Slashdot Mirror
Online Carpooling Service Fined In Canada
TechDirt is reporting on a disappointing development out of Canada. An Ontario transportation board has fined PickupPal, a Web-based service for arranging carpools, because a local bus company complained of the competition. (TechCrunch apparently first broke the story.) "[The transportation board has] established a bunch of draconian rules that any user in Ontario must follow if it uses the service — including no crossing of municipal boundaries — meaning the service is only good within any particular city's limits. It's better than being shut down completely, and the service can still operate elsewhere around the world, but this is yet another case where we see regulations, that are supposedly put in place to improve things for consumers, do the exact opposite."
* You must travel from home to work only â" (Not Home to School, or Home to the Hospital or the Airport) * You cannot cross municipal boundaries â" (Live outside the city and drive in â" sorry you cannot share the ride with your neighbour) * You must ride with the same driver each day â" (Want to mix it up go with one person one day and another person another day â" no sorry cannot do that â" must be same person each day) * You must pay the driver no more frequently than weekly â" (Neighbour drives you to work better not pay her right away just in case she drives you later on in the week)
Personally, I'm confused as to how they came to these regulations. It's built on a faulty foundation that they could define carpooling as a very strict set of conditions- and then disallow any activity that didn't meet those conditions.
It just plainly doesn't make sense. If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas, how is that any different from sharing a ride with a family member? According to these restrictions, I can't drive myself and my mom to the airport and split the gas cost?
It's my car and I'd much prefer to do with it what I'd please- I see absolutely no reason the government has any say in this!!
Other Canadian news:
-In a surprising decision by the Ontario Sandwich Authority, You may no longer split the cost of a foot long sub with somebody else and then each eat half, as it doesn't boost profits to our local sub shops...
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
I didn't know horses were big enough for more than two people anyway.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
I live in Canada, but sometimes I'm not proud of our idealism. This is one of those times.
Calling this Draconian doesn't illuminate the bureaucratic essence enough. Machiavelli would be proud of the Ontario Transit Board. I heard they were planning to offer bounties on the heads of the webmasters involved, but only if they were impaled on 50' spikes and lined up in front of Capitol Hill, but that was just a rumor because the 40' spikes weren't long enough to confuse us.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Everyday I walk 20 minutes to get to work. I could take the bus - wich would take just as long, and would cost me much more.
So, how long until walking is prohibited? It seems pretty unfair to me, looking this way.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Seriously. The government should have no say in this, either in their part or on the behalf of others.
Everyone knows government is best suited to provide us with our most basic needs: housing, healthcare, and transportation.
Get ready U.S.isan's - your turn is next.
I thought the government was only supposed to provide services that the private sector can't or won't provide with reasonable cost and quality.
There is a bill already before the Ontario Legislative Assembly to update the regulations to explicitly allow this practice. It is disappointing that the OTB didn't wait until the bill had passed before passing judgement, but at least we can hope the situation won't last long. The same bill would outlaw some common driver distractions, such as television screens and handheld cell phones.
http://www.ontla.on.ca/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&BillID=2099
Because nothing says "Good System!" like using your lobbying clout to get the government to shut down your more efficient competition.
If you can't compete, then you shouldn't be in the game.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I read the link figuring that there must be some good reason for this law. It may be an outdated reason but I figure there must still be some reason. ,"You need to know how much to charge the government so you can give that money to the government?"
I was wrong.
Of course it reminds me of something that happened to me at work.
My company sold software to a Canadian government agency. They pay a yearly fee for updates and support. On day I got a call from the Canadian tax department. They wanted to know how much the update disks we where shipping to the other agency where worth. This was before the Internet was available to mortals.
Well six floppies so about six dollars. I told them the updates where free.
They kept arguing with me to tell them how much the updates where worth. It seems that they needed to charge tax the people that where receiving the updates.... I told them that IT WAS THERE OWN GOVERNMENT!!!!
The told me that it didn't matter. So I asked them this
They said yes, and didn't even laugh. In fact they where a little ticked that I couldn't see the logic in it.
I told them that they had just invented Taxabation and they hung up on me.
We talked to our clients and set up a bbs so they could download the updates from then on.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Everyday I walk 20 minutes to get to work. I could take the bus - wich would take just as long, and would cost me much more.
So, how long until walking is prohibited? It seems pretty unfair to me, looking this way.
You sir, have a very promising career ahead of you as a government bureaucrat! You may even have a secondary career as a bureaucrat trainer.
