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Is the ride-sharing app Uber an unfair, unregulated competitor to Ottawa’s taxis — or is it the innovative and inevitable way of the future? Andrew Duffy looks at the controversy over an app that’s already taken a quarter of Ottawa taxi drivers’ business
Getachew Ayele used to operate a local convenience store, but when he started to lose business to Shoppers Drug Mart and other chains, he jumped to the taxi industry.
Ayele, 57, an Ethiopian immigrant and father of four, is today pondering another career move because of Uber, the controversial new player in the city’s people-moving business.
Since the ride-sharing service launched in Ottawa last October, Ayele has seen his take-home pay drop 25 to 30 per cent. It means there’s less money left over once he’s shelled out $2,025 for insurance, license rental and dispatch fees each month. Money that he used to set aside for his children’s university fund — $500 to $1,000 a year — now pays for groceries.
“This is a tough time,” he says.
In only eight months of operation, Uber has wrought massive change in Ottawa’s taxi industry.
The company’s smartphone-friendly system has siphoned tens of thousands of fares from conventional cab companies, slashed the incomes of drivers — many of them immigrants — and depressed the resale value of taxi plates.
Some cab drivers have crossed the street to join the upstart firm in a desperate bid to reclaim lost income. Others are boiling mad.
Politicians are being asked to take sides on the issue, which cabbies frame as unfair competition and Uber supporters hail as disruptive innovation.
At Queen’s Park, Ottawa South MPP John Fraser’s bill to crack down on “bandit cabs” has passed second reading and is now before committee. In Ottawa, city council this week approved a full review of the taxi bylaw and other “emerging issues” raised by ride-sharing services.
As the debate unfolds here and in cities around the world, Uber continues to defy regulators and win customers.
Diane Deans, chair of the committee that will examine the city’s taxi bylaw, says there can be no doubt that Uber is popular, particularly among young people tethered to their phones.
“Young people are choosing the sharing economy,” she says. “They’re choosing to ride-share, they’re choosing Uber, because they don’t want to pay cash, they want to do all transactions on their phones, they want to see where their car is and rate their driver … I suspect this is only the beginning of the sharing economy.”
All of it means Ottawa taxi owners face a long wait to understand whether the Uber Effect will be permanent — or just another bump in the road.
The effect
Daniel Ghosn has been trying to sell an Ottawa taxi plate for the past six months, but so far, potential buyers have only kicked the tires.
The tradable taxi licenses used to sell for $250,000 or more, but since Uber came to town, the price has dropped drastically.
Ghosn, 53, a father of two and a full-time driver for Executive Cabs, is selling his 50 per cent stake in a second taxi plate that he bought as an investment. It is being offered on Kijiji for $150,000.
“It’s really down and nobody’s buying,” says Ghosn, who purchased his initial taxi plate 25 years ago for $97,500 after emigrating from Lebanon. “There’s no business because people are waiting on a decision from Queen’s Park.”
Ghosn believes the market for plates will remain depressed until provincial politicians vote on MPP John Fraser’s Bill 53, which proposes a dramatic hike to the penalties that local officials can impose on unlicensed taxi drivers. The legislation would raise maximum fines to $30,000 from $500, and allow authorities to impound the cars of repeat offenders.
For Ghosn, the issue is black-and-white: “It’s not fair competition when you can build a house without a permit and not follow the building code, and I have to. That’s the difference between us and them.”
The number of taxi plates issued in Ottawa — it stands at about 1,200 — is something determined by city officials.
The city has always restricted the size of the industry in an effort to ensure drivers and owners earn a decent living while also being able to afford insurance, licensing, repairs, gasoline and accessible vehicles.
The highly regulated system inflated the market value of existing taxi plates; it also led to commercial stagnation. The growth of the taxi fleet has not kept pace with the city’s population, which has resulted in longer waits, particularly during busy Friday and Saturday evenings.
What’s more, the limited number of new plates has made it difficult for competitors to enter the industry. As a result, taxi drivers have never had to worry much about customer service since the only threat to their business came from shadowy “bandit cabs.”
