Make Austin Uber-less!
Matthew Feeney writes at Cato about Austin's regulations for Uber and Lyft to have fingerprints as part of their driver background checks:
This is a disappointing result, especially given that fingerprinting is, despite its sexy portrayal in forensic TV shows, not a perfect background check process and needlessly burdens rideshare companies.
Due to this regulation (and others -- see below) Uber and Lyft have pulled out of Austin -- making Austin less attractive in light of how an increasing number of people are giving up their cars and using ride-sharing services.
From the WSJ's Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller from 2014:
Many people who have never faced charges, or have had charges dropped, find that a lingering arrest record can ruin their chance to secure employment, loans and housing. Even in cases of a mistaken arrest, the damaging documents aren't automatically removed. In other instances, arrest information is forwarded to the FBI but not necessarily updated there when a case is thrown out locally. Only half of the records with the FBI have fully up-to-date information."There is a myth that if you are arrested and cleared that it has no impact," says Paul Butler, professor of law at Georgetown Law. "It's not like the arrest never happened."
And guess what -- as Feeney writes:
Uber and Lyft do carry out background checks via third parties that look at court records and sex offender registries in order to determine whether a driver applicant meets their criminal background requirements, which are often stricter than those that govern taxi driver applicants. In fact, Austin is one of the cities where Uber's and Lyft's safety requirements are more stringent than those imposed on taxi drivers.As R Street Institute's Josiah Neeley has explained, Austin doesn't prohibit taxi driver applicants who have been convicted of "a criminal homicide offense; fraud or theft; unauthorized use of a motor vehicle; prostitution or promotion of prostitution; sexual assault; sexual abuse or indecency; state or federal law regulating firearms; violence to a person; use, sale or possession of drugs; or driving while intoxicated" to work as taxi drivers provided that they have "maintained a record of good conduct and steady employment since release."
In contrast, Uber and Lyft disqualify driver applicants if they have been convicted of a felony in the last seven years. Uber and Lyft also include features that make drivers and passengers safer than they would be in traditional taxis.
Rideshare transactions are cashless. This removes an incentive for thieves to target rideshare drivers. Taxi drivers, who make a living out of picking up strangers, on the other hand can be more reliably assumed to be carrying cash than rideshare drivers.
In addition, both the rideshare driver and passenger have profiles and ratings. The rating system provides an incentive for riders and passengers to be on their best behavior.
Taxi lobby, anyone? It's how government-backed cartels force out competition, writes John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist.
By the way, as Davidson reports, it wasn't just fingerprinting being required. Other requirements;
"Trade dress" for rideshare vehicles, restrictions on where drivers can pick up and drop off passengers, and an onerous data reporting scheme.
Davidson notes:
It shouldn't have to be spelled out, but of course Uber and Lyft drivers own their own vehicles, unlike cabbies, which means they already have to clear several regulatory hurdles like having a driver's license, vehicle insurance, and current inspection and state registration. Creating a separate license for them would be redundant, just like most occupational licensing schemes are. If you're street-legal, then you should be able to give anyone a ride, whether it's a friend or someone who hailed you on an app. If there's one thing we shouldn't try to recreate for a new generation of app-based, on-demand companies like Uber and Lyft, it's the archaic, collusive model of the taxi cab business--especially not under the pretense that doing so is in the best interests of the drivers, the riders, or the public.In addition to being corrupt, the taxi cab business model simply isn't equal to the demands of a large city like Austin.
Oopsy!
I'll be in Austin for a psych conference next year, and this sure affects where I can stay.
Also, if I move out of California at some point -- not that I'm looking to do that -- I'm sure not going anyplace where there's no ridesharing service.
Other cities should think of that before they act similarly.
Oh, and those who die or or injured in drunk driving incidents should give a little hat tip to those in Austin who were behind or voted against repealing this measure -- if they still have an arm to raise and/or the ability to raise it.