Are they going to randomly stop cars with more than one person and question everybody? Or maybe they'll have undercover police. We could even have a new CSI CPU (Carpool Unit).
The article is heavily biased, although this isn't terribly surprising.
Pickup Pal is a service that allows individuals to arrange not only carpools. Specifically, it allows drivers and passengers to arrange compensation for trips.
Does this remind you of anything else? Oh, yes, a taxi company (or bus company, take your pick) which is Trentway-Wagar's complaint.
The bus company, which TW is, as an organization that arranges for buses to transport passengers for money, is bound by a series of provincial vehicle travel laws which require its drivers to be insured, to possess the correct licenses for their vehicles, and so on.
There are, in fact, specific exceptions in the specified Acts for car-pooling, but it appears that Pickup Pal does not satisfy them for various reasons (which should actually be quite obvious, prima facie).
The difficulty is that Pickup Pal is obviously not merely offering a carpool service. They are also obviously not offering a public taxi service or a bus service, either, but the carpool service has a defined exception in the law.
The law, the board argues, exists to protect riders. Drivers are to be insured, carry the proper licenses for their vehicles, and so on. (Insurance issues, which is a major public interest in cases such as these, form a major part of the Board's concern. Insuring a public vehicle is very different from insuring a private car and the caps on insurance are often much higher.)
As a result, Pickup Pal was ordered to immediately cease taking any actions that would put them in violation of the Public Vehicles Act.
Pickup Pal argues that they have nothing to do with the service, that they merely arrange this. The Board does not agree, for good reason- a taxicab company could make an identical argument. Such an argument is unpersuasive. There is a compelling public policy argument to regulating public vehicles and carriers and so on. For abiding by these regulations, Trentway-Wagar incurs costs, and they found it unfair that another provider would be able to avoid the regulations and thereby avoid the costs- hence the charge of unfair competition.
The summary writes that the regulations are making things worse for the consumer. I beg to disagree. Unsafe public transportation is worse than expensive public transportation, and there is a compelling public policy reason for regulating public transportation for safety's sake- regulations that Pickup Pal did not abide by.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Wouldn't this be a good service to run on some sort of P2P network with no centralized tracker?
I have never heard of these regulations. I doubt very much they are enforced at all. The fact that the got fined is only due to a complaint. If A) the public was aware, or B) the Premier was aware of those regulations, it would be dead in a week. This is actually very stupid move by the bus company if they are really worried about competition. I mean really, the province just started installing car pool only lanes on the 401, are they going to now say they are not committed to this sort of activity. Silly.
If I were PickupPal I would not pay the fine and write two letters, one to our Premier, and one sent to the various mainstream media outlets also indicating a letter was sent to the Premier.
This will kill the fine, kill the regs, and likely promote PickupPal, and car pooling in general. That's a quadruple win I think.
I remember hearing about this story a few months ago on NPR (can't find a link, if someone else can it's worth it to listen to). IIRC, they had an executive from the competing company being interviewed.
Basically, his complaint boiled down to the argument that it wasn't fair that the bus company had to comply with a bunch of expensive regulations, but that a carpooling service didn't.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
seeing that PickupPal is a web based company, can't they just more their operations outside of the Ontario transportation board's jurisdiction and tell them where to shove their fine?
Hey. Surely it all to the good that these cowboy capitalists have been brought properly under regulation, isn't it? Can't have people going around doing things without permission!
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Rage Against An Ontario Transportation Board, featuring vocalist Zack de la Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk.
If I remember correctly there was a something similar in Germany. A cleaning company had a lot of workers who lived in an particular outlying town so the cleaning company got a passenger van to drive them back and forth. The local bus/train service then took them to court because of the lost business. I cannot remember how it all ended up but I seem to think that the cleaning company lost. (They got "taken to the cleaners" so to speak.)
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Part of what you're describing is an assumption that people will be harmed and will then have to go through the effort and cost of a legal battle for compensation or to affect change. That sounds great! Don't you think that reality should really be somewhere in-between?
According to the Ontario Highway Transporation Board decision [PDF], the bus company that brought the complaint is Trentway-Wagar, which is part of Coach Canada, which also includes Erie Coach Lines, Autocar Connaisseur, and Gray Line and a numbered company in Quebec (refer to the Wikipedia pages). Coach Canada is apparently an affiliate of Coach USA, and both are a part of the massive Stagecoach Group.
Perhaps where the OTSB and the legislation has failed, consumer choice can make a difference. I know I'll try to avoid them next time I'm travelling in Ontario.