Until Uber.
The arrival of the ride-sharing service last October has roiled the city’s taxi industry. Backed by a slick smartphone app, Uber has made deep inroads into the transportation marketplace.
Click on graphic to enlarge
Company spokesman Xavier Van Chau said more than 1,000 Uber drivers have registered in Ottawa. They serve tens of thousands of local riders every week, he said, which would represent a significant share of the estimated 20,000 taxi trips made each day in the capital.
The vast majority of Uber drivers work part-time during peak demand periods. “It was pretty hit and miss up until Christmas, but for whatever reason, it just exploded after that,” said one Uber driver. “Now, it’s pretty much busy the whole time you’re on if you pick the right shifts.”
Uber Technologies Inc. bills itself as a company that “connects riders to drivers” through its smartphone app. Its services are now offered in more than 250 cities throughout the world, from Akron, Ohio to Wuhan, China. Recently valued at $41 billion, Uber has attracted investors such as Goldman Sachs and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who are wagering the start-up will defeat regulators and outpace rivals such as Lyft and Sidecar.
The service began in San Francisco in July 2010. Three months later, Uber was hit with its first cease and desist order. Despite similar resistance from local regulators at virtually every stop, the company has continued its expansion at breakneck speed.
In Ottawa, Uber followed a proven formula to gain a market foothold: It conducted a social media blitz, offered free rides to users, and free iPhones to new drivers — all while dismissing the city’s old taxi regulations as inapplicable to its services.
The city responded with a series of sting operations. Bylaw officials have now laid charges against 58 drivers and collected $16,000 in fines, but Uber has simply paid its drivers’ costs and penalties, and carried on with business.
Local taxi drivers are seething. They believe the city has failed to adequately defend its own regulatory regime against the Uber invasion.
“For someone just to come unqualified with just a regular vehicle and start taking your job is insane,” says Blue Line driver Fadl Hamade, who’s working longer hours to make up for lost income.
Most of the other drivers interviewed by the Citizen estimated that they’ve lost between 25 and 35 per cent of their business.
Blue Line taxi driver Jihad Chamoun mortgaged his home to buy an Ottawa taxi license for $200,000. He estimates that he has lost one-third of his business in the past year while also watching the value of his investment plummet. “Nobody will buy it,” says Chamoun, who still owes about $160,000 on his second mortgage. “If you give it for $50,000, nobody will buy it.”
An Uber driver, however, says the taxi industry has only itself to blame after years of indifferent service: “That’s the main complaint I hear from people: customer service. Rude drivers, drivers talking on the phone, refusing short fares.”
In contrast, Uber passengers can see drivers’ ratings on the app and add their own rating after each trip.
The politics
Uber raises questions of fact and philosophy that must be answered by politicians before they decide what to do about it. Is Uber a conventional taxi company with a great smartphone app, or a ride-sharing service with a groundbreaking business model? Is it part of an emerging new economy? Or is muscling into the old one under the guise of technology?
Ottawa’s Diane Deans says she has yet to decide exactly what Uber is as the city heads into a major review of its taxi bylaws. “I’m going into it with an open mind,” she says.
Councillor Diane Deans
The Uber conundrum has been brought into sharp focus in Toronto where Mayor John Tory has praised the company while his city pursues an injunction to shut it down. “Uber and services like it are here to stay,” Tory has said. “It is time our regulatory system got in line with evolving consumer demands in the 21st century.”
The city’s lawyers, however, have called Uber a “serious risk to the public” and their court case against the company is scheduled to start next week. That case also features an interesting subplot as the company strives to keep secret its driver insurance policy, which it regards as a unique commercial advantage. The litigation represents just one of dozens of legal challenges that engulf the company worldwide.
Massive rallies against Uber have been staged by taxi drivers in London, Berlin and Brussels, and government authorities have raided the company’s offices in Paris and Amsterdam. In Canada, Uber has been forced out of Vancouver and Calgary, but continues to operate under duress in Ottawa, Montreal, Edmonton, Toronto, Quebec City and Halifax.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has described his company’s approach as “principled confrontation” with an entrenched, monopolistic industry.