I'm not in Austin city limits and could not vote on this. I am, however (or was) signed up to drive for Uber. I never actually drove, I did it in case we needed quick cash at some point. Guess what-I had to pass a background check!
What psych conference? I'd love to attend-esp if I can finagle some CE credit for it. So, the deal with taxis here: they take FOREVER to get! And many taxis won't pick up from 6th st/bar areas, they don't want to deal with drunks and/or pukers in their cars. The taxi wait on 6th is frequently over an hour late at night. Uber wait was maybe 5 mins. Drunks aren't going to wait an hour, so you are exactly right-more drunk drivers. Ride-sharing lowered Austins DUI income. Can't be having that, now can we. Gotta have that income to pay for the stupid "green" initiatives like light rail that picks up in one spot and drops off to one spot and is useless for 99% of the city's population. Plus, several people in city government are co-owners of Taxi companies, so there's that corruption as well.
If I were a lawyer trolling for business, I'd find the first person injured/killed via DUI after this passed, and convince them to sue to city.
Soon we will be required to have a license to convert O2 into CO2.
momof4 at May 11, 2016 5:59 AM
So, Austin is proposing to replace its alternative to a regulated taxi service with ... a regulated taxi service?
The fingerprints stay in the file forever. Once the government has an ID on you, it does not give it up for anything.
Conan the Grammarian at May 11, 2016 7:12 AM
First, my wife and I voted for Prop One, which meant we voted for Uber/Lyft. The City of Austin is a nanny state, and the council leadership absolutely believes that more government and more rule-making is the absolute answer to every problem. Plus, one of the councilpersons, Ann Kitchens, was carrying serious water for the cab industry; they made substantial donations to her campaign as early as 2014 in anticipation of this battle. I wanted Uber/Lyft to have the freedom to operate in Austin.
Having said all that I now have to say that I have seen few candidates/organizations run the abortion of a campaign that Uber/Lyft did. In a city that should support ridesharing, given how popular it is, Uber/Lyft were crushed at the polls. The reason was the overbearing, ham-handed campaign they ran. The anti-Prop One group only raised about $100,000, while the Uber/Lyft people spent almost $9 million. This was noted. Also, a great many people felt that the ultimatums delivered by Uber/Lyft were unseemly, and I heard the words "temper tantrum" and "meltdown" uttered more than once. Further, a great many Austinites just didn't like the idea that Uber/Lyft felt they were somehow above already established rules. Their arrogance was completely off-putting to a great many Austin voters. They papered my mailbox in the last week before the election, and I think that put people off as well.
They ran the same sort of campaign they've won with in other cities, but they failed to understand that Austin is it's own place, with it's own culture and way of seeing things. I told my wife that Uber/Lyft should have hired a local ad agency/PR firm to advise them on the best way to conduct a campaign in Austin. To my knowledge this didn't happen.
My .02 as an Austin voter.
roadgeek at May 11, 2016 7:23 AM
There was a pretty small turnout for this vote. It looks to me like the anti-uber voters turned out specifically because Uber pissed them off. There was a lot of news about the company engaging in shady/annoying campaign tactics, including illegal robo-calls. There was an attempt to recall the city council member who pushed the rideshare regulations- the folks who were petitioning in neighborhoods to get recall signatures were mostly from suburbs in a different county South of Austin.
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Austin's mayor encouraged people to "not rush" to work today. Officially. The pitch is that if we can all telecommute when the POTUS comes to town and shuts down the highways throughout the city, why can't we stagger the times we come in? Nevermind standard business operating hours, I suppose.
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It is very hard to get from East to West in this city. Public transportation is crap and the only people I ever see getting on the buses are homeless folk, hipsters, and "urban youth." Exactly the people I've moved out of the city to avoid. I actually looked at the bus routes last week while my car vehicle was in the shop to see if I could find a bus to the western edge of the city... No. Nothing.