Regulations like this are never for consumer benefit; they are always to protect the incumbent providing service.
Whether or not this is a good thing depends very much why this is being done.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Why is there no mention of the current bill in the Ontario legislature that's aiming to change these slightly outdated laws.
How coïncidental, there's an open jobposition for the local gay-insult-man here in Canada.
We're offering you this position, with a competitive wage.
All expenses for your travel and stay are ofcourse compensated for.
Eagerly anticipating your arrival...
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
"The transportation board's worry is that there will be a bunch of amateur, unregulated bus/cab drivers running around."
That makes sense. You wouldn't want the bus drivers to have to share the road with a bunch of untrained amateur drives on the road.
Oh...wait....
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
But it wouldn't ruin your geek cred by getting in shape. Image is everything, man!
In some circles, being in shape can actually enhance your geek cred. For instance, this geek gets an A.
traceroute shows they're currently hosted on servers-etx.hgn.ca, which are located in Ontario, Canada.
Just move the server to another country, and tell the Ontario Transport Ministry to "Go Fuck Yourself", same as businesses in Quebec host their sites outside of Quebec and tell the Office de la langue francais "Mange la merde." The OLF always backs down when push comes to shove over the question of regulating internet content, since they don't have jurisdiction - the internet is regulated exclusively by the feds via the CRTC.
While they're at it, they should cite the CRTC regulations that make the internet solely federal jurisdiction, and again tell them to "Go Fuck Yourself - Twice."
Ha ha... yes, I read the news.
Oh, and regarding GP post: yes, troll, but the sort of troll that I find amusing to no end. That's just my sense of humour, I guess.
P.S: Good show. I moderated you funny, FWIW.
Of course people who espouse laissez-faire policies also decry the fact that we are too litigious, if litigation is our only recourse then what do we do? The only people who get justice are those who can afford to litigate it? Seems a bit much to me. Obviously the answer lies somewhere in between. P.S. I do not wholly disagree with you, but a blanket fix for no regulation doesn't hold water.
....Let that service relocate to Barbados. These are not the sixties! What the [socialist] Canadian government can do once the service relocates, is to attempt to block access to the site, or even block it like the [communist] Chinese do to some sites. Then we can lump Canada and China into the same boat.
I am sure the Canadian government will not be proud of this.
But even then, tech savvy Canadians can always get to the site using technologies already available. What I fear is that seemingly docile Canadian will just keep mum like they always do.
The Ontario Ministry of Transportation, on its HOV lane page, promotes carpooling and links to SmartCommute.ca. This is an initiative of Metrolinx, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Metrolinx offers services to the "greater Toronto area". So the Ontario government is arranging carpooling across city limits, but forbidding another group from doing so.
In the 1950s, Tallahassee, FL had a city bus boycott organized to protest segregated bus seating (a similar version of the more famous boycott in Montgomery, AL).
What did the city do? They cracked down on "illegal" carpooling, calling them "unlicensed taxis".
Sounds like the website needs to do the same thing the torrent websites do and host over in another country, ignoring the law entirely.
this is yet another case where we see regulations, that are supposedly put in place to improve things for consumers, do the exact opposite.
Bingo. And it's exactly what you're going to see if you get the network neutrality legislation Slashdotters are pining for.
That's the nature of government regulation.
This is a driving service, driving services are regulated for the safety of the client and pay higher insurance to cover potential damage to the client.
The fact that the "complainer" in this story is a competitor is moot... It's the site's owner's fault for not verifying the legality of their service before creating it...
Guess who was pushing lawyers the most on this issue? Greyhound. Although they don't admit to it, they didn't like that PickupPal was taking business away from them.
Hopefully no Canadian hotels hear about this and jump into the fray. Sites like couchsurfing charge a small fee for membership. Members are provided a forum to find people willing to let other users stay at their place free of charge (while on travel or whatnot). No licenses, no taxes, no government involvement whatsoever. Sounds like we need some government intervention!
That isn't he half of it. In the OSA's most recent regulation, since a "foot" is no longer an official measurement in Canada, "foot-long sandwiches" must now be called "3.048 decimeter-long sandwiches". This is primarily meant to get revenue from American tourists, who will be slapped with a CAD$50 fine for using "foot" as a unit of measurement to describe a sandwich. Mr. Sub has looked forward to this day, since their new sandwich will be 25% more expensive than the old sandwich. (After all, "3.048" is better than "1").
