So here’s what’s going to happen.
At some point—probably between now and Friday—Portland Bureau of Transportation Director Leah Treat will enact rules allowing Uber and Lyft to operate within the city of Portland. The bureau will then ink agreements with the companies that mandate they’ll share certain anonymized data for the next four months, and Uber and Lyft will pay $20,000 a piece, prove they have insurance, and vouch that their drivers are not hardened criminals and have valid business licenses.
It sounds like a lot, but any day now Uber will be back in Portland.
“It could be a matter of days,” Bryan Hockaday, a policy advisor to Transportation Commissioner Steve Novick, said at a lengthy hearing last night, which ended in a somewhat fraught 3-2 vote to provisionally welcome Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) to town.
That hearing, by the way, was exactly what you’d expect from the emotional debate that’s played out in Portland since Uber illegally stormed the gates late last year, full of jeers and inappropriate clapping and even a shouted suggestion Commissioner Dan Saltzman had been bought.
Cab companies and drivers urged city council to further refine a proposed 120-day “pilot project” that was on the table, invoking the darkest tales Uber’s collected around the world—rapes, assaults, drunk driving, crashes where no insurance company would be held accountable—to paint a sort of hellscape we’d all be living in if TNC’s are allowed in the city without tight rules.
Their more reasonable points: That the city shouldn’t trust Uber and Lyft to conduct their own background checks of drivers (it doesn’t trust cab companies to do the same), and should require more expensive insurance plans.
“It’s totally outrageous to cater to the whims of a $40 billion company,” said Stephen Kafoury, a lobbyist for the city’s taxi companies who, like many of last night’s speakers, refused to be bound by the time constraints for testimony set by council. “Your experience with Airbnb should be a good lesson for you here. Uber has a corporate culture that resists government regulation.”
TNCs brought their own voices—wooden, overly corporate spokespeople who mostly stuck to their pat lines about being “honored” and “humbled” by Portlanders’ support, but also a woman who said her Uber shifts had helped her family avoid bankruptcy, and a former cabbie who said the company was a refreshing change from taxi outfits’ unfair practices.
But the thing about hearings like this, at the tail end of months of public process and scads of hearings from a citizen task force, is it’s all been said. Commissioners knew the arguments for and against, and had come to the hearing with their positions more-or-less solidified.
Mayor Charlie Hales and Novick had proposed the pilot project, so were definite yes votes. That meant they needed to convince one colleague to sign onto a resolution that would let PBOT make rules to welcome TNCs, and that they’d need a unanimous vote if they wanted to force an immediate code change to create the same rules for cabs.
Commissioner Amanda Fritz was a definite no. She’s repeatedly voiced concerns about the safety of services like Uber and Lyft, with particularly strong feelings about the levels of insurance they should be required to carry. That’s understandable, given the untimely death of Fritz’s husband in an auto accident. Her central argument, though, was that council shouldn’t rush because Uber wants in. She wanted the state legislature to take a crack at new insurance laws surrounding TNCs.
It’s only barely an exaggeration to say Commissioner Nick Fish might have been the most anti-Uber person in the room. Again and again, he eluded to the company being a bully and bad actor—the transportation version of Wal-Mart, which Portland City Council has elected in the past not to give much of a foothold in Portland. Fish even launched into an entire series of questions to a Lyft representative aimed solely at rehashing Uber’s lawless entry into Portland last year. And with his ‘no’ vote on the resolution, Fish spent much of his remarks on chastising the company.
“I’m not anti ride-share, but I don’t like bullies,” Fish said. “I don’t care for people or businesses who act like the rules don’t apply to them.”
Which left Saltzman, who gave a brief soliloquy about how he probably liked cabs more than the Ubers of the world, but that this was our changing society and there was no reason not to give a new arrangement a shot.
Saltzman was only the second commissioner to vote, but his “aye” ended any suspense. Cabbies started stalking out of the room.
There was more drama over the passage of the ordinance, which, remember, needed to be unanimous (with at least four of five commissioners voting) to go into effect immediately. Fritz tried to convince her colleagues, again, to pull back and treat the matter as a normal ordinance, meaning it would get a second reading next week and go into effect a month later. When that failed, Fritz walked out of the room, setting the table for a unanimous vote (Fish changed his vote, explaining he didn’t want to disadvantage cab companies).
So now! We live in a brave new world. For the next four months, there is no limit on the number of drivers cab companies and TNCs can put on the streets. There’s not even a limit on the number of cab companies that can operate. But, buyer beware: There’s also no limit on what you can be charged.
When all this will truly take root is unclear. All those things I mentioned at the top of this post still need to happen, and PBOT spokesman Dylan Rivera said this morning no hard timelines had been worked out for when TNCs could begin operating.
“At this point we’re not putting a specific day on this,” Rivera said. “We’re moving quickly to implement the direction we got from council.”
Uber is not “ride share”, it’s deregulation, plain and simple. Look past the hype. Nobody’s sharing rides, it’s just a get-rich-quick job scheme sold to the working class under the same false promises as anything else that sounds too good to be true. “Be your own boss!” etc. Might as well use your private vehicle to deliver pizzas– at least you’ll earn minimum wage.