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Something really questionable happened right before this vote. Months ago APD came out with stats showing that since Uber and Lyft arrived in Austin, DWIs were down something like 23%. Then, either Thursday or Friday last week, the front page of the paper has the story that those stats were wrong, DWIs are only down 5-7%. I find it very, very interesting that the story came out a day or two before the vote.
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Cabbies in Austin are awful. Shitty, rude drivers in crappy old cabs that smell bad.
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The state is likely to step in and override the city's regulations.
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Amy, don't stay at the LaQuinta downtown during your convention. It's a hooker hotel.
ahw at May 11, 2016 7:23 AM
"Something really questionable happened right before this vote.."
Oh, the Austin paper was totally in the bag for the city council. Stupid newspaper. Useless as teats on a hog. I only look at it in the morning to see if 35 is blocked, and KXAN even does that better.
roadgeek at May 11, 2016 7:26 AM
"....It is very hard to get from East to West in this city...."
I've seen the plans TxDOT and its predecessor agency THD, drew up to solve this problem. This was back in the 70's, when THD had money coming out their ass. They offered to build some nice crosstown expressways along the Riverside, Ben White, Koenig and Research corridors. Council turned them down. Bunch of tree-huggers. They insisted that if the roads weren't built, then people wouldn't move here. All we ended up with the Ben White and Research freeways, and it took until the 90's to get those. THD spent the Austin money on other parts of Texas that wanted the roads.
roadgeek at May 11, 2016 7:31 AM
I will never go downtown again thanks to this. Lyft and Uber got me down there (spending lots more money) regularly. But there are no real parking options downtown, petty crime is rampant (my friend's car was broken into inside a hotel parking garage, another had hers stolen from a paid parking lot) and mass transit in Austin is a pathetic joke (even more pathetic than the cab system). And, without Lyft/Uber, I expect drunk driving from downtown to go back up.
... speaking of the cab system... we used the "hail a cab" app to get to East 6th for a friend's show last night. We live in north-central Austin. This would have been a breeze with Uber/Lyft. But we waited 20 min for a cab driver to even accept our fare and another 40 min for him to show up. Before Lyft/Uber, we've had cabs refuse to take us back home at the end of the night because they aren't likely to get another fare in our quiet neighborhood.
Shit is going to hit the fan for ACL and SXSW. You'll have people coming into town from around the country (and world) and realizing that it's comically difficult to get around the city and to the airport. I've visited cities that don't have Lyft/Uber. I pull up the app when I land at the airport, realize I can't use them and think to myself, "What kind of ass backwards shithole is this??" This is what people will think about Austin.
It is very hard to get from East to West in this city.
It's impossible to get anywhere but downtown or campus, unless you want a 2-hour bus ride with transfers. I actually make it a point to ride the bus whenever possible, and I've often had buses (even the fancy 'rapid' bus) just fail to show up.
sofar at May 11, 2016 7:45 AM
Finger prints were not the only issue
The proposed regulations included:
-Each Uber auto must display a "distinctive emblem"
- Pick-up and drop-off spots restricted
-Uber must give advance estimate of fare to each passenger before passenger enters vehicle
There may have been other proposed regulations
Nick at May 11, 2016 8:01 AM
The Federalist weighs in.
The editors of the Austin American Statesman claimed that the real issue at stake was not whether Uber and Lyft should have to fingerprint their drivers, but whether “it should be corporations or Austin’s elected leaders that write the rules for doing business in the city”—as if taxi cab companies haven’t been writing their own rules in Austin for decades. Just like in most cities, it’s hard to imagine a more corrupt collusion of local government and special interests than the local taxi cab cartel, where three cab companies hold every city permit and a single company, Yellow Cab, owns 68 percent of them.
But anti-corporate rhetoric plays well in Austin, so ridesharing opponents pushed it as far as they could. They claimed that Uber and Lyft “exploit” their drivers because as private contractors they don’t get benefits and don’t have control over rates, which are set by each ridesharing company according to demand. Taxi cab rates, by contrast, are set by the city based on the whim of municipal bureaucrats.