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
"[The transportation board has] established a bunch of draconian rules that any user in Ontario must follow if it uses the service â" including no crossing of municipal boundaries â" meaning the service is only good within any particular city's limits. It's better than being shut down completely, and the service can still operate elsewhere around the world, but this is yet another case where we see regulations, that are supposedly put in place to improve things for consumers, do the exact opposite."
Regulations ultimately act to benefit the regulated; not the public. The raise barriers to entry and protect incumbents. A Nobel Prize laureate in Economics pointed that out years ago.
In general, regulated industries can sustain higher prices and have less competition than unregulated ones. That's not o say regulation does not have a place; but to think it results in lower prices to consumers is wrong.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You take the fun out of life...
What about 'ride boards' that are/were common at universities and colleges? Should the university be instructed to take them down, as they are vaguely complicit in a gypsy-busing service?
I am certain that PickupPal has only the best intentions, but before you accept money for giving somebody a lift you should carefully read your insurance policy. Finding yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit because you invalidated your liability insurance mightn't be the smartest move; so you should pass on the "gas or grass" options.
One of the things that modern society seems incapable of understanding is that erring on the laissez faire side of things can create really interesting services with minimal hassle. People focus excessively on perceived problems like "oh nos... without intrusive government regulations, the water would be poisoned!!" when a capitalist approach, holding those who harm others civilly and criminally liable for harm to limb and property would suffice in most cases.
These regulatory boards look great on paper to the sort of people who see the world through the rosy colored lenses of community involvement, communitarian ethics, etc., but they don't really work. The FCC is a glorious example of how such regulatory boards invariably get utterly coopted by those they are supposed to regulate.
The moral of stories like this is simple. If you are going to implement semi-socialistic policies like public busing or giving a company a monopoly on providing a bus service, at least have the good sense to compartmentalize that so much that it doesn't interfere with any other aspect of public life.
The problem is the cost of discovering that products were deadly outweighs the added cost due to regulations requiring meeting safety standards.
In fact, lack of such regulation might result in higher costs (time and money)as consumers replace government testing with their own to ensure their safety.
While many libertarians believe free markets can solve all problems, theory and practice are two very different things in many cases.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
1) it is not a bus or taxi service as no one is providing services for hire. If someone does use the site as a means to provide services for hire, the issue is with the provider not the site. You cannot fine a newspaper for running an ad from a taxi company that is breaking the law.
2) Buses and taxis already compete with car pools. If you really want to stifle the competition, then make car pooling illegal.
3) It's Canada. Expect stupidity, and who gives a frak.
These people would really have a cow in Northern Virginia. Slugging, or waiting for strangers to pick you up to take you to work, has been going on here since the early 1970's!
Yes, it's odd, and you do exactly what your mother told you not to do: talk to strangers and get in their car. But there have been no serious crimes against "slugs" reported during the entire time.
It just feels strange the first time you do it, and it never completely feels right!
Oh well "Who is John Galt?"
Personally, I'm confused as to how they came to these regulations.
There is carpooling. And there is taxi and limo service. I think the restrictions are to prevent a for-profit transportation service and then claim you are just "carpooling", when you and a few people are paying a guy $20 a month to cart you all around the place.
I forget how it's handled in various states in the US. But roughly there are things in place that prevent you from running a taxi service without a license while still being allowed to carpool with neighbors and coworkers.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Solution: if you dont like the tactics of the company boycott them. Tell all your friends to not use their services. They will just find someone else to blame for their woes.
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
On another note, it seems that one loophole in the statute might be that if no money changes hands, as in round-robin ride sharing, that no law has been broken. Its totally stupid, but that might still be legal.
Not according to the act.
The restrictions apply to "public vehicles", which explicitly excludes "car pool vehicles"
The whole brouhaha started because the service, as it currently operates, does not meet the definition of car pooling.
Quoted:
I am always suprised at how many people will happily get in a car with someone they don't know just because it has been called a 'carpool' instead of 'hitchiking'. I have a pal who's wife was arguing (well, more a debate) that it was a good thing to go to the carpool sites in our county, and find someone that is going to the same place as you. This is an attractive 98 pound woman. She would never consider hitchiking, but could not grasp that getting into a strangers car alone from a carpool parking lot is no better than doing it from any random freeway on ramp.
After getting no where with her, I pointed out to him what she had been saying. I have no doubt that they had a big argument about it because she now is adamantly against the idea of using the find a stranger in the parking lot method of carpooling. Some might think that I over stepped a line, but I really don't want to find out that she was found in a ditch raped an murdered. I know if I were a rapist, she would have easily been in the top 1% of target victim group because she is attractive, to small to put up a big fight, and was willing to get into a strangers car.
