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This year should be the year that we finally get our acts together and decide what to do about Uber — but with multiple conflicting provincial bills and city bylaws screaming toward one another, it’s anybody’s guess how we’ll do it.
The grey-market car-hiring service is the pointy end of the “sharing economy.” Uber sees notionally independent drivers sign up with an online app that links them to passengers who want cheap rides from unregulated drivers with (typically) great service and iffy insurance. It’s demolishing traditional taxis, and government regulators have tried but so far failed to stomp it out because customers, the fools, really seem to like it.
Last year, Ottawa started a review of how it regulates taxis, including by limiting the number allowed on the road with a restricted system of plates. This has been a disaster for a long time, but getting out of it without ruining a lot of little guys who invested tens of thousands of dollars in the right to drive cabs will be all but impossible. Recommendations on how to try are due imminently.
But meanwhile, two Ottawa MPPs have bills trudging through the legislature that would help cities crack down on Uber, mainly by toughening penalties for operating bandit cabs. Ottawa South Liberal John Fraser’s version has got farther than a similar bill from Nepean-Carleton Tory Lisa MacLeod’s, though even studying Fraser’s has been on the to-do list of a legislative committee on social policy since last spring. It’s called the Protecting Passenger Safety Act, which tells you where Fraser’s coming from.
Former opposition leader Tim Hudak has a private member’s bill of his own, the rather more enthusiastic Opportunity in the Sharing Economy Act, that’s going to a different committee of MPPs, the one on finance and the economy. Besides legalizing Uber, it would do the same for apartment-rental services like Airbnb and ones that let you rent out private parking spaces.
These are private members’ bills, not government bills, because dealing with popular cutting-edge services that are popular precisely because they knock the legs out from well-understood, well-entrenched industries feels as good to a politician as rabies.
Between them, these bills represent pretty much all the attitudes you can have on services like Uber: “They’re risky and must be regulated!” versus “They’re awesome and we should leave them alone!” Majorities of MPPs liked them both (at least enough to send them on for further study), so reconciling their opposite visions should really be no problem. The Hudak bill in particular could sweep aside anything Ottawa chooses to do short of total liberalization of the taxi business.
Pressure is building. In Toronto, taxi demonstrations blocked traffic repeatedly, making political life awfully difficult for a city council that’s been pretty firmly on the taxi industry’s side.
In Ottawa, the Uber problem is mixed up with a dispute over the fees drivers pay to pick up fares at the airport, which the airport authority and dispatch firm Coventry Connections agreed now was the perfect time to hike. They changed the system from a flat monthly fee of $345 for a cabbie to pick up all the airport passengers he or she wanted to a $4.50-a-ride fee that works out to a whole lot more each month for a driver whose whole business is airport pickups — but also lets taxi drivers who aren’t dedicated to airport runs get in on the action. It adds a lot of flexibility to the airport fleet but destroys some drivers’ exclusive access to one of the few really reliable sources of taxi fares in the city. There are cartels within cartels.
So that meant more traffic-blocking protests, and a violent raid on Coventry Connections’ office that led to charges against four taxi-union guys who aren’t even from here. Hard to know whether to think of them as goons or Luddites. Either way, every time such a thing happens it’s very bad for people who have not seemed to grasp that they aren’t widely seen as the scrappy heroes of this story.
Their legally (if not practically) protected status has to end. It will end. This year our leaders will at least show us whether it’ll be tidy or messy.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The grey-market car-hiring service is the pointy end of the “sharing economy.” Uber sees notionally independent drivers sign up with an online app that links them to passengers who want cheap rides from unregulated drivers with (typically) great service and iffy insurance. It’s demolishing traditional taxis, and government regulators have tried but so far failed to stomp it out because customers, the fools, really seem to like it.
Last year, Ottawa started a review of how it regulates taxis, including by limiting the number allowed on the road with a restricted system of plates. This has been a disaster for a long time, but getting out of it without ruining a lot of little guys who invested tens of thousands of dollars in the right to drive cabs will be all but impossible. Recommendations on how to try are due imminently.
But meanwhile, two Ottawa MPPs have bills trudging through the legislature that would help cities crack down on Uber, mainly by toughening penalties for operating bandit cabs. Ottawa South Liberal John Fraser’s version has got farther than a similar bill from Nepean-Carleton Tory Lisa MacLeod’s, though even studying Fraser’s has been on the to-do list of a legislative committee on social policy since last spring. It’s called the Protecting Passenger Safety Act, which tells you where Fraser’s coming from.
Former opposition leader Tim Hudak has a private member’s bill of his own, the rather more enthusiastic Opportunity in the Sharing Economy Act, that’s going to a different committee of MPPs, the one on finance and the economy. Besides legalizing Uber, it would do the same for apartment-rental services like Airbnb and ones that let you rent out private parking spaces.
These are private members’ bills, not government bills, because dealing with popular cutting-edge services that are popular precisely because they knock the legs out from well-understood, well-entrenched industries feels as good to a politician as rabies.
Between them, these bills represent pretty much all the attitudes you can have on services like Uber: “They’re risky and must be regulated!” versus “They’re awesome and we should leave them alone!” Majorities of MPPs liked them both (at least enough to send them on for further study), so reconciling their opposite visions should really be no problem. The Hudak bill in particular could sweep aside anything Ottawa chooses to do short of total liberalization of the taxi business.
Pressure is building. In Toronto, taxi demonstrations blocked traffic repeatedly, making political life awfully difficult for a city council that’s been pretty firmly on the taxi industry’s side.
In Ottawa, the Uber problem is mixed up with a dispute over the fees drivers pay to pick up fares at the airport, which the airport authority and dispatch firm Coventry Connections agreed now was the perfect time to hike. They changed the system from a flat monthly fee of $345 for a cabbie to pick up all the airport passengers he or she wanted to a $4.50-a-ride fee that works out to a whole lot more each month for a driver whose whole business is airport pickups — but also lets taxi drivers who aren’t dedicated to airport runs get in on the action. It adds a lot of flexibility to the airport fleet but destroys some drivers’ exclusive access to one of the few really reliable sources of taxi fares in the city. There are cartels within cartels.
So that meant more traffic-blocking protests, and a violent raid on Coventry Connections’ office that led to charges against four taxi-union guys who aren’t even from here. Hard to know whether to think of them as goons or Luddites. Either way, every time such a thing happens it’s very bad for people who have not seemed to grasp that they aren’t widely seen as the scrappy heroes of this story.
Their legally (if not practically) protected status has to end. It will end. This year our leaders will at least show us whether it’ll be tidy or messy.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
