Like the taxi dispatch that drives us gaga, it took ages to arrive.
Like the cabbie we disdain, it isn’t clear on which direction it needs to travel.
Like the vehicle that is unkempt and creaky, it needs service before the rubber hits the road.
So describes last week’s Uber/Lyft announcement, the putative ride-sharing “framework” from the BC Liberals – more skeletal than substantial, a bit of campaign millennial click bait that creates almost as many puzzles for municipalities and the industry as it addresses.
The momentary headline-
hogging distraction from the Liberals’ campaign financing ruckus is a bit like my cooking at times: late to get in the oven, half-baked when it gets served up, generally with a heart in the right place.
But as Jean Chrétien used to muse when he surmised a mess without a solution at hand: we have work to do.
Among the many quandaries outstanding for the provincial government is the treatment of the incumbent business so as not to engender political combustion.
The decision courts youth like none other. But it is a large risk to believe there are more votes to be gained from a younger generation than lost from an older one May 9.
While the taxi industry’s reflexive apoplexy had the feel of professional wrestling’s staged outrage – surely the announcement was no surprise – it isn’t anything but agony to realize the day of reckoning has come for one’s professional pursuit. (Seen this movie – been part of it – in media.)
The curious part of the strategy isn’t the introduction of ride sharing, but the generative – and not terribly generous – directive to the incumbents.
The government did well to propose public safety measures to license drivers and push services like Uber and Lyft into a sensible regulatory regime. They’re doing the reassuring best they can in that regard.
Before you can set off fireworks, you have to learn to play carefully with matches.
What ministers Peter Fassbender and Todd Stone outlined last week seems to advocate unlimited licences, dreadful and devastating economic news for anyone in Vancouver or elsewhere who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars for one in a restrictive environment.
This felt acutely like Liberal payback for how the City of Vancouver has treated the province in general and gouged the taxi business for its plates in particular.
But the commitment to shatter the traditional pickup and drop-off boundaries – basically the building block of the business model – seems like the launch of a cab-eat-cab culture. You have to think that by the time ride sharing is introduced later this year, the Liberals will be more than laissez-faire, unless we want even more brawls on Granville Street late Saturday night.
How the province and municipalities help the plate-holders and drivers adapt will be telling, because a taxi is at times as much of a public service as a business, particularly for our elderly and those with disabilities. That being said, the public mood for a form of corporate welfare is hardly compassionate when one’s personal welfare seems at times so uncertain.
The initial gestures of $1 million for a better smartphone app and $3.5 million for fender-bender avoidance technology are rather baffling. But the plan to create a new insurance tier for taxis will be an interesting innovation.
The manoeuvre – a promise without every detail in place and without legislation unless there is re-election – has a familiar feel. The budget’s reduction in Medical Services Plan premiums was in the same pledge-now, deliver-later boat. In the MSP case, it took the steam out of the NDP. In the ride-sharing case, it isolated them as a defender of the status quo – awkward for the self- proclaimed progressive party.
Well played on both accounts on the surface.
But if the Liberals do not make clear their empathy for the taxi business in the coming weeks, their insensitivity will make certain sensitive ridings in Surrey and Vancouver susceptible. Sorry, there is no app for that. •
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
