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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."
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
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.
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Wrong.
The landlord pays property tax and that cost is passed along to tenants as part of the rent.
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For the record, I live in the same town ad the bus company that brought this all to a head (trentway-wager).
They had a point in their initial concern, however the way the transportation board handled this was all wrong. There were van operators who were unlicenced and unregulated, who basically bought large 10-15 person vans, and were advertising on PickupPal for "intercity transportation" (e.g. rides to Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, etc.). They were abusing PickupPal to basically operate a Van and Taxi service. Unfortunately, instead of the transportation board finding out who those unlicenced operators were and cracking down and fining them, they decided to take their wrath out on the website and screw it up for everyone else who were following the "spirit" of the website.