Slashdot Mirror
SF Airport Officials Make Citizen Arrests of Internet Rideshare Drivers
transporter_ii writes "In the past month, San Francisco International Airport officials have been citing and arresting drivers from mobile-app enabled rideshare companies that pick up and drop off passengers, an airport spokesman said. Doug Yakel said there have been seven citizen arrests issued to 'various offenders' since July 10. The airport had issued cease and desist letters to several rideshare companies, including Lyft, Sidecar and Uber, in April. Taxi drivers are holding a noon rally at San Francisco City Hall Tuesday to 'keep taxis regulated and safe' and are calling for the end of ridesharing services."
Regulations = safety... right?
The entertainment industry says so. It seems only reasonable to see others take up the cause. Parents who tell kids to share their toys should be arrested also. It's killing the Toys R us franchise.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Arresting someone for what amounts to a civil offense seems like government power overreach to me, otherwise known as fascism.
Is picking someone up at the airport an indictable offense?
reason #8732 not to fly to the US...
Meanwhile the world evolves and the dinosaurs think that by roaring louder they will divert the extinction that is free economy.
I just read the summary several times, and the article twice, and I still have no idea what the hell people are getting arrested for...
But I get the feeling that if someone explains it to me, it'll only lead to me yelling "WHAT THE FUCK, AMERICA?!" and I already have a headache, so I would rather just remain ignorant this one time...
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
The California Public Utilities Commission is setting guidelines making ride-sharing legal. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57596259-93/uber-lyft-and-sidecar-get-tentative-green-light-in-calif/
Are the cars marked or painted with the company names and/or logos?
For one of the companies at least, the cars are wearing pink mustaches. (yes, really)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No, but tresspass is. The airport has banned those hiring the non-taxi rides. It's a jerk move, but it's legal.
It's partly about their business and partly about public safety. Taxi services have higher insurance rates as well as safety inspections of both the cars and the drivers.
Look, this ride share serves is every bit as dangerous as hitchhiking. You are taking your chances with it that you won't be robbed of everything you have with you and your naked corpse found in the remotest part of California.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
I've got to say SFO is consistently the most hostile airport I've ever been to, and I've been to a lot of them.
But this just beggars belief and basically boils down to taxi drivers wanting a monopoly and "somehow" convincing the airport officials to back them.
You can't do anything for free in the good old US-of-A, its bound to upset some corporation or other, and they're the ones with all the power, not the voters.
#include <sig.h>
Before regulating, how about the existing cab companies clean up their own act first.
From TFA:-
Apparently, regulated taxis in San Francisco are so safe that theres a dedicated webpage discussing homicide prevention strategies. For cabs specifically in SF only.
And one of the main reasons ridesharing is taking off is that apparently existing regulated cabs offer terrible service.
Actually, hmm, my sympathies might lie with the cab driver on the making out bit. But only if shes hot. ^_-
They didn't just get made up because it was fun to regulate taxi drivers
No, they got made up because someone could then make money from ALL drivers picking up someone, and furthermore artificially jacking up prices by lowering supply.
No, the whole thing is about protecting people from ending up in the back of "taxis" that couldn't or wouldn't get through
Ha! Spoken like someone who has never been in a real taxi. In London perhaps with the black cabs we could buy your bullshit. In most other cities or most other companies you just need to fork over the VERY LARGE amount of cash required to join the club - your only instructors required being Washington and Benjamin.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's all about the money. The SF airport officials want their cut of the fares and are bullying the rideshare cabs to get it. This is what they said in April :-
So, when banning the ridesharing cabs (who don't pay their 'nominal fees') didn't work, they started arresting the cab drivers.
IMO you've got it backwards. The licenses ("shields" or "medallions") cost so much because they're a licence to print money once acquired. In NYC "corporate" medallions have sold for over $1 million. They sell for that much because the owner can get a better return on his investment than he can investing it in other ways, adjusted for risk. Medallion owners tend to play municipal politics well, to protect their investment. They also fool the public into feeling sorry for them. Please don't fall for it.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
the cars are wearing pink mustaches
They're in disguise.
Your post reads like you have absolutely no perspective, have chosen a side, and are completely focused on supporting that position. The idea that 99% of regulation isn't beneficial is absolute nonsense.
When I came into work today in my car I benefited from regulation of air-bags, lighting, road markings, junction positioning, emissions, brakes, vehicle road worthiness and probably dozens, if not hundreds, of others.
There are stupid regulations, just like there are stupid laws, but the exceptions should be dealt with rather than throwing the whole system out.
Moustache rides?