That pugnacious approach has scored key regulatory victories. Uber and other ride-sharing services have been legalized in a number of states, including California, Colorado and Illinois, and more than a dozen cities, including Chicago, Seattle, Washington and Austin.
In those places, Uber has convinced regulators that it’s part of an emerging new sector — the sharing economy — that includes firms such as Airbnb, a lodging service, Task Rabbit, an odd jobs service, and Zipcar, a car sharing service.
Xavier Van Chau, Uber’s Canadian spokesman, says Ottawa has the chance to learn from other jurisdictions that have created a new licensing category for ride-sharing services that focuses on public safety and sets standards for background checks, insurance and vehicle inspections.
Related
Uber is not against sensible regulation, he says, but does not want to be governed by old taxi regulations since it’s not a cab company: It doesn’t own cars, employ drivers or use dispatchers. The company, he argues, should be treated as a technology platform since its app directly connects people who need rides to those willing to provide them.
It means, Van Chau says, that Uber is in the “delicate position” of convincing regulators that their outdated rules are stifling competition.
Increasingly, Uber is appealing to the public to make its case. Last summer, Uber hired David Plouffe, the former campaign manager for U.S. President Barack Obama, as its chief strategist. “What we maybe should’ve realized sooner was that we are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber,” Kalanick told Vanity Fair in December. “And this political race is happening in every major city in the world.”
Uber’s opponents have joined that political race and are rallying support among both customers and politicians. Canada’s major taxicab companies have invested heavily in new apps and formed a national lobby group. Its website, taxitruths.ca, aims to “educate Canadians” about the risks of unregulated drivers.
Ottawa’s Coventry Connections — a firm that operates 18 taxi fleets, including Blue Line, Capital Taxi and Westway — is a founding member of the group.
Hanif Patni, chief executive of taxi operator Coventry Connections.
“The real story here is not about technology: Three men and a dog can develop an app in six months,” says Coventry CEO Hanif Patni. “The real story here is that, just like the restaurant industry is regulated for food safety or the building industry is regulated so that buildings don’t collapse, the taxi industry is regulated for safety. The taxi industry moves people late at night in cars. There’s a reason we’re regulated. And these companies like Uber, they’re circumventing all these laws.”
By scalping fares during peak hours, Patni says, Uber has sabotaged the economic structure of the industry. “There’s only so much work,” he says. “And what they’re doing is completely destroying the integrity of the taxi industry. Because once you take 10 or 15 per cent of the work, the economics of the industry changes since our drivers have the same fixed costs.”
Patni’s case against Uber is one that politicians can expect to hear again and again in the coming months.
Lobbyists for both sides are in high gear. According to the City of Ottawa’s lobbyist register, Uber managers Chris Schafer and Ian Black have met with 20 members of city council since October, while National Public Relations lobbyists have held still more meetings to make the company’s case. In that same period, taxi industry lobbyist Jeff Polowin, senior vice-president of Hill & Knowlton, has held 25 meetings with city hall officials and sent more than 50 emails to senior bureaucrats and councillors.
The economics
The taxi industry is not the first to be sideswiped by technology’s wild, unpredictable turns. The Internet has already hammered the publishing, postal delivery, music, gambling, travel and television industries by providing the on-ramp for never-before-imagined competitors.
Uber makes money by taking 20 to 28 per cent of the fare from its services, which include limousines and hired cars, all booked online with a credit card. It is now exploring cargo and food delivery in some markets.
One of the company’s most important innovations, however, may also be among its most unpopular. Uber’s “surge pricing” is a dynamic pricing model that can dramatically increase fares during high demand periods such as New Year’s Eve. Uber says it’s a market-based instrument designed to incentivize drivers to take to the road when they’re needed most. The company’s app features an algorithm that identifies episodes of high demand and low supply and gradually hikes fares in response.