Conan the Grammarian at May 11, 2016 8:29 AM
One vital advantage of Uber for consumers, that I do not see listed here, is that Uber drivers cannot screw customers in the same way that conventional taxi drivers can. I don't use Uber, but my understanding is that the fare is calculated and shown to the rider ahead of time. So the old cabbie's tricks with out-of-towners and foreigners (roundabout route, slow driving, etc, etc) simply don't work with Uber.
Another significant advantage is that Uber customers can pick and choose their driver, based on the reviews of other customers. With a conventional street-hail taxi, you get the driver rand the vehicle you get, and you have no way to assess the quality of the driver or his vehicle. And vice versa. In Minneapolis, for example, if you hail a taxi while carrying a bottle of liquor, and the taxi you hail has a driver of Somali origin, chances are, he's going to refuse to take you. With Uber, you can iron out issues like this beforehand, to the benefit of everybody.
momof4 makes excellent points about how crappy taxi service actually benefits some parts of city government.
Blatant rent-seeking, pure and simple - taxi cartels doing their best to get the state to enforce their monopoly and their ability to keep screwing over the citizens. Why is it always the most-liberal cities that try the hardest to maintain the worst and most-corrupt monopolies on things like taxi service?
llater,
llamas
llamas at May 11, 2016 8:45 AM
I tell you what, you won't be missed if you don't come to Austin. Go live in the corporatist-libertarian dreamland of your choosing. Most of us in Austin prefer to let the democratic process define our laws, not deep-pocket corporations.
And say a prayer for Robert Wenzel on your way out the door.
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/wife-of-motorcyclist-killed-in-crash-suing-lyft/159954309
Paul at May 11, 2016 8:49 AM
What do you think those taxi companies are?
Conan the Grammarian at May 11, 2016 8:52 AM
"I tell you what, you won't be missed if you don't come to Austin. Go live in the corporatist-libertarian dreamland of your choosing. Most of us in Austin prefer..."
Oh, good, here we go! Another "Don't move here!" whiner.
How long have you lived in Austin, Paul? Oh, wait. Nobody cares.
Everybody in Austin acts like they're an "old Austinite" and they want the city to stay exactly the same as it was when they moved in- whether that was the '60's or 2009.
Dude, do you think you'd be missed if you left?
ahw at May 11, 2016 9:16 AM
Let me guess: Austin has gone all in on the 'ban the box'?
'Ban the box' means that prospective employers aren't supposed to ask if you have a criminal record...
Hmmm...
I R A Darth Aggie at May 11, 2016 9:23 AM
And now this:
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/city-recommends-austins-cabs-be-deregulated/nrLLQ/
ahw at May 11, 2016 9:30 AM
And now this:
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/city-recommends-austins-cabs-be-deregulated/nrLLQ/
ahw at May 11, 2016 9:30 AM
I ran into that a lot when I worked in San Francisco. Everybody lamented how the city was better "in the old days."
And everybody wanted it to go back to those days, a pretend small town in big city garb. Google-hate and dotcom-hate was a badge of pride, a pretense for even newcomers to pretend to be old San Francisco hands.
It was easier to blame the newcomers for the rising prices and rents than to realistically look at the situation and admit "the City" was growing and needed more housing built.
==============================
Innovative disruption? NIMBY says Austin
"This isn’t about safety — it’s about the taxi racket and the gentlemen who operate it, an old-fashioned Democratic interest group."
AND
"Austin is, like Las Vegas, one of those places where the average drunk gets drunker than average. Parties on Sixth Street, South By Southwest, University of Texas football games, and a hundred other public events in the city are accompanied by a fair amount of Shiner Bock and Tito’s. Two Temple University researchers found that the low-cost Uber X service had helped to substantially reduce drunk driving in California. Reproducing those results nationally would save billions of dollars and thousands of lives — and avoid the creation of thousands of new criminals. But Austin has cronies to protect."
