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Collection: Crimp Your Ride

5 Tips for Portland and Vancouver BC on Uber

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Portland and Vancouver BC officials, welcome to Seattle’s pain. With Uber launching (or threatening to launch) its app-based personal transportation service in your city, you have a real puzzle to solve.

You only have to balance all these goals: Protecting consumers, supporting green alternatives to car ownership, enforcing sensible rules, jettisoning outdated ones, not rewarding bad behavior, confronting limitations of a strangled taxi system you created, navigating tough equity questions, and taking on a company now valued at $40 billion that doesn’t give an inch without a fight.

If it makes you feel any better, Seattle spent more than a year trying to figure that out. The compromise it reached earlier this year is imperfect, and the city arguably got swept up in a popularity contest in which the prom queen has now lost some of her luster.

But you can still benefit from that effort, as well as hindsight. Since Seattle passed its new rules for “transportation network companies” (TNCs) in July, Uber (or its officials) have been sued by district attorneys in California for misleading consumers about safety practices, went on a bizarre tear about smearing journalists, was banned in New Delhi after a driver raped a passenger, apologized for sexist promotions in France, launched in Portland against the city’s express will, and has fought stricter insurance requirements. This weekend, it appalled the world by initially defending a policy that charged $100 fares to leave downtown Sidney, Australia, where a hostage crisis was unfolding (though the company quickly walked that back).

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Seattle Sets Ride-Service Companies Free

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Lyft Car

Nearly a year ago, I conducted a simple commuting test. Who could get me to work faster: a plain old cab or Lyft? At the time, the pink mustachioed Jeep that I conjured with my iPhone was a relatively new thing. But it got me where I needed to go 34 minutes faster than a taxi, plus no one yelled at or hung up on me.

Since then, drivers for Lyft and uberX and Sidecar—who offer people rides-for-hire in their personal cars and have essentially been driving illegal taxis—have multiplied. And the smartphone-based dispatch companies have won a loyal following of customers by making it much more convenient, pleasant, and efficient to get around the city without a car.

On Monday, that popularity paid off, as the Seattle City Council did an about-face and agreed to let those new Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) continue to grow legally without the arbitrary constraints that the city has imposed on taxis for decades. The Council on Monday essentially passed a compromise brokered by Mayor Ed Murray and supported by formerly splintered factions of the ride-for-hire industry. The results don’t exactly add up to a well-constructed and holistic transportation policy. They’re more like a kitchen sink of changes that gave everyone enough of something to stand behind the agreement.

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Murray Compromise Lifts Seattle Rideshare Caps

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With everyone facing something to lose, representatives from Seattle’s new(ish) ‘rideshare’ industry stood alongside vehicle-for-hire owners and taxi owners and drivers Monday to announce a compromise brokered by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray that they all can apparently live with.

It’s a big win for companies like Lyft and UberX, which could operate with no caps on their numbers of drivers and grow as fast as the market demands. It also apparently offered enough sweeteners to satisfy at least some taxi and for-hire owners and drivers, who had spent more than a year arguing that solution was unacceptable and put them at an unfair disadvantage.

Here’s a rundown of what everyone got out of the negotiated deal—which, significantly, still needs approval from a majority of city council members who passed a much different framework earlier this year:

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Ride-For-Hire Roundup

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rideshare, Lyft, TNC

Update: Lyft, Uber, Sidecar, and their supporters announced on Friday (3/28) that they will launch their own referendum to overturn the Seattle City Council ordinance that capped ride-for-hire drivers and required the parent companies to comply with a host of other regulations. If Seattle Citizens to Repeal Ordinance 124441 gathers enough signatures, the ordinance will be suspended from taking effect until a citywide vote. 