But it has caused a backlash in places such as Australia, where it came into effect, briefly, during a terror attack. In other places, customers have complained about price gouging, but the company’s app makes it clear when surge pricing is in effect — and what each ride will cost.
Ottawa economist Dan Hara, who specializes in the taxi industry, says Uber has capitalized on its “fabulous” smartphone app, a chronic undersupply of cabs, and general confusion about what constitutes a shared ride. He contends a shared ride is not what Uber offers since the driver is making a special trip – like any other cabbie – to deliver a fare to a destination. A shared ride, he says, connects people going to the same place.
Still, Hara believes the service is here to stay: “They have a good service that’s worth preserving, but I think they should comply with the safety regulations that exist.”
The future
Politicians will ultimately decide the future of Uber’s ride sharing service in Ottawa, and so far, the signals they’ve sent have been decidedly mixed.
Liberal MPP John Fraser, the author of a bill to crack down on bandit cabs, says that although the sharing economy presents regulatory challenges, innovation and public safety must always go hand in hand. “Taxis are public transit,” he argues. “And we regulate and have standards for all forms of public transit.”
Still, Uber supporters were encouraged by the Liberal government’s April budget, which pledged support for the sharing economy. Noting that new technologies are disrupting old business models, the Liberal budget vowed to create the right regulatory and tax regimes to “help innovation thrive.”
For her part, Diane Deans says Uber may be the first ride-sharing service in the city, but it’s likely not the last.
“If I have a sense, it’s that this is coming, it’s a bit of a tsunami coming at us,” she says. “I think we need to ensure the public is protected in anything that we allow in the city of Ottawa. But I think the public ultimately makes the choice — and especially the younger generation seems to be choosing ride share.”
Uber’s legal woes
Uber faces a raft of legal trouble worldwide. Among the cases:
查看原文...
Getachew Ayele used to operate a local convenience store, but when he started to lose business to Shoppers Drug Mart and other chains, he jumped to the taxi industry.
Ayele, 57, an Ethiopian immigrant and father of four, is today pondering another career move because of Uber, the controversial new player in the city’s people-moving business.
Since the ride-sharing service launched in Ottawa last October, Ayele has seen his take-home pay drop 25 to 30 per cent. It means there’s less money left over once he’s shelled out $2,025 for insurance, license rental and dispatch fees each month. Money that he used to set aside for his children’s university fund — $500 to $1,000 a year — now pays for groceries.
“This is a tough time,” he says.
In only eight months of operation, Uber has wrought massive change in Ottawa’s taxi industry.
The company’s smartphone-friendly system has siphoned tens of thousands of fares from conventional cab companies, slashed the incomes of drivers — many of them immigrants — and depressed the resale value of taxi plates.
Some cab drivers have crossed the street to join the upstart firm in a desperate bid to reclaim lost income. Others are boiling mad.
Politicians are being asked to take sides on the issue, which cabbies frame as unfair competition and Uber supporters hail as disruptive innovation.
At Queen’s Park, Ottawa South MPP John Fraser’s bill to crack down on “bandit cabs” has passed second reading and is now before committee. In Ottawa, city council this week approved a full review of the taxi bylaw and other “emerging issues” raised by ride-sharing services.
As the debate unfolds here and in cities around the world, Uber continues to defy regulators and win customers.
Diane Deans, chair of the committee that will examine the city’s taxi bylaw, says there can be no doubt that Uber is popular, particularly among young people tethered to their phones.
“Young people are choosing the sharing economy,” she says. “They’re choosing to ride-share, they’re choosing Uber, because they don’t want to pay cash, they want to do all transactions on their phones, they want to see where their car is and rate their driver … I suspect this is only the beginning of the sharing economy.”
All of it means Ottawa taxi owners face a long wait to understand whether the Uber Effect will be permanent — or just another bump in the road.
The effect
Daniel Ghosn has been trying to sell an Ottawa taxi plate for the past six months, but so far, potential buyers have only kicked the tires.
The tradable taxi licenses used to sell for $250,000 or more, but since Uber came to town, the price has dropped drastically.
