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Ottawa’s cabbies are so furious over the city’s slack treatment of car-hiring company Uber that they’re practically out of control, the leader of the union at Capital Taxi said Monday.
Georges Chamoun had just come from a meeting with Mayor Jim Watson and other city officials. He and the leaders of union units at Ottawa’s other taxi companies want more charges laid against drivers who use Uber to find paying passengers without having taxi-driving licences or the city-issued plates that are deliberately kept scarce to make sure driving cabs pays decently.
“We’re looking for more enforcement to the bylaw at the municipality level,” Chamoun said, standing in a semicircle of about eight taxi-union leaders in the atrium at City Hall. Uber began operating in Ottawa last fall and the bylaw department has laid dozens of charges against its drivers since, but it’s not enough, he said.
“We are doing all the steps before the drivers, before we will lose control (of) what the drivers are going to do in the future,” Chamoun said. “They’re not listening to us anymore, the drivers. They don’t believe that we are doing enough and we are not fast enough to get out of this crisis, because the past nine months they’ve been suffering. They’ve been losing money. They can’t any more keep up with their bills, with their mortgages. They all have families and I can see it, that in the near future, is there is no any more control. We cannot control them any more. They’re going to go on the street. They’re going to, I don’t know. I don’t know. We heard it a lot from many drivers, they’re going to go out on the street and it’s going to be out of control.”
Licensed, plate-holding cabbies have usually made big investments in their occupations: the plates that let them drive taxis legally can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city issues them but lets them be bought and sold rather than returned when a cabbie leaves the industry. The idea was once that keeping taxis scarce would mean drivers would be guaranteed livings and be able to afford to maintain their cars well, but in practice it’s created a class of plate-owners who profit from the taxi industry without actually participating in it directly themselves.
It also means that drivers who do own their own plates, or who pay steep monthly rents to drive, have a lot at stake if they can be undercut by plateless Uber drivers who pop in and out of the business whenever they feel like it.
The cabbies want more bylaw enforcement, more involvement by the police (whose enforcement of the separate Highway Traffic Act can lead to stiffer punishments), and louder support from the city for legislation at Queen’s Park to toughen the system, Chamoun and the others with him said.
Two private-member’s bills that would do that are stalled in the provincial legislature because it doesn’t sit in the summer. They’re both from Ottawa MPPs, the Liberals’ John Fraser and the Progressive Conservatives’ Lisa MacLeod.
As it stands, the city’s bylaw regulating the taxi industry pretty clearly rules out private drivers’ picking up passengers and driving them places for money. The city’s secured guilty pleas under it from drivers who’ve used Uber to find those paying passengers. But the legal status of Uber as a company isn’t as clear. It insists it’s a technology company, not a taxi brokerage, and not covered by any city rules.
A court ruling last week, interpreting Toronto’s similar bylaw, agreed with that take. Uber is more like a phone company that relays messages back and forth, not a taxi company that takes calls and dispatches drivers, Judge Sean Dunphy ruled.
“Our mayor took a strong position against Uber,” said Amrik Singh, the leader of the union covering all of Ottawa’s cabbies, standing next to Chamoun. “He told us he’s going to say in the open that Uber is operating illegally and he will do anything to stop Uber from operating in the City of Ottawa.”
Watson wasn’t immediately available to confirm, deny or refine that, his spokesman Brook Simpson said, but would be later in the afternoon.
Coun. Diane Deans, who chairs the city council committee that regulates the taxi industry, said the city’s just about to embark on a review of its taxi bylaw.
“My instinct is to approach this in the role of the regulator. It’s not primarily to protect the way the taxi industry is currently operating. It’s to ensure that the safety of the public and consumer protection are paramount,” she said. It could well be a problem that nobody inspects Uber drivers’ cars for safety or makes sure they’re properly insured, for instance.
“Beyond that, I think the public will drive this industry and the changes that will go forward. So to a certain extent the industry has to recognize this is a disruptive technology and it’s not going away any time soon and there are going to have to be some changes,” Deans said.
She’s previously overseen a city move to issue non-tradeable plates for cabbies who wanted to drive wheelchair-accessible taxis, which was meant to be a small move toward reducing the value of plates on the Ottawa market.