So we finally learn that Portland’s liberal, progressive image is only skin-deep. Cue the chorus of Cali ex-pats singing Uber’s praises: “Dude I took Uber all the time in SF, and it was siiiick! Like press a button on my iPhone and dude rolls up in a Benz!” and so on. Who cares about Portland businesses? Who cares about self determination for our local government? Uber has shiny things, and that’s as far as you’ve pondered it. Give us vanity / convenience and we’ll gladly drink the Flavor Aid and whatever poison a $40-billion-valuation startup wants us to drink. Bottoms up, you stupid fucks.
I still have a hard time figuring out the notion that cab drivers should be some sort of protected class with their jobs shielded from becoming obsolete through technology.
Hi Dirk, a factual correction on your background check point (it’s easy to get wrong because the public testimony from the general public was apparently confused on this):
According to Administrative rule PFH 16.40.080-01(B) for Taxis the administrator of the PFH may accept a criminal background report from another source than the LEDS system normally used. In staff testimony at the council meeting last night PBOT staff said they encouraged this because they are actually more extensive than LEDS and capture national data, not just Oregon data.
https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportat… has the administrative rule. The public testimony you should be able to confirm yourself as you’re a reporter.
I was there last night, but I didn’t testify (FD: I’m a software engineer in mapping for Uber).
Seth: Thanks. I’ll look into this, but my understanding is that the city currently does the background checks for cab drivers, which is really my only point.
Dirk, I guess I wasn’t completely clear and left a few assumptions in, so I’ll try again with more specificity. The code (https://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/?c=… 16.40.080) and the associated admin rules (linked above) don’t require taxis to go through the city for background checks the way both are written. In fact, they are allowed explicitly to “accept” background checks from a third party (in admin rule part B) as part of the application process rather than “perform” a background check (which is acceptable in part A). The code doesn’t say that the city will “perform” the checks but merely sets a standard. So the idea that the city doesn’t trust taxis but will trust TNCs is not exactly spot on. The city will trust both to do it and did trust taxis in the past to do it, and so we were told, the city actually encourages the use of third party background checks, so they don’t have to, as their checks are more limited and not as good. That was why I thought it was relevant to your point. Hope that clarifies things!
On the insurance point, the insurance requirements for TNCs are higher than for Taxis in period 2 and 3, but lower in period 1. This kind of makes sense since TNCs don’t do street hails. They aren’t actually working during period 1, but are “available” and not “en route”. They are most of the time parked or in some cases driving to another location of higher demand.
Dispatch algorithms work to minimize or eliminate period 1 because that’s basically wasted time. A parked car isn’t making money, parking costs money, and a car driving to a place of higher demand is also potentially wasting energy (if it could have otherwise got there in period 3 rather than periods 1 and 2, with a better dispatch algorithm, then it would have been wasted).
The portion of period 1 where drivers are relocating to a location of higher demand is kind of like “commuting to work”, too. A taxi driver that drives a personal car to pick up a leased car (not that they all do this, some might take it home), could be said to be similar to period 1, and the personal, non-commercial insurance levels apply there.
That it’s a personal vehicle adds some intricacies. Personally, I think the *personal* (non-commercial) insurance levels are way too low. 25k is nothing. I carry 250k personal coverage, whatever the max is, plus a secondary umbrella policy (which required getting the max on the primaries), so my personal liability coverage is actually in 7 figures, not 5. If we doubled 25k to 50k for every driver on the road, I think that would probably be a vast improvement for everybody. And on the bright side, too, maybe making people actually pay for their social burden with proper levels of insurance might make people opt out of driving themselves and bike or carpool more.
I think Amanda had a great point that being underinsured is a problem, but taking it out on TNCs seems to be only a minor improvement when it’s a huge problem with all drivers.
Uber has been wildly successful and well received by the customers who actually use the service (as opposed to city officials and the protected monopolies they create) in major left leaning cities like Los Angeles and New York. I’m pretty sure Portland can manage.
Uber can afford the lawyers it needs to wiggle out of practically anything, so why should they require insurance at all? They’re not even a transportation company, you see. They exist solely to “make the world a better place” or some shit. Promise big, litigate your way out of trouble and leave scorched earth for its employees, customers and their communities.
Honk honk! Make way for Bay Area brogrammer privilege!
Please ask yourself this, when it is New Years Eve 2017 and all the taxis have been wiped out of existence in Portland, and your surge priced ride home from the Tube or whatever, is now $50 instead of the $10 it normally is every other day of the year, who will you turn to?
TriMet?
Stupid ignorant sheep.
“when it is New Years Eve 2017 and all the taxis have been wiped out of existence in Portland, and your surge priced ride home from the Tube or whatever, is now $50 instead of the $10 it normally is every other day of the year, who will you turn to? “
Ha! As if you could get a Portland taxi on NYE. That’s the whole point.