Ghosn, 53, a father of two and a full-time driver for Executive Cabs, is selling his 50 per cent stake in a second taxi plate that he bought as an investment. It is being offered on Kijiji for $150,000.
“It’s really down and nobody’s buying,” says Ghosn, who purchased his initial taxi plate 25 years ago for $97,500 after emigrating from Lebanon. “There’s no business because people are waiting on a decision from Queen’s Park.”
Ghosn believes the market for plates will remain depressed until provincial politicians vote on MPP John Fraser’s Bill 53, which proposes a dramatic hike to the penalties that local officials can impose on unlicensed taxi drivers. The legislation would raise maximum fines to $30,000 from $500, and allow authorities to impound the cars of repeat offenders.
For Ghosn, the issue is black-and-white: “It’s not fair competition when you can build a house without a permit and not follow the building code, and I have to. That’s the difference between us and them.”
The number of taxi plates issued in Ottawa — it stands at about 1,200 — is something determined by city officials.
The city has always restricted the size of the industry in an effort to ensure drivers and owners earn a decent living while also being able to afford insurance, licensing, repairs, gasoline and accessible vehicles.
The highly regulated system inflated the market value of existing taxi plates; it also led to commercial stagnation. The growth of the taxi fleet has not kept pace with the city’s population, which has resulted in longer waits, particularly during busy Friday and Saturday evenings.
What’s more, the limited number of new plates has made it difficult for competitors to enter the industry. As a result, taxi drivers have never had to worry much about customer service since the only threat to their business came from shadowy “bandit cabs.”
Until Uber.
The arrival of the ride-sharing service last October has roiled the city’s taxi industry. Backed by a slick smartphone app, Uber has made deep inroads into the transportation marketplace.
Click on graphic to enlarge
Company spokesman Xavier Van Chau said more than 1,000 Uber drivers have registered in Ottawa. They serve tens of thousands of local riders every week, he said, which would represent a significant share of the estimated 20,000 taxi trips made each day in the capital.
The vast majority of Uber drivers work part-time during peak demand periods. “It was pretty hit and miss up until Christmas, but for whatever reason, it just exploded after that,” said one Uber driver. “Now, it’s pretty much busy the whole time you’re on if you pick the right shifts.”
Uber Technologies Inc. bills itself as a company that “connects riders to drivers” through its smartphone app. Its services are now offered in more than 250 cities throughout the world, from Akron, Ohio to Wuhan, China. Recently valued at $41 billion, Uber has attracted investors such as Goldman Sachs and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who are wagering the start-up will defeat regulators and outpace rivals such as Lyft and Sidecar.
The service began in San Francisco in July 2010. Three months later, Uber was hit with its first cease and desist order. Despite similar resistance from local regulators at virtually every stop, the company has continued its expansion at breakneck speed.
In Ottawa, Uber followed a proven formula to gain a market foothold: It conducted a social media blitz, offered free rides to users, and free iPhones to new drivers — all while dismissing the city’s old taxi regulations as inapplicable to its services.
The city responded with a series of sting operations. Bylaw officials have now laid charges against 58 drivers and collected $16,000 in fines, but Uber has simply paid its drivers’ costs and penalties, and carried on with business.
Local taxi drivers are seething. They believe the city has failed to adequately defend its own regulatory regime against the Uber invasion.
“For someone just to come unqualified with just a regular vehicle and start taking your job is insane,” says Blue Line driver Fadl Hamade, who’s working longer hours to make up for lost income.
Most of the other drivers interviewed by the Citizen estimated that they’ve lost between 25 and 35 per cent of their business.
Blue Line taxi driver Jihad Chamoun mortgaged his home to buy an Ottawa taxi license for $200,000. He estimates that he has lost one-third of his business in the past year while also watching the value of his investment plummet. “Nobody will buy it,” says Chamoun, who still owes about $160,000 on his second mortgage. “If you give it for $50,000, nobody will buy it.”