Really....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
That is a hugely sweeping assertion that requires some justification. Do you have any statistical evidence to back it up, or are you speaking from sheer prejudice?
There is a huge amount of regulation. Which means that if only a very tiny bit of regulation is bad, there is a lot of bad regulation. But to generalise from the fact that there is a lot of bad regulation to the idea that 99% of regulation is bad is the sloppiest of sloppy thinking.
From you statement, for example, road safety regulations are a waste of time, as are all those for any other form of transport. There is an incredible amount of aviation safety regulation - are you happy to repeal 99% of it? Which 1% of poisonous chemicals do you want still banned? Are you happy to deregulate your local nuclear power plant, so it can be run by the workers willing to accept the lowest pay? And, of course, get rid of all those regulations intended to keep politicians at least a little hinest - sell political office to the highest bidder.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Driving a cab might not have been a big business where you were, but consider NYC, where a medallion costs well over $1M at this point. The interest on the loan to buy the medallion pretty much dwarfs any other costs -car, gas, etc...
Taxi drivers enjoy legal semi-monopolies. It's sold to the public that it ensures that they will be picked up(despite being black), get a safe vehicle(despite pretty much all vehicles being safe today), with enough legroom and a 'professional' driver.
The problem comes in that, as a consumer, if there's enough taxis they'll have to pick up non-optimal customers(black) anyways, as a consumer I can look at the vehicle and refuse to use it if it's old, dirty, whatever(and being a licensed taxi company doesn't prevent this), and as the complaints elsewhere in the thread show, getting a 'professional' driver is still something of a crapshoot.
Ergo I see the regulations costing me a lot, but giving me little, thus I object to them.
I don't read AC A human right
Welcome to the future. The smartest taxi drivers will use ride sharing services to eliminate their down time. The others will get broke.
~ Best man at your service.
Non-traditional houses means you don't have any experience how this construction will be in shape in five, ten or fifty years time. But normally, houses exists that long. And the regulations in place try to make sure of that. Constructing houses is a complex problem, and each new construction might have hidden problems which only appear after a few years. I remember the breaking down of the roof of a ice skating hall here around, where several factors contributed to the accident (which left about a dozen people dead).
How a passenger arrives at the airport - by bicycle, by train , by rideshare or by stork - is simply none of their business as long as it is not disruptive. From the airport's perspective, there is no difference between a taxi and a rideshare, so claiming that the rideshare is "trespassing" is absurd.
Of course, the regulatory capture by taxi companies is the real, underlying issue here. There is no reason to restrict who can take another person in their car; this is an arrangement for services between consenting adults, and none of the government's business.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
That would depend on the definition of a "good" regulation. You seem to cite the airbag regulation as a bad thing. Yet what was the alternative? When they first came out many countries were struggling to get passengers to buckle up. Killing a few lighter passengers vs not saving a large proportion of the population that fails to follow another regulation is not necessarily a bad thing.
Just like our building codes where I live say nothing about earthquake hardening. Though if an earthquake were to hit now and kill thousands of people would that be a failed regulation? No it would likely be an edge case given the historical lack of earthquakes.
Also with lane markings you're getting regulations and best practices convoluted. Best practice is to include lane markings on the road. Where they are included they need to follow the regulations which dictate what they will look like.
Can you clarify: you are happy to take the risk of an incident which will leave millions dead, and cost trillions in property damage, and depend on financial restitution after the accident? You say you wouldn't live near it: a serious nuclear accident could pollute 1/3 of the US (Chernobyl polluted Scotland): three such plants and you have to leave the country. Do you know how open-cast mining companies have managed to manipulate such a system? An initial company opens the mine, extracts the coal and gets the profits, then as the mine is coming to the end of its life, transfers it to a shell company which has no assets. When the time comes to close the mine and rehabilitate the land, the company goes bust, with no resources to do the job their long-distant predecessors started. Ditto with pollution (Love Canal etc). Have you not heard of Bhopal - how many of them (a) got financial restitution, and (b) would not far rather have healthy lives than any financial payback? The law should prevent this, you say? Would you bet your life against the lawyers and political favours that a significant slice of a ten billion dollar profit can buy? And do you really think money can compensate for human lives? Will you sell permits to murder - which is essentially your proposition?
How much time are you willing to spend researching before going into a burger bar? Remembering that the burger chain owners will be spending significant amounts of money whitewashing their reputation and attacking those who say their food is dangerous even if it isn't. There is a proven history over millennia of big guys screwing consumers, often fatally, and getting away with it. Before food regulations were instituted in London, approximately 10% of food sold was actively dangerous (flour padded out with white lead) and more than 80% was adulterated (bread padded out with chalk). The profits from "getting away with it", and the ease of providing a fall guy to take the heat if you don't, are irresistible to the small percentage of the population who are actively dishonest - and then the majority who are trying to compete with them have to do the same and go bust.
