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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."
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.
This sort of reminds me of a short story that Asimov wrote about a boy who decided he no longer wanted to use the transporters in every home in order to go to school. He preferred walking to school each day instead, much to the horror of his mother.
It just... piqued my memory, I guess.
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 It may be an outdated reason but I figure there must still be some reason.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.
Even more so Bastiat's story about the candle maker wanting to outlaw the sun for unfair competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlemakers'_petition
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.
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?
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
A carpool is quite a bit different from a bus, provides an entirely different service in an entirely different manner.
In and around Tampa, Florida, the state will GIVE you a van and buy your gas if you get 4 or more people to ride in it 5 days a week (I think they're looking for people with 40+ mile commutes each way). Turns out to be cheaper for the state to supply the vans than for them to increase capacity on the roads clogged with single riders.
There is a saying:
A company does a hundred things wrong, and 1 right you only here about the 1 decision. The government does 1000 things right and 1 wrong, you only hear about the wrong one.
This is true.
A company just needs to to tralk about it's failures, and very few people know. The government has a lot of people whose sole purpose is to tell everyone when smething goes wrong.
I worked in the private sector for about 38 years, and now I work for a city government. I see aso many thing being done correctly, for the benefit of the citizen. I see projects that are completed on time and within budget all the time.
I see a lot less waste. (you can confuirm that by going to the labrary and looking at the numbers)
But a son as 1 thing goes wrong, it's headlines. Sometimes it
s becasue of a stupid elected official, sometimes it's due to unforseen factors. Like the price of rock suddenly going through the roof, sometimes it looks like a mistake because of a lack of facts.
Bear in mind even a moderately size City has 1000's of projects going on every day.
I ahve been pleasantly surprised working for the government. I have also learned a lot about why things seem so expensive.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, some countries take that approach. Ever taken a gypsy cab in one of them?
Also remember, you are discussing something in a country that is not the US. Here in Canada we take a bit of a different approach. In the US, if something happened, the passenger or his family would just sue everyone they could think of. Here were like to take a bit more of a proactive approach and try to prevent tragedies.