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Feb 25, 2014 at 9:54 am
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
I'm reminded of my attempts at home repair. Sometimes you open a wall and find things that don't make any sense. Why are things routed this way? Why is this junction box here? Learning more about codes and common practices these decisions often come to make sense. Going in and straightening everything out is sometimes downright dangerous.
1) Fares were difficult for customers to discover, so they couldn't shop for the cheapest alternative.
2) The market was dominated by 3 large taxi providers.
I think the current conditions are different. The new services like Uber let you know exactly what the price is. And there is more competition now with the new providers.
You should also remember that the urban areas that taxis serve today are much different than they were in the 1970s/early 1980s and are much less likely to tolerate a shoddy, unsafe taxi service.
Regulate basic standards of operation and maybe set a fixed price to/from the airport, but capping the number of cars is not the function of government.
BTW, check out Ireland for an example of a cap lift that's stuck. If memory serves they also set up a program to help compensate license owners for the resulting drop in the licenses' (absurdly inflated) worth.
people go on blind dates using the internet. it's crazy to suggest people can't regulate out the bad drivers, bad services, high prices themselves. and today many people are willing to be drivers. we should totally deregulate and let ANYONE provide rides for hire. if they have $3 million in insurance and register it online and the govt. maintains an online yelp type review system keyed to the license plate so you see a provider you look them up. then you get in at your own risk.
this is how we do it when it's mowing your lawn. you pick someone, and they don't have a license. many babysitting jobs are done this way, too. no license. let people make choices consensually. this overregulation is ridiculous, and unenvironmental, the easiest way to remove 30% of all cars going to work is to let another 30% their negibhors carry the rider for $4 or $8 or whatever people want to pay -- and this is illegal now. Why? fears it won't work based on something in the 70s aren't relevant today.
I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that's because TNCs don't have the same problems. I'm sure there's something wrong with them... but you wouldn't know that reading through Goldy's seemingly pointless verbiage.
I don't know if outright deregulation is the answer. I think maybe REregulation to make changes that are more in line with the modern times AND serve the customer is probably the way to go.
Forcing towncar services into the heavily regulated taxi market? Not the answer. The popularity of the towncar like Uber is a direct response from the people that the taxi market as it exists now is not serving them well.
I will not use taxis for this reason: I generally have to wait 15 minutes or longer for one and I live in the urban center of the city. The customer service is often time extremely rude and difficult to communicate with. Taxi drivers always balk at the fact that I want to use my bank card to pay even though this is now the popular and accepted method of payment these days. The last time I took a cab was when the driver flat out denied my card and insisted on driving me to an ATM to get cash for him.
That is unacceptable. Using Uber I don't have to wait any longer than 7 minutes for the car, using the app is simple, the drivers have all given excellent service and the payment is no longer awkward. Furthermore, I ask the drivers about their experience driving for Uber and they all have only great things to say, many of them having abandoned previous taxi employers.
There are some real problems with the TNCs. Surge pricing is one of them. Insurance and safety is another. Why not just directly address those issues, Goldy?
You have neither demonstrated that taxis are equally useful as Uber (likely an impossible task) nor have you demonstrated that Uber will destroy taxi service (and you make the case why they can't in the 4th paragraph).
This talk of caps is a retaliatory effort to protect an ineffective monopoly from modern technology. It's a textbook case of regulatory capture.
Want to make Uber drivers pass a background check? Great! Safety regulations for cars? Wonderful. Want to convert Uber to a for-hire service instead of independent contractors? Go for it. Those measures might protect consumers. Caps just protect Yellow Cab. Next we'll be capping the number of buses to protect gas stations from losing money.
Rather than regulate, or deregulate, they should be fully incorporated into the transit system, in a form ranging anywhere between subsidies and full incorporation where taxi drivers become Metro employees.
TNCs are supplement to taxis, not a replacement.
The burden should be on those arguing to change the status quo. There's got to be a better reason than regulations bad, market good.
Do you want more drunks on the road, Goldy? Do you want young women walking home alone at night because there are no taxis around? Should my coworkers at my restaurant stand around for up to an hour waiting for a taxi with their tip money in their pockets after they close down for the night? We need as many options at our disposal as possible. We need every option to get home safely. Capping our options - and doing so only to protect a terrible, outmoded, monopolistic industry - is the worst kind of regulation.
By the end of the week, publish a coherent, succinct enumerated list of the top five issues with. Try and keep it under a thousand words. Bonus points if you can actually correlate any of these history lessons to said issues.
Generally speaking, 3 stars on Yelp mean that your company sucks (assuming you have a few dozen+ reviews). Three stars is "everything pretty much sucked, but it wasn't bad enough to get angry about it". Anything less than that means that there's something seriously wrong with your business.
I am not sanguine about a good and workable outcome.
http://freakonomics.com/2012/05/23/men-w…
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18093?utm_ca…
We examine gender differences in bargaining outcomes in a highly competitive and commonly used market: the taxi market in Lima, Peru. Examining the entire path of negotiation we find that men face higher initial prices and rejection rates. These differentials are consistent with both statistical and taste-based discrimination. To identify the source of the inferior treatment of men we conduct an experiment where passengers send a signal on valuation before negotiating. The signal eliminates gender differences and the response is shown only to be consistent with statistical discrimination. Our study secures identification within the market of interest and demonstrates that there are environments where sophisticated statistical inference is the sole source of differential gender outcomes.