Big business, due to simple financial muscle, can always outgun the little guy. The only solution the little guy has is to gang up together: all together we have the muscle to match business. Such a ganging-together of all the little guys is called a "government".
I can only conclude that you are completely ignorant of the law of the past 200 years if you have such a naive trust in post-facto restitution, and ignorant of advertising if you trust on reputation to warn of bad providers. That worked in a medieval village. It didn't work even in a medieval town, let alone an industrial country with tens of millions of businesses,
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Because we are so much safer paying a taxi $55 for the ride to the hotel and then the expected $20 tip.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The one time someone said to me: "I'm placing you under citizens arrest"
My reply was "Go fuck yourself"
and when the police showed up, it wasn't me that got carted off to jail.
People need to learn about their rights.
I would be happy to see nuclear power regulations repealed, so long as those that build and run nuclear power plants are actually accountable for any incidents that occur as a result of preventable actions on their part. This goes to the heart of statism: the protection of corporations. Corporations are an invention of government, allowing them to esacpe culpability when their interests at risk. If I run a power plant, and I neglect to have proper safety precautions and something happens, I should be held accountable for those actions.
I don't say this often, or lightly, but this is stupid idea. This is free-market libertarianism taken to the (il)logical extreme. Are you arguing that regulations are never good or necessary? What if someone wants to build a nuclear power plant near a highly populated area? Near a large water source for easy cooling, eg Fukushima? What if they are using a design that has known flaws? Are you still OK as long as those responsible will be "accountable" in the end? What about if they cut corners to recoup their investment sooner? You mention auditing and inspection but what good are these if there are no regulations? Would the inspectors just make strong suggestions? Even with the best intentions, things go wrong-- see what is happening with the San Onofre nuclear plant that is being permanently shut down due to leakage problems. Estimations are that decommissioning will take years and nearly $3B. Whats to keep those responsible from cutting corners to make a fast buck and when things go south, declaring bankruptcy and just walking away? Do you honestly think a strong sense of personal/corporate responsibility will help in this situation? Wouldn't it be nice if the nuclear power plant operators were required to have a fund that would be used when a plant closes so that the responsible parties can't just walk away? Fortunately, the operators of San Onofre do have $2.7B in a decommissioning fund-- because of regulations.
Sometimes it is OK to have a lot of experiments to find out what works best-- I think having a lot of smaller financial institutions is preferable to having a few "too big to fail" ones. With regard to nuclear power plants, are you going to let people/corporations do 100s of experiments to find out what works best? Some failures leading in meltdown causing Chernobyl type contamination zones? No. Sometimes regulations are a good thing.
Your quoting airbags reminded me - the first generation of airbags were dictated by the government to be set up to do a lick of good for an unbuckled passanger. As a result they detonated with such force they killed lighter people (children and small females).
Is the street lighting, road markings, and junctions a result of regulations or industry 'best practices'?
While airbags were a bit off the mark to start, the goal and intent were correct and eventually got us where we are today. Airbags have saved many many more lives than they have taken, so I'm willing to take the growing pains as a society to get to where we are today.
As for best practices, how many cities are willingly putting up more street lights? Or repainting roads to make the markings clear? Most of these things the cities/states are required to do. If we got rid of all regulations, we would be fucked. What incentive would a city or state have to fix anything? Why wouldn't a business just dump waste into streams and lakes that feed your drinking water? Its faster/cheaper/easier so it would happen over night.
I hate red tape just as much as the next guy, and I spend a good chunk of my time at work filling out "TPS" reports, but these systems are in place to keep douchebags (people/corporations) from doing what comes naturally to them, screwing us all over. As far as the story goes, I like the idea of rideshare, and can see how taxis are getting pissed, but is that the best thing our police departments can be doing, investigating and ticketing normal people over stepping on a taxi drivers toes?
Regulation certainly has important uses: it keeps your house from burning down, makes you safer in car accidents and ensures that your food is clean and properly prepared.
But this is mostly self-protectionism by the taxi industry. Ride sharing is basically "accelerated friend making" for the purposes of carpooling. Any claim that it's unsafe because its unregulated is more or less bullocks. It's maybe a matter of service quality, but that should really a choice left made up to the customer, shouldn't it?
I don't know where you live, but at least in the U.S., pretty much all building codes say that if an engineer has designed it, so it will be. No problems with non-traditional houses, as long as you've got someone competent to design it.