An Uber driver, however, says the taxi industry has only itself to blame after years of indifferent service: “That’s the main complaint I hear from people: customer service. Rude drivers, drivers talking on the phone, refusing short fares.”
In contrast, Uber passengers can see drivers’ ratings on the app and add their own rating after each trip.
The politics
Uber raises questions of fact and philosophy that must be answered by politicians before they decide what to do about it. Is Uber a conventional taxi company with a great smartphone app, or a ride-sharing service with a groundbreaking business model? Is it part of an emerging new economy? Or is muscling into the old one under the guise of technology?
Ottawa’s Diane Deans says she has yet to decide exactly what Uber is as the city heads into a major review of its taxi bylaws. “I’m going into it with an open mind,” she says.
Councillor Diane Deans
The Uber conundrum has been brought into sharp focus in Toronto where Mayor John Tory has praised the company while his city pursues an injunction to shut it down. “Uber and services like it are here to stay,” Tory has said. “It is time our regulatory system got in line with evolving consumer demands in the 21st century.”
The city’s lawyers, however, have called Uber a “serious risk to the public” and their court case against the company is scheduled to start next week. That case also features an interesting subplot as the company strives to keep secret its driver insurance policy, which it regards as a unique commercial advantage. The litigation represents just one of dozens of legal challenges that engulf the company worldwide.
Massive rallies against Uber have been staged by taxi drivers in London, Berlin and Brussels, and government authorities have raided the company’s offices in Paris and Amsterdam. In Canada, Uber has been forced out of Vancouver and Calgary, but continues to operate under duress in Ottawa, Montreal, Edmonton, Toronto, Quebec City and Halifax.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has described his company’s approach as “principled confrontation” with an entrenched, monopolistic industry.
That pugnacious approach has scored key regulatory victories. Uber and other ride-sharing services have been legalized in a number of states, including California, Colorado and Illinois, and more than a dozen cities, including Chicago, Seattle, Washington and Austin.
In those places, Uber has convinced regulators that it’s part of an emerging new sector — the sharing economy — that includes firms such as Airbnb, a lodging service, Task Rabbit, an odd jobs service, and Zipcar, a car sharing service.
Xavier Van Chau, Uber’s Canadian spokesman, says Ottawa has the chance to learn from other jurisdictions that have created a new licensing category for ride-sharing services that focuses on public safety and sets standards for background checks, insurance and vehicle inspections.
Related
- Uber vs taxis: What Ottawa drivers say about each other
- Tale of the tape: Taxis vs Uber
- The typical Uber driver: Better educated, less ethnically diver
Uber is not against sensible regulation, he says, but does not want to be governed by old taxi regulations since it’s not a cab company: It doesn’t own cars, employ drivers or use dispatchers. The company, he argues, should be treated as a technology platform since its app directly connects people who need rides to those willing to provide them.
It means, Van Chau says, that Uber is in the “delicate position” of convincing regulators that their outdated rules are stifling competition.
Increasingly, Uber is appealing to the public to make its case. Last summer, Uber hired David Plouffe, the former campaign manager for U.S. President Barack Obama, as its chief strategist. “What we maybe should’ve realized sooner was that we are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber,” Kalanick told Vanity Fair in December. “And this political race is happening in every major city in the world.”
Uber’s opponents have joined that political race and are rallying support among both customers and politicians. Canada’s major taxicab companies have invested heavily in new apps and formed a national lobby group. Its website, taxitruths.ca, aims to “educate Canadians” about the risks of unregulated drivers.
Ottawa’s Coventry Connections — a firm that operates 18 taxi fleets, including Blue Line, Capital Taxi and Westway — is a founding member of the group.
Hanif Patni, chief executive of taxi operator Coventry Connections.
“The real story here is not about technology: Three men and a dog can develop an app in six months,” says Coventry CEO Hanif Patni. “The real story here is that, just like the restaurant industry is regulated for food safety or the building industry is regulated so that buildings don’t collapse, the taxi industry is regulated for safety. The taxi industry moves people late at night in cars. There’s a reason we’re regulated. And these companies like Uber, they’re circumventing all these laws.”
