyn Bauer as spokesperson for the “Taxi Mafia”,
but may I point out that the term BLOOD MONEY actually appears on the BC Taxi Association’s own website.
ALSO:Benn Proctor’s SFU Masters of Public Policy thesis is an excellent source of information to anyone who’d like to learn more about Vancouver’s bizarre taxi situation. (
Free DL here.)
DOUBLE ALSO: An eye-opening seven part series on self driving cars.
TRIPLE ALSO:This episode of South Park NAILS IT.
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