Says the man who has never met a county building inspector. It doesn't matter if code explicitly states that something is permissible--if they don't personally understand it, it doesn't meet code. If they don't like the practice, it doesn't meet code. If they had a fight with their wife that morning, their kid hates them, and the dog just bit them, it doesn't meet code.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I'm pretty sick of hearing the same old tired bullshit from conservatives and libertarians about how regulations, unions, and taxes are so awful.
You can always find some instance of where a given regulation is bad, a union is over-reaching, or taxation is burdensome. But these three things, regulations, unions, and taxes, define civilization as we know it in the contemporary U.S.
Regulations (laws) and the regulatory agencies were demanded by the people and put into place to protect citizenry from consistently ethics-challenged business world. Likewise unions. Business, it turns out, cares more about turning a profit than the health, safety, and welfare of you, your family, employees, and the environment we all live in. If you don't threaten to throw 'em in jail, or subject them to penny ante fines and public humiliation, businesses will happily bait and switch your ass to death. They'll pay you starvation wages to work in situations as dangerous as the most dangerous situation you can imagine. And dock your pay if you're late.
For every bad regulation you come up with, there are a thousand that have saved your life in the last week. For every non-union shop that you claim is fair and treats its employees fairly and looks out for their safety there are a thousand people on disability from preventable industrial accidents.
And taxes help pay for those life-saving regulations. And roads. And bridges. And schools. And police and fire departments, health departments, public parks, libraries, universities, basic research, the arts, THE MILITARY... Need I go on?
And for every onerous tax you mention, there are a thousand benefits you've personally reaped in services and infrastructure paid for by our taxes.
So I don't want to hear about how bad government regulation is, or that unions're bad, mmm'kay? Or that we shouldn't pay taxes. If you don't want to participate in our society and partake of the benefits, fucking move someplace where you don't have to suffer those "burdens".
I hear Somalia doesn't have personal income tax...
Is the street lighting, road markings, and junctions a result of regulations or industry 'best practices'?
Yes, there are regulations for all of that, and if you want to see a cluster fuck, visit a country where there are none, or if there are, they are not enforces (India and Philippines come to mind)
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
The best way to get rules changed is to refuse to follow them. Done right, this sparks a discussion of whether the rules are sensible or not. There's really no other way to do it. The government put these rules into place, and will not want to spend time reviewing or changing them. They have to be pressured into doing so, and that's exactly what is happening.
It is a very important responsibility of any citizen is to disobey senseless regulations. When you are called on one, invest the time in your society by fighting to have the regulation knocked down.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The taxi drivers assert that this is a safety matter.
They are correct - it is a matter of keeping their jobs safe.
How much would someone have benefited from having a car that cost 1/10th of what you paid but without many of those safety features? Someone then able to get to a job, who could then earn more, save more, and eventually afford a nice, safe car like yours. But now he can't, because the price of a car is too much.
That type of car is called motorcycle.
I'm going to preface this by saying I'm using the term "regulation" in this post to mean "government regulation". Private entities impose regulations on member companies all the time, and I have no issue with it. This response is a rebuttal only to the idea of "government regulation". Is there regulation that specifies network architectures? Is there regulation that says TCP/IP is the backbone of the Internet? Is there regulation that says USB is the standard method of connection for a whole slew of devices? Information Technology is the most UNregulated industry in the world....it also happens to be the fastest growing (for decades now) and the most diverse in terms of job opportunities and applications to customers. Regulations are ALWAYS about protecting a preferred interest, never about safety. The old addage is "you get what you pay for". If you pay for something that has an inherent lack of safety, but it's cheaper, and you get more customers than the guy that charges a higher price for the safe product...who do you think is going to demand the regulation? The customers certainly aren't, they are obviously happy with the less safe product, else they wouldn't buy it. The only person that would scream for safety regulation is the one knows he can drive his competition if his competitor were FORCED to meet the same standards. You cite air-bags, lighting, road markers, etc. as regulations you "benefit" from. Are you telling me that if not for regulations cars would wander aimlessly through the dark on dirt paths? This is absolutely ludicrous and is simply a "who will build the roads?" argument. It stems from a belief that without forced coercion at the point of a gun that people would not provide a quality product (and if roads and general safety were products to be sold instead of given away after stealing from others, they would be quality...to those that purchase them). Life is about risk management. No one can be 100% safe all the time. It is incumbent upon the individual to take the various risks in their own life and weigh those against the resources available to them. Some people don't trust elevators, they simply don't ride them, they take the stairs instead. It takes longer, thus it consumes their time. That is resource and risk management, and if you don't do it for yourself you're simply helpless and reliant on others to make decisions for you.
