Texas Legislature Clears Road For Uber and Lyft To Return To Austin (austinmonitor.com)

schwit1 shared this article from the Austin Monitor: The Texas Legislature has cleared the road for Uber and Lyft to return to Austin on their own terms. On Wednesday, the state Senate overwhelmingly approved House Bill 100 on second and third readings, sending the statewide ride-hailing regulations to Governor Greg Abbott's desk for his signature. If Abbott signs it, as he is expected to do, the new law will preempt regulations City Council passed in December 2015 that both Uber and Lyft deemed too restrictive on transportation network companies such as themselves.
The new rules still require criminal background checks, but drop the requirement for fingerprinting. "We find it unfortunate that the 36 lobbyists deployed by the Silicon Valley giants were effective in convincing the State Legislature that there was a need to overrule the Austin voters," said a local ride-sharing company, which vowed to continue operating -- and to at least continue fingerprinting their own drivers. Houston's mayor complained the new statewide rules handed down are "another example of the legislature circumventing local control to allow corporations to profit at the expense of public safety."

Comments

Small government republicans win again!

[mrmaster]

It's quite frustrating to read, multiple times, how state government continues to override local municipalities. Another instance is in regards to city fracking ordinances. It's also worrisome that Texas has done nothing to reduce the bribes...sorry..I meant to say campaign contributions and the conflicts of interests that exist in the state senate. God, I just sent can't get enough of small government!

Re:Small government republicans win again!

[Koby77]

With state law versus the federal government, the constitution enumerates certain states rights. That is, they defined the things for which the federal government controls, and left other issues to be decided for the states themselves. Not necessarily so with city rights. It is not the place of cities to carve out their own little fiefdoms for which large-scale projects such as the internet, energy projects, or mass transit, are things to which everyone else must be subservient. Cities are there to provide local services, such as police, fire, garbage collection, and perhaps some road repairs. When individual cities start stomping on the rights of state citizens, then it is well within the scope of the state to step in and restore those rights.

Re:taxi robbery

[SumDog]

> Uber might have its flaws

Have you been reading Slashdot? Every week there's a story about Uber. We know their work environment is over-competitive and toxic. They have a "Hell" map that uses fake accounts to show all rival ride-share driver locations (including Lyft and taxi companies with their own apps), several high ranking Uber staff have left this year, two women have written posts about sexual harassment, information about Greyball shows how they used tech to get around fines from local laws, Google is suing them for stealing self-driving tech ...

Uber is terrible, their wages for drivers drop every year, they have a toxic business structure and yet no one seems to give a shit and still uses them with the "Uber might have its flaws" bullshit argument.

Fuck Uber