- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,290
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
Ottawa city councillors brace Thursday for a battle over how to fit services like Uber into our angry and defensive taxi industry. The Ontario government has some suggestions.
It commissioned a major investigation from a think-tank called the MaRS Solutions Lab, a sort of outboard policy brain trust in Toronto. Its report landed Thursday morning, hours before the city government here releases its proposal for how exactly this stuff should work in Ottawa.
First, the big disappointment: The MaRS report is silent on the central challenge for politicians in this, which is dismantling the archaic system of city-issued taxi “plates” that limits the number of cabs on the road. Those plates are tradeable, people have paid in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for them (expecting guaranteed incomes as a result), and services like Uber just ignore them completely.
Admitting that they’re powerless against this is a hell of a thing for a group of politicians to do. They can assign bylaw officers to sting Uber drivers, they can run awareness campaigns about bandit cabs, they can rail and inveigh, but riders gonna ride. Resisting it might not be as damaging as Prohibition or the war on drugs, but it’s just as hopeless. Might as well go down to the sea and order the tide not to come in.
But if that tide is going to come in, and our politicians find the guts to admit they can’t stop it, the MaRS report has a bunch of useful ideas for how to prepare for life afterward.
The MaRS people did the report for Toronto in particular, which is wrestling with the same problem, but its taxi system isn’t so radically different from Ottawa’s there’s nothing we can apply here. Anyway, the work is more about principles than specifics.
For instance: “Everyone needs to be vetted.” If you’re going to drive strangers for money, you need to be checked out, with a criminal-record check and a clean driving history being a minimum standard. Vehicles need to be inspected for safety, once before they pick up their first fares and periodically thereafter. And every driver needs to have insurance suitable for the work they’re doing.
Uber operates in a grey area on all these counts, while taxi drivers are kept to standards that might actually be unnecessarily high. In Ottawa, to drive a cab you have to have taken a specific training course at Algonquin College; maybe we don’t need that. Taxicabs also have to meet city-set standards not just for safety but for size, age, even trunk space; maybe we don’t need those either. Only a tiny percentage of riders travel with a ton of cargo but every rider pays for the option and that’s silly.
Taxi drivers pay flat annual fees for their licences; the Solutions Lab report recommends what Edmonton has already done, letting ridesharing drivers pay a tiny fee for each fare they take. That lets them be flexible in the time they choose to put in rather than billing them like full-time drivers when they might not want to be.
Here’s the general idea: Increase the regulations on Uber drivers and free cabbies of some needless ones, and the wildly disparate economics of the two jobs could meet in the middle.
At the company level, the Solutions Lab report recommends requiring Uber and similar companies to get licences to dispatch cars, which is mainly aimed at getting them to share data about the rides their services provide. What kinds of fares are they taking? Where and for how much? Are there gaps? The idea is to make smarter regulations possible eventually, with regulators working from better information.
And here’s a big one: Deregulate fares. Uber charges what it wants and so should taxi companies. The city regulates taxi fares to the penny so that you know what you’re in for when you get in any cab, no matter how you’ve come to it. The MaRS report recommends keeping that for “street hails,” but if you’re summoning a taxi from an app, you can know in advance what it’s going to cost and make your choice accordingly. Companies could — imagine this! — run on different business models, charging different amounts for different levels of service.
We’ll find out Thursday afternoon how far Ottawa’s willing to go. But again, the hard part isn’t Uber. It’s the existing taxi industry. And admitting we can’t stop the tide.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
It commissioned a major investigation from a think-tank called the MaRS Solutions Lab, a sort of outboard policy brain trust in Toronto. Its report landed Thursday morning, hours before the city government here releases its proposal for how exactly this stuff should work in Ottawa.
First, the big disappointment: The MaRS report is silent on the central challenge for politicians in this, which is dismantling the archaic system of city-issued taxi “plates” that limits the number of cabs on the road. Those plates are tradeable, people have paid in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for them (expecting guaranteed incomes as a result), and services like Uber just ignore them completely.
Admitting that they’re powerless against this is a hell of a thing for a group of politicians to do. They can assign bylaw officers to sting Uber drivers, they can run awareness campaigns about bandit cabs, they can rail and inveigh, but riders gonna ride. Resisting it might not be as damaging as Prohibition or the war on drugs, but it’s just as hopeless. Might as well go down to the sea and order the tide not to come in.
But if that tide is going to come in, and our politicians find the guts to admit they can’t stop it, the MaRS report has a bunch of useful ideas for how to prepare for life afterward.
The MaRS people did the report for Toronto in particular, which is wrestling with the same problem, but its taxi system isn’t so radically different from Ottawa’s there’s nothing we can apply here. Anyway, the work is more about principles than specifics.
For instance: “Everyone needs to be vetted.” If you’re going to drive strangers for money, you need to be checked out, with a criminal-record check and a clean driving history being a minimum standard. Vehicles need to be inspected for safety, once before they pick up their first fares and periodically thereafter. And every driver needs to have insurance suitable for the work they’re doing.
Uber operates in a grey area on all these counts, while taxi drivers are kept to standards that might actually be unnecessarily high. In Ottawa, to drive a cab you have to have taken a specific training course at Algonquin College; maybe we don’t need that. Taxicabs also have to meet city-set standards not just for safety but for size, age, even trunk space; maybe we don’t need those either. Only a tiny percentage of riders travel with a ton of cargo but every rider pays for the option and that’s silly.
Taxi drivers pay flat annual fees for their licences; the Solutions Lab report recommends what Edmonton has already done, letting ridesharing drivers pay a tiny fee for each fare they take. That lets them be flexible in the time they choose to put in rather than billing them like full-time drivers when they might not want to be.
Here’s the general idea: Increase the regulations on Uber drivers and free cabbies of some needless ones, and the wildly disparate economics of the two jobs could meet in the middle.
At the company level, the Solutions Lab report recommends requiring Uber and similar companies to get licences to dispatch cars, which is mainly aimed at getting them to share data about the rides their services provide. What kinds of fares are they taking? Where and for how much? Are there gaps? The idea is to make smarter regulations possible eventually, with regulators working from better information.
And here’s a big one: Deregulate fares. Uber charges what it wants and so should taxi companies. The city regulates taxi fares to the penny so that you know what you’re in for when you get in any cab, no matter how you’ve come to it. The MaRS report recommends keeping that for “street hails,” but if you’re summoning a taxi from an app, you can know in advance what it’s going to cost and make your choice accordingly. Companies could — imagine this! — run on different business models, charging different amounts for different levels of service.
We’ll find out Thursday afternoon how far Ottawa’s willing to go. But again, the hard part isn’t Uber. It’s the existing taxi industry. And admitting we can’t stop the tide.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