Look, this is ridiculous. I am all for personal responsibility and I try to exercise it in my daily life. I ride a motorcycle for crying out loud, I need to be personally responsible. So I agree that people need to think about what they are doing and consider the consequences.
But our modern world is too complex to have people weighing every decision. I don't have time to make sure that every restaurant I eat at has clean facilities. Are we all supposed to inspect the kitchen ourselves? I can't personally verify that the apartment building I live in was properly built, or that the airbags in my car will work properly and only when they are needed, or that the taxi I'm riding in has been properly maintained, or that the medicines I'm taking are safe and effective. And if I find that any of these are not the case, I don't have the resources to correct them. I can take my money elsewhere, but that's not incredibly effective; I'm a drop in the bucket.
It would be great if we all had perfect information and could make rational choices based on our own sense of what is most important to us. Really, I would dig that. But the fact is we don't have the expertise or the resources to independently judge the entirely of the world around us. It's too big, and life moves too fast these days. We need regulations to make sure basic standards are being met. Sometimes those regulations are used for anti-competitive goals, and I agree that's wrong. But to say regulations are ALWAYS about protecting a preferred interest, never about safety is not correct either.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Having recently paid for three permits and six inspections for me and myself doing the work on my own house, I beg to differ. If you're building a non-standard, engineer-designed home, presumably you have enough money to immediately quash any attempts by inspectors at not following the rules. Lawyers come comparatively cheap when you think about the cost of the entire project.
If they don't get it, they'll (at least they should) ask for plans - plans that are sealed by a PE or an architect and are approved by the county. Yes, inspectors are people, and they may have overcoming their own biases low on their priority list. Still I think you're painting a picture that's overly gloomy.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
But again, you are thinking like a homeowner that plans to stay in the home for some time. Politicians think very short term, so instead of "If we fix that bridge it will bring more people to the town, and eventually lead to more tax revenue", its "I dont think we we should fix the bridge since it will be expensive now, it will last a few more years". Short term politicians have no incentives to do what is best for the country/state/city in the long term.
So, you're in favour of cities favouring wealthy neighborhoods over poorer neighborhoods, since they'll get more tax revenues from the millionaires paying taxes than the poor receiving welfare?
Interesting idea, that....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
And you can challenge them on the spot and through the process if they won't follow the rules.
Three Civil engineers were building a large retaining wall on one of their property. The inspector showed up and said you can't build walls higher than 4 feet tall without a plan and inspection every few feet. The engineer who's property it was grabbed a sketch that was nothing more than line on paper, grabbed his seal and stamped and signed the "design plan" handed it to the inspector and informed the inspector that private inspection of the wall would be handled by the 3 on site engineers. The inspector called his boss who came out and told him to shut up.
Regulation is there to protect future owners of the property. You build the house wrong or don't follow code and you can end up killing someone. That inspection prevents you from being charged with homicide later. Inspection is a good thing even if some of the jackasses in the business are just that.
It doesn't matter if code explicitly states that something is permissible--if they don't personally understand it, it doesn't meet code. If they don't like the practice, it doesn't meet code.
As someone who does have experience with codes enforcement, I can tell you for a fact that in the US, if the code explicitly states something is permissible, it will be accepted by the inspector. City/County governments don't like to get sued any more than the rest of us do. If my city codes inspector failed my inspection because he 'didn't like the practice', I'd make 3 calls and it would be resolved; the city administrator, my alderman, and my attorney. In that order.
As far as the GP's assertion that if an engineer designed it, then it's good. That's bullshit too. Many jurisdictions base their codes on national standards, and the engineer needs to be familiar with the codes for the property in question. For example, if code says a 2x10 floor joist can span x feet. The engineer can't make the span x+1 and say "a little deflection is acceptable". It will fail inspection, builder will have to remedy the problem, and the person paying the bills is going to sue the engineer for the additional costs.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
As far as the GP's assertion that if an engineer designed it, then it's good. That's bullshit too. Many jurisdictions base their codes on national standards, and the engineer needs to be familiar with the codes for the property in question. For example, if code says a 2x10 floor joist can span x feet. The engineer can't make the span x+1 and say "a little deflection is acceptable". It will fail inspection, builder will have to remedy the problem, and the person paying the bills is going to sue the engineer for the additional costs.
Of course, you neglect to mention that any engineer who wants to keep his stamp won't actually use it on something he knows is against code. It's not just a ring you get when you graduate.
Here's an example from my part of the world.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?