If you thought the City of Seattle was going to have the last word with new regulations for ride-for-hire companies like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar, ha! Since the city vote less than two weeks ago, entrenched parties (plus entirely new ones) have taken the fight to the courts and the voters. Here’s a quick roundup of what’s happened:

The Lawsuit

The Western Washington Taxicab Operators Association, a coalition of owners and drivers, yesterday filed suit against Uber in King County Superior Court. Geekwire fleshes out their arguments here, but the lawsuit basically claims Uber has been offering competitive services illegally and operating outside city of Seattle and King County rules on ride-for-hire operations.

It asks for damages “in amount equal to the lost fares and tips due to defendant Uber’s unlawful dispatch operation,” though it does not specify an amount. The suit also makes a dig at Uber, arguing the company:

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Seattle’s New Ride-For-Hire Universe

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The Seattle City Council unanimously voted Monday to limit the number of drivers that Lyft, UberX, Sidecar and other similar companies can have on the road to 150 at a time, but it left the door open for the council to revisit or lift that cap after one year.

In a compromise that no one loved, council members said the plan allows the popular smartphone-based upstarts to operate legally in the city—unlike actions that other jurisdictions have taken to to ban them. They also said it puts key provisions in place to protect consumers, expands the number of legal vehicles-for-hire in Seattle, and gives the existing taxi industry a limited period of time to innovate and catch up.

The council also resolved concerns about insurance gaps by requiring “Transportation Network Company” (TNC) drivers to carry commercial insurance or have the TNCs prove to the city that their drivers have equivalent or better than state-mandated coverage under company umbrella policies.

In a statement issued after the vote, Lyft said the city had disregarded the voices of thousands of customers who opposed the restrictions and was crushing new economic opportunity. However, it also said Lyft “will continue operating in Seattle, will continue to stand behind drivers, and will continue to offer a safe, affordable and friendly transportation option to the great city of Seattle.”

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Rideshare Update: Caps and Insurance Gaps

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rideshare, Lyft, TNC

Update: Thursday afternoon, Uber became the first Transportation Network Company to release information the city of Seattle has sought for months to inform its decision making.

The company revealed that the number of drivers currently signed up with uberX Seattle is 900—the first indication of just how popular the service has become. It also said the number of drivers active on the uberX system at any one time “regularly” exceeds 300, which is double the city’s proposed cap, and is growing to meet demand. Uber also shared previously released details about its insurance coverage and volunteered to meet in person with Seattle City Council members to review its policies.

Uber Seattle’s General Manager Brooke Steger said in a statement that the company was “now releasing these driver numbers to illustrate to the Council that this legislation will kill ridesharing as we know it.”

Update #2: Lyft shortly afterwards released a statement that in Seattle “1000 drivers have gone through the safety approval process to join the Lyft platform,” and Sidecar confirmed Friday that it has “nearly 1000” registered drivers. Those companies declined to clarify how many of those drivers are actively working for the companies and to disclose how many people are typically driving on the system at any one time, which would be more helpful in shaping the current city debate.

Now that Seattle is headed towards becoming first city in the country to cap the number of drivers that companies like Lyft, uberX, and Sidecar can have on the road, another issue remains less settled: How to cover insurance gaps.

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Seattle Headed Towards ‘Rideshare’ Regs

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Unless minds change in the next two weeks, Seattle appears headed towards capping the number of drivers who have turned their personal cars into vehicles-for-hire and have been working for companies like UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar, though city council members have not settled on where that cap should be.

Their working proposal would not limit the number of overall vehicles that those “Transportation Network Companies” (TNCs) can dispatch on their system, but companies like Lyft and UberX and Sidecar would also have to start adding taxis and licensed for-hire vehicles or limousines to their smartphone apps in order to grow or maintain their service.

Among other amendments, the council on Friday voted to abandon a confusing proposal that would have limited “casual” TNC drivers—ones who weren’t interested in sitting through the city’s two-day for-hire driver’s license class—to working 16 hours per week. Instead, TNC drivers can drive as many hours as they want but must take the same safety class as current taxi and for-hire drivers. The city will explore ways to streamline and focus that training on pertinent safety issues.