Simply put: Carpooling with strangers IS hitchhiking.
Each person needs to evaluate the risk/benefit of hitchhiking for themselves, but they should not delude themselves into thinking that they are not the same thing just because it now has a PC name and the government encourages it.
And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Another post detailed it as well but heck, this is Slashdot and nothing is ever only said once in comments.
A carpool is generally defined as a group of people going to generally the same destination over a period of time. That's my general definition. Feel free to make up your own. Examples would be from a Park and Ride lot to an office complex, co-workers who travel a lot on the same schedule going to the airport, etc. It's a defined, regular event. Almost every carpool has the same members for most of the time.
By setting up a service where you could look for a ride from X to Y and pay for that specific ride isn't a carpool. It's a taxi service going under the heading of Carpool with the intention of skirting the regulations that they should be following.
I can see where shutting this down/restricting it heavily is actually a good idea. Not for taking away business from the municipal services but just for safety's sake. Taxi, shuttle and bus drivers are regulated for a reason.
Since municipalities seem to have their own carpool websites with the intention of encouraging 'real' carpools they know that carpools don't compete with bus service. It might be named here as part of municipal services just so the taxi companies aren't singled out as the people who are most affected.
Take a good look at the cars and drivers around you on the road some days. Do you really want them ferrying people around? Do you want to be in that car, with that driver? Doing this is actually a public service. Yes, that one was a bit on the flippant side.
Seems to me that all this service does is facilitate communication between people who want to car pool. Doesn't Canada have a "charter of rights" to protect free speech?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apparently driving is like sex in Canada.
The bus is like a strip club. Everyone gets together for legally sanctioned transportation, but none of the customers get to drive, and it's not as much fun as a real car ride.
Big health care provider: I want to offer a very expensive type of health care service. But I can only afford to do it as part of a broader array of more profitable services, which help subsidize the less-profitable stuff. If some small, independent operators come in and cherry-pick my "profitable" patients, I won't be able to offer the less-profitable stuff at all. City Regulator: You're right, that's not fair. In the name of offering better health care for all, we will pass some regulations tightly restricting new entries to the market. - Alaska Jack
QED. Just too bad about the needs of the people who would otherwise have been using the service.
- Alaska Jack
The moose, or the Canadians?
TFA is a little one-sided.
First, the regulations that exist are not there to stop carpooling, they're there to ensure bus and taxi services are safe. This isn't some theoretical problem, either, as a number of people were killed in an unlicensed and uninsured van in southern Ontario a few years back. (Would they have been alive if the service vehicle had been through a safety check, or if the operator of the vehicle was properly licensed? I don't have those details, and I can't find the article I was reading about it this morning). The problem is that the regulations are very broadly defined, and a lot of car pooling falls under them.
The Ontario government has been actively working to fix the laws for a while now, so they don't apply to car pool services (http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/09/02/ot-carpool-080902.html). But, how to write a law which covers a taxi, and doesn't cover car pooling? Tough to get right, but they are working on it.
Second, the site in question, PickupPal, was being used by a couple of companies in southern Ontario who were selling rides from Ottawa to Toronto, and the reverse direction (a 6 hour drive), putting multiple people into vans. So, essentially, running a bus service. This is a far cry from car pooling, and obviously these companies should fall under the bus regulations. Should the government be fining PickupPal, or fining these unlicensed bus services directly? Hard to say without knowing all the details involved.
PickupPal, though, called the ruling a victory, so they're obviously happy with it.
In 2005 a bus company sued cleaning ladies who carpooled, claiming "unfair and parasitical competition".
These threads are crammed with people pointing out that these regulations are primarily intended to protect incumbent businesses from competition. A few people have argued that, no, there is a public interest served in making sure drivers are licensed, etc.
One solution to this would be voluntary accreditation. It wouldn't be *illegal* to offer your services without it, just as it is not illegal for an unaccredited college to offer classes. But an accrediting association could offer its stamp of approval to drivers who qualify, allowing consumers to choose to ride only with accredited drivers or not.
- Alaska Jack
I find the Canuckistan label that you Americans so lovingly toss around to be offensive and annoying. I don't refer to your country as Jesusland (although perhaps I should). Show show respect for your #1 trading partner and largest supplier of oil.
The Ontario Transport company did the same thing some years ago to stop Allo-Stop to operate in Ontario.