By scalping fares during peak hours, Patni says, Uber has sabotaged the economic structure of the industry. “There’s only so much work,” he says. “And what they’re doing is completely destroying the integrity of the taxi industry. Because once you take 10 or 15 per cent of the work, the economics of the industry changes since our drivers have the same fixed costs.”
Patni’s case against Uber is one that politicians can expect to hear again and again in the coming months.
Lobbyists for both sides are in high gear. According to the City of Ottawa’s lobbyist register, Uber managers Chris Schafer and Ian Black have met with 20 members of city council since October, while National Public Relations lobbyists have held still more meetings to make the company’s case. In that same period, taxi industry lobbyist Jeff Polowin, senior vice-president of Hill & Knowlton, has held 25 meetings with city hall officials and sent more than 50 emails to senior bureaucrats and councillors.
The economics
The taxi industry is not the first to be sideswiped by technology’s wild, unpredictable turns. The Internet has already hammered the publishing, postal delivery, music, gambling, travel and television industries by providing the on-ramp for never-before-imagined competitors.
Uber makes money by taking 20 to 28 per cent of the fare from its services, which include limousines and hired cars, all booked online with a credit card. It is now exploring cargo and food delivery in some markets.
One of the company’s most important innovations, however, may also be among its most unpopular. Uber’s “surge pricing” is a dynamic pricing model that can dramatically increase fares during high demand periods such as New Year’s Eve. Uber says it’s a market-based instrument designed to incentivize drivers to take to the road when they’re needed most. The company’s app features an algorithm that identifies episodes of high demand and low supply and gradually hikes fares in response.
But it has caused a backlash in places such as Australia, where it came into effect, briefly, during a terror attack. In other places, customers have complained about price gouging, but the company’s app makes it clear when surge pricing is in effect — and what each ride will cost.
Ottawa economist Dan Hara, who specializes in the taxi industry, says Uber has capitalized on its “fabulous” smartphone app, a chronic undersupply of cabs, and general confusion about what constitutes a shared ride. He contends a shared ride is not what Uber offers since the driver is making a special trip – like any other cabbie – to deliver a fare to a destination. A shared ride, he says, connects people going to the same place.
Still, Hara believes the service is here to stay: “They have a good service that’s worth preserving, but I think they should comply with the safety regulations that exist.”
The future
Politicians will ultimately decide the future of Uber’s ride sharing service in Ottawa, and so far, the signals they’ve sent have been decidedly mixed.
Liberal MPP John Fraser, the author of a bill to crack down on bandit cabs, says that although the sharing economy presents regulatory challenges, innovation and public safety must always go hand in hand. “Taxis are public transit,” he argues. “And we regulate and have standards for all forms of public transit.”
Still, Uber supporters were encouraged by the Liberal government’s April budget, which pledged support for the sharing economy. Noting that new technologies are disrupting old business models, the Liberal budget vowed to create the right regulatory and tax regimes to “help innovation thrive.”
For her part, Diane Deans says Uber may be the first ride-sharing service in the city, but it’s likely not the last.
“If I have a sense, it’s that this is coming, it’s a bit of a tsunami coming at us,” she says. “I think we need to ensure the public is protected in anything that we allow in the city of Ottawa. But I think the public ultimately makes the choice — and especially the younger generation seems to be choosing ride share.”
Uber’s legal woes
Uber faces a raft of legal trouble worldwide. Among the cases:
- Uber is defending 40 Montreal drivers who were fined $500 last month and had their cars impounded by the city.
- District attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles have filed suit against Uber, alleging the company has misled consumers about the quality of its driver background checks.
- Uber is fighting in court to overturn bans on its services in Germany, France and Spain; it has also filed a complaint with the European Commission.
- In India, Uber’s largest market outside of the U.S., the company faces new regulatory hurdles after a Delhi woman was allegedly raped and beaten by a driver in December; the woman is now suing Uber for negligence.
查看原文...
