Slashdot Mirror
Can Ride-Sharing Startup Lyft Survive the SoCal Heat?
First time accepted submitter Kyle Jacoby writes "The app-powered on-demand ride-sharing startup, Lyft, has brought its trademark pink mustaches to San Diego. After a successful venture in San Francisco about a year ago, Lyft has since expanded to offer their services to other congested cities, like Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. Despite the utility of the service, Lyft (and related services Sidecar and Uber) has recently come under fire from the city of Los Angeles, whose department of transportation issued cease-and-desist letters to the startup. It seems that the service has the taxi community in an uproar, who believe that Lyft ride-share drivers should be required to obtain the permits similar to those required of taxi drivers." Nothing like some regulatory capture for Independence Day. Amid the ongoing strike of BART workers in the Bay Area, I bet some people are using on-line organization tools for ride-sharing with a similar upshot.
The number of taxis in NYC is fixed, and the price of a "medallion" to operate one hangs around $1M (source). That's not an open-but-regulated business. That's a closed, protected one.
Yet the city that we are talking about, San Francisco, also has a rigid number of Medallions issued out and thats it. If you want to own a cab in San Francisco, you have to buy a Medallion from an existing Medallion owner. There isnt an application process where you can apply to get a license and if you look like a great person to operate a cab you will get a Medallion.. its not like that at all, nor does anyone at all pretend that thats the way it is. The City doesn't. The Medallion owners don't.
..and its not just taxi services that have this protected-from-competition arrangement, and often the laws are written quite plainly to state that the licensing board for the industry must consider the impact a new license would have on existing license holders.
If you examine all the large cities, you will find that fixed-number-of-medallion setup is overwhelmingly the norm.
For example, Connecticut just recently rescinded a law which protected moving companies after a long battle with an out-of-state moving company that wanted to do business inside the state but could not get a license to do so on the grounds that the additional competition would hurt the existing license holders. Note that the article I just linked to states "Unfortunately, the old standard will still apply to taxi, livery, and motorbus carriers."
So while you sit there claiming that not all cities are like NYC, well my friend entire States are exactly like New York City. What I really think is that you dont have a real grasp of the amount of government regulation there is in the country, nor do I think that you have even a casual understanding of the intent of nearly every regulation. I think that you are likely to be someone that has regularly defended greater regulation of things that are already so regulated that the current players dont have to worry about any competition, a situation that devolved into an event that got you to call for greater regulation to begin with (housing bubble? yeah, I predict that you blame the housing bubble on a lack of regulation.)
"His name was James Damore."