Go back to 1979. You start by digging in your pants for quarters? You pickup a disease ridden public phone and you put it to your face? You grab the phone book but all the pages have been torn out? You ask a passing person for the number for a cab company? He's high on heroin so he can't tell you? You ask someone else? Maybe you wrote the number down somewhere? They say a cab is on the way? God knows who comes? They might be a serial killer? They might go the long way? God knows how much it costs until you arrive at your destination? No oversight!
Fast forward to 2013 with your smart phone. Everything is regulated by the technology. Your driver is documented. The route you take is documented. Everything is sent to your email afterwards. Absolute transparency and if there is any problem you just call the company and they resolve the issue for you.
Back when Giuliani was cracking down on cabs in the late '90s, the Village Voice ran an article about one particular cabby who, throughout his career, had never bothered following any of the regulations he was supposed to follow. He charged more on Christmas. He charged more for ugly chicks, and that was only when he deigned to pick them up. The Voice tried its best to make that asshole sound sympathetic, as the last bastion of Old New York (whatever the fuck that is), but all they wound up doing was making Giuliani's case.
It's funny that you would mention economic and social justice issues regarding this topic, because both factor in to taxi regulations.
If that coverage wasn't sufficient, guess who I'd be going after? The city, that's who, for letting these people drive without sufficient coverage. The city means -- wait for it -- the taxpayers.
Do you think Uber or Lyft want to pay the full time rate for insurance coverage for their part-time drivers? Hell no they don't. They want to pay the minimum allowable, and stick the taxpayers for any additional liability.
The argument shouldn't be about caps. Caps don't mean shit. The argument should be over whether these pirate motherfuckers should be allowed to operate at all. Because if the gutless Council doesn't force them to cover their drivers at the same level as full-time cabbies are required to be covered, then they're not protecting the public, and shouldn't be re-elected.
Next question.
Bottom line - it's fine if the city wants to set certain levels of minimum insurance. Ultimately, however, w should let the private market decide how to achieve those levels (individual CDL policies vs. group policies, etc.)
A two-year pilot program. That is all the council is voting on. Two years to experiment with caps and find the right balance. Possibly that balance will be no caps. Personally, I think think for-hire training, licensing, and insurance requirements may drive away many part-time TNC drivers, making caps less necessary.
but technology HAS addressed the issues. that's what you fail to admit. uber/lyft is cheaper. you can easily dispute the charges if the driver takes you the wrong way. drivers get punished if they refuse short trips. prices are up front when you order. NAME ONE THING that is unresolved. seriously.
in addition to technology developments, there are some serious economic developments since 1979. we're not in a giant gas crisis, for example. also, seattle employment isn't dropping through the floor. times are different.
and from a bigger picture, we're not talking about deregulation. we're talking about improved self-regulation. uber/lyft does a better job at regulating their own than taxi commission ever could or will. they have a vested interest in keeping people happy and being fair.
i think you're just fishing for reasons to reject the new times because they challenge your politics or whatever. and you need to stop. be a little more practical and less ideological.
There's a whole other world of people out there who don't live like us. Their needs count too.
Things you can still do in Seattle without regulations forcing them to exist: Buy records, rent/buy VHS tapes, get your VCR repaired, get a phone book, buy an oil filter for your Plymouth, pay with cash anywhere other than the UW campus, buy film for your non-digital camera, etc etc -- The point is Seattle is a much more populous, vibrant area than it was 30 years ago when dereg failed the market segment you're worried about. Dragging TNCs into regulation that has failed the consumer -- and regulation has most certainly failed the consumer when taxi companies average sub50% reviews -- is not a rational solution.
You're all "OMG. You're saying the new option isn't available to EVERYBODY? We should nip that in the bud!"
And we're saying chill out. For those who can afford it, its better. And for the 6 people out there who don't have smartphones or debit/credit cards and yet STILL afford cabs (who are these people honestly?) they can call a traditional cab. They'll always be there, albeit smaller in number.
The status quo in February 2014 is that people are using TNCs, experiencing a high degree of customer satisfaction in the process, and not causing any obvious or identified problems that I've seen any evidence for. You can't shrink a thriving industry by ~75% with an arbitrary cap (I've heard no effort to explain how 300 was arrived at as the proper number) and claim you're protecting the status quo.
The appeal to authority in this post represents a new low in your coverage of this issue. Some of us are old enough to remember when 89% of the city council, who I have no doubt sat through a lot of hearings and meetings on the subject, decided the goddamned deep bore tunnel, with shaky funding and no overrun plan, was a good fucking idea.
This would be a devastating response to all the people who are arguing taxis should be banned, since we Uber and Lyft show we don't need them anymore. If they existed.
I saw that too... I think Goldy would have been first in line at the turn of the century to ban bicycles. Because underneath his thinly veiled liberalism is a conservative who is just afraid of new ideas ;)
"Taxis serve people without smartphones, without credit cards, and who pay with cash or scrip. The TNCs do not."
The intersection of the venn diagram of people that are too poor to have a smart phone or a credit card but are rich enough to pay for a taxi is really small.
This being said if there isn't sufficient demand for this that service will go away, but I don't think it will. You're just shilling for a special interest that can treat customers like shit and provide awful service because of your beloved "regulation".
"Taxis also pick up hailing passengers." "Are you suggesting that unregulated drivers in unmarked cars should be stopping to pick up hailing customers?"
Make it legal and somebody will. We already let people drive cars, this isn't a marginal decrease in safety.
only 1,000 restaurants in seattle.
only 400 painters.
only 200 doctors.
just think if we made monopolies everywhere, we could get even more campaign donations each year as we fiddle and faddle with the loopholes, exemptions, regultions and changes! KA CHING for the politicians!