Allo-stop is a wonderful system of carpooling where you call them when you are going from town to town. If you have a car, they will assign you people who don't have them. Money is paid, the guy with the car gets is Gaz paid, the passenger pay a lot less than with Bus Transport, everybody is happy.
I used it sooo much when I was a college student, it saved me hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in transport. Would have gladly used it to go to Ottawa many times, but hey, "unfair competetion" or something...
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
to ANOTHER country.
I hope this helps.
Sincerely,
K. Trout
regulations are just a tool to improve humanity's standards like anything else. just like a car, in the right hands and right direction they can deliver, and in the wrong hands with misdirection they can kill.
Read radical news here
Programming for an open system is not possible, of course.
This issue is almost already dead. It is OLD news, and there are changes to legislation going through the provincial(state) parliment to fix this problem.
The reason for these rules were to prevent UNLICENCED operators from running a bus or taxi service. Obviously the rules need to be changed, and they are.
If you read the rules, you'll see that for a carpool to be a "public vehicle" and fall under the regulation at all, the driver must be paid. If you and your neighbour exchange the driving but no money then you're fine. If you pay your neighbour to drive then your neighbour becomes a "public vehicle" (I know it's stupid) and subject to regulation. Note that if you advertise your car on this website and charge for the transportation, then you are in the business of driving people for money, so it's not unreasonable to say that you fall under the rules regulating such service (buses/taxis/whatever). I don't believe that there should be such laws at all, but that's a different issue altogether.
A few weeks ago, I listened to an interview with the Ontario government minister responsible and he stated quite clearly that he wants to change the wording of the law to permit informal carpooling.
The problem is that there was a notorious incident where scum were running an unlicensed bus company and killed five people. See http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2000/07/19/watchdog000719.html
Until the new legislation is negotiated and pushed through, expect the licensed bus compnanies to insist that the letter of the law be followed.
I'm pretty sure our largest supplier of oil is ourselves.
As for Jesusland, go for it, it's true. Just because we're screwed up doesn't mean we can't make fun of others.
International Drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Drive) is Orlando's main tourist strip. There's a tendency for convention organizers to charter buses to run shuttle service between the convention center and all the convention's official hotels.
Charter buses can be fined $200 for stopping on International Drive to pick up passengers; they have to pick up on side streets or parking lots.
Now, the Orlando public transit system and the International Drive bus route can stop on International Drive. Convention organizers could probably hand out city bus passes at a lower price than chartering buses, but that would also likely wind up in people unfamiliar with the area getting on the wrong bus and winding up who-knows-where. That aside, there's probably an image issue with making your convention attendees ride a bus with *gasp* service-sector employees on their way to and from work.
My point: this is MUCH different than shuttting down a carpool site. Lynx isn't trying to keep bus charters from taking their business; they simply don't want International Drive to become a bus-choked nightmare. :-)
Utter utter BS. As Michael Lewis notes :
'There weren't enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league's stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all."They weren't satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn't afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that's when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?"'
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Thanks for the link! If anyone is still reading this thread, I should point out that I can't find the material I was referencing in the link provided. Three possibilities: (1) The edition I have is older than the third edition, and the preface has completely changed; (2) I am remembering something from another part of the book, or (3) I am thinking of a completely different book altogether! I suspect the answer is (2). I will have to check this when I go home tonight. Sorry for any confusion. - Alaska Jack
Sixth? I've only just found discovered that hardly anyone posts on Friday night.
+ An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. +
The website just needs to ban all arranging of ride sharing on all public transportation. It should be able to continue the arrangement of ride sharing with those who have their own private transportation.
"...but this is yet another case where we see regulations, that are supposedly put in place to improve things for consumers, do the exact opposite."
What, in heaven's name, gives you the idea that regulations are put there to improve things for consumers? Some may, but many are about protecting corporations and industries, and many are about maintaining fovernment control.
Improving things for consumers is somewhere near the bottom of the "why there are regulations" list.
I wonder how long it will take until we see laws making free/open-source software illegal or limited only to licensed programmers.
Ummm, you forgot #6...
6) Profit!
In a world of government planning don't buck the plan..
Only trolling here but... its just proof that Government knows best and once you start down that rood to, "Government please help us out here..." these types of externalities do impinge on government economic planning and such rulings help strengthen the rule of law and prevent miss use of scarce government resources (your $$).
http://www.hawknest.com/
This is a new and interesting definition of "worked".
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Same thing happened in France in 2005: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/11/france