Conan the Grammarian at May 11, 2016 9:30 AM
Sorry about the double-post.
@IRA Darth Aggie: The council was kicking around a ban-the-box ordinance this year. I don't know what came of it, though.
http://kxan.com/2016/03/22/council-considers-changing-hiring-process-for-austin-businesses/
ahw at May 11, 2016 9:38 AM
Sorry, momof4, that psych conference is actually in San Antonio.
http://meeting.spsp.org/past-meetings
I have attended an ev psych conference in Austin, and it seems like a great place -- but this is a dealbreaker for probably a lot of people, in terms of moving to a place.
Amy Alkon at May 11, 2016 9:39 AM
I tell you what, you won't be missed if you don't come to Austin.
Thank you for your kind of offer to not visit your pretentious over-regulated faux-portlandia urban utopia. I think I will take you up on your kind offer. Enjoy paying more and waiting longer for a cab.
Shtetl G at May 11, 2016 10:24 AM
Gotta love Paul.
And I love how everybody immediately got on his silly comment.
Here's Paul: "Most of us in Austin prefer to let the democratic process define our laws, not deep-pocket corporations." ~ Paul at May 11, 2016 8:49 AM
CONAN got this perfectly: "What do you think those taxi companies are?"
Crony capitalism isn't the "democratic process." It just looks that way to those who don't think too hard.
Amy Alkon at May 11, 2016 10:56 AM
Everybody in Austin acts like they're an "old Austinite" and they want the city to stay exactly the same as it was when they moved in- whether that was the '60's or 2009.
I had someone try to be "more-Austin-than-thou" with me recently. He'd been here less time than I have.
I kinda understand griping about the rapid changes -- my favorite bar in the city closed last year to make way for condos. I actually cried. But I knew the city was changing rapidly back when I moved here, and I still chose to come. Most of the time, I actually like living in a desirable place that's attracting people from all over the world (although I wish for fewer New Yorkers).
sofar at May 11, 2016 11:41 AM
"I told my wife that Uber/Lyft should have hired a local ad agency/PR firm to advise them on the best way to conduct a campaign in Austin. To my knowledge this didn't happen."-roadgeek
They hired *state* lobbyists. The same type of guys you'd hire if you want to push something through at the Capitol. They'll try to push new, rideshare-friendly regulations through at the state level in the 2017 legislative session. I don't know if they hired any *local* PR firms or political firms. I know one of the lobbyists they hired (who had previously worked for the electrical power association my company is a member of); he is a local but I doubt that he had any experience with local campaigns. I suspect this is the case with most of their government affairs people.
And frankly, they'll probably win at the state level. Austin-bashing is a sport at the Texas Legislature. Some of the biggest players are the state reps from the 'burbs and small towns immediately surrounding the city. The state senator who will probably end up sponsoring pro-Uber legislation lives in Georgetown and went to UT.
ahw at May 11, 2016 1:09 PM
What I love about NIMBY types like Paul above is that a company shows them how bad service is and how to improve it and that's a BAD thing.
City council supports the companies that provided the poor service and that's a GOOD thing.
Chances are Paul has never relied on a cab or if he did he lives in the "right" part of town.
Want to improve things? Stay away from my town. We don't need no stinking improvements.
Bob in Texas at May 11, 2016 3:54 PM
Went to ACL Fest last year, decided not to go this year (because of the line-up), but had I known this, for sure wouldn't have considered it. Ubered every drive to the festival and back. Every experience was a good one. Cannot imagine how this is gonna go down without Uber this year. Some nights it's over 100,000 people in that park.
gooseegg at May 11, 2016 4:24 PM
"Went to ACL Fest last year, decided not to go this year (because of the line-up)..."
You may have missed Vilifi, which is a shame. Put the buds in and be amazed at a hundred voices and tricks from a 3-piece VERY hard rock band, with serious musicality.
Radwaste at May 11, 2016 10:00 PM
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