City council later voted to let those plates be traded after all, on the grounds that taxi drivers should be guaranteed a slow rise in the value of their one-person businesses.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
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Georges Chamoun had just come from a meeting with Mayor Jim Watson and other city officials. He and the leaders of union units at Ottawa’s other taxi companies want more charges laid against drivers who use Uber to find paying passengers without having taxi-driving licences or the city-issued plates that are deliberately kept scarce to make sure driving cabs pays decently.
“We’re looking for more enforcement to the bylaw at the municipality level,” Chamoun said, standing in a semicircle of about eight taxi-union leaders in the atrium at City Hall. Uber began operating in Ottawa last fall and the bylaw department has laid dozens of charges against its drivers since, but it’s not enough, he said.
“We are doing all the steps before the drivers, before we will lose control (of) what the drivers are going to do in the future,” Chamoun said. “They’re not listening to us anymore, the drivers. They don’t believe that we are doing enough and we are not fast enough to get out of this crisis, because the past nine months they’ve been suffering. They’ve been losing money. They can’t any more keep up with their bills, with their mortgages. They all have families and I can see it, that in the near future, is there is no any more control. We cannot control them any more. They’re going to go on the street. They’re going to, I don’t know. I don’t know. We heard it a lot from many drivers, they’re going to go out on the street and it’s going to be out of control.”
Licensed, plate-holding cabbies have usually made big investments in their occupations: the plates that let them drive taxis legally can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city issues them but lets them be bought and sold rather than returned when a cabbie leaves the industry. The idea was once that keeping taxis scarce would mean drivers would be guaranteed livings and be able to afford to maintain their cars well, but in practice it’s created a class of plate-owners who profit from the taxi industry without actually participating in it directly themselves.
It also means that drivers who do own their own plates, or who pay steep monthly rents to drive, have a lot at stake if they can be undercut by plateless Uber drivers who pop in and out of the business whenever they feel like it.
The cabbies want more bylaw enforcement, more involvement by the police (whose enforcement of the separate Highway Traffic Act can lead to stiffer punishments), and louder support from the city for legislation at Queen’s Park to toughen the system, Chamoun and the others with him said.
Two private-member’s bills that would do that are stalled in the provincial legislature because it doesn’t sit in the summer. They’re both from Ottawa MPPs, the Liberals’ John Fraser and the Progressive Conservatives’ Lisa MacLeod.
As it stands, the city’s bylaw regulating the taxi industry pretty clearly rules out private drivers’ picking up passengers and driving them places for money. The city’s secured guilty pleas under it from drivers who’ve used Uber to find those paying passengers. But the legal status of Uber as a company isn’t as clear. It insists it’s a technology company, not a taxi brokerage, and not covered by any city rules.
A court ruling last week, interpreting Toronto’s similar bylaw, agreed with that take. Uber is more like a phone company that relays messages back and forth, not a taxi company that takes calls and dispatches drivers, Judge Sean Dunphy ruled.
“Our mayor took a strong position against Uber,” said Amrik Singh, the leader of the union covering all of Ottawa’s cabbies, standing next to Chamoun. “He told us he’s going to say in the open that Uber is operating illegally and he will do anything to stop Uber from operating in the City of Ottawa.”
Watson wasn’t immediately available to confirm, deny or refine that, his spokesman Brook Simpson said, but would be later in the afternoon.
Coun. Diane Deans, who chairs the city council committee that regulates the taxi industry, said the city’s just about to embark on a review of its taxi bylaw.
“My instinct is to approach this in the role of the regulator. It’s not primarily to protect the way the taxi industry is currently operating. It’s to ensure that the safety of the public and consumer protection are paramount,” she said. It could well be a problem that nobody inspects Uber drivers’ cars for safety or makes sure they’re properly insured, for instance.
“Beyond that, I think the public will drive this industry and the changes that will go forward. So to a certain extent the industry has to recognize this is a disruptive technology and it’s not going away any time soon and there are going to have to be some changes,” Deans said.
She’s previously overseen a city move to issue non-tradeable plates for cabbies who wanted to drive wheelchair-accessible taxis, which was meant to be a small move toward reducing the value of plates on the Ottawa market.
City council later voted to let those plates be traded after all, on the grounds that taxi drivers should be guaranteed a slow rise in the value of their one-person businesses.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