The Seattle City Council did not take a vote Friday on the contentious issue of whether to put caps on new TNC drivers, but at a committee meeting attended by every councilmember, at least five—Bruce Harrell, Sally Clark, Mike O’Brien, Kshama Sawant, and Jean Godden—expressed support for limiting new TNC drivers at some level during a two-year pilot program.

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O’Brien’s Taxi Plan Could Work

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Lyft truck

It’s been a hard road to reconcile Seattle’s broken taxi system with the as-of-yet unregulated environment in which popular smartphone-based ‘ridesharing’ companies like Lyft, Uber and Sidecar have been operating.

The plan that City Councilmember Mike O’Brien unveiled at a committee meeting last week doesn’t come close to doing what I’ve previously suggested ought to be done—removing taxi caps entirely, regulating vehicles-for-hire and drivers to make sure they are safe, and letting the market sort out how many cars-for-hire ought to be on the road.

I would still advocate for that in a perfect world. This would help unlock the vast untapped potential of ridesharing in personal cars, especially if companies like Lyft or Sidecar grow beyond providing cab-lite service and employ thousands of drivers who pick people up and share space in their cars when they’re already on the road. This is a transformative, sustainable solution that expands transportation choices and costs taxpayers nothing.

But we live in a more complicated real world, one with a specific history. Thousands of taxi and for-hire vehicle drivers—many, many of whom are immigrants who support families on the fares they collect—have spent years working under a set of illogical and innovation-killing rules that we, as a city, have imposed upon them.

The two-year pilot program proposed by O’Brien could serve as a reasonable bridge between the old and new systems, if the different parties were willing to try. It’s not clear that they are, and it’s entirely possible that if the city adopts his proposal, at least some and possibly all of the ridesharing companies will pack up and take their services elsewhere.

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Will Seattle Be the City to Kill ‘Ridesharing’ Companies?

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After months of hearings, a Seattle city council committee has released a draft blueprint for regulating on-demand, app-based “ridesharing” companies like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar that would dramatically curtail their growth in the city, if not kill their current business model.

Until now they’ve been picking up customers illegally and with virtually no oversight from the city. This has been unfair to taxi and for-hire vehicle drivers, the bulk of whom are immigrants and who have to follow a thicket of regulations dictating everything from the insurance they must buy to what they wear to the form of payments they can accept.

Clearly, the city had to level the playing field somehow. But instead of loosening restrictions on taxi drivers and allowing them to compete more freely in the marketplace, the city’s solution appears to revolve around imposing more byzantine regulation on yet a new category of competition.

The city’s draft regulations would put Uber, Sidecar, Lyft and similar companies into a new category of “Transportation Network Companies (TNC)” and create a two-year pilot program. If the rules remain as written, they would limit those companies—whose smartphone-based dispatched systems and savvy marketing have been steadily wooing over customers—to a fleet of 100 vehicles. That’s a huge problem for companies that have sought to build a pool of many part-time drivers who typically use their own vehicles to give people rides.

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What Will Ridesharing Be When It Grows Up?

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ridesharing car

The debate over crafting new rules for Seattle’s evolving for-hire industry has lasered in on a interesting question: What will on-demand ridesharing apps like Lyft, Sidecar and uberX look like when they reach a critical mass?

Will they popularize paid ridesharing by connecting people with empty seats in their car with people who need rides? Imagine if someone who happened to be driving from Shoreline to IKEA could open an app and connect with car-free shoppers who need a ride there. Or if someone headed to a meeting in Olympia with an empty car could pick up others headed that way. This could unlock tons of wasted space in our personal cars and create a online marketplace to encourage carpooling on the fly.

Or will these paid ridesharing services simply turn into taxi services with less overhead and fewer regulations? In this scenario, the drivers aren’t really “sharing” rides at all. The drivers are still making it easier for their passengers to live a car-lite or car-free lifestyle, but they’re primarily earning an income by circling around in their personal cars and driving people where they need to go.

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