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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

"Uber and Lyft may have left town, but the city of Austin seems to be doing just fine without them."

Wow, so all these people on Facebook are giving the fingerprints and background checks that Austin now legally requires of all community sourced taxi services?

Or ... are they not doing that, and also not paying taxes or subject to any regulation at all, unlike Uber and Lyft?

Austin's goal in the law was to put controls and regulation on this industry. The result is trumpeted by this article as a success for that intent. However, it seems that what has actually been created due to the city's creating a void in needed services is a totally underground black market system with no accountability whatsoever. Reasonable observers might note this to be a step away from regulation and control.

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> Austin's goal in the law was to put controls and regulation on this industry.

I'm pretty sure Austin's goal was to protect the taxi magnates by putting their competition out of business.

> However, it seems that what has actually been created due to the city's creating a void in needed services is a totally underground black market system with no accountability whatsoever.

That's not actually bad when one considers the real purpose of the law: the taxi magnates get to keep their price floor, and they get to watch the police power of the State exercised against their underground competitors.

It's easy to comply with the requirement, so I don't see how this requirement was meant to protect the incumbent taxi services. In other words, it's not that much of a burden. They could comply and they could continue to decimate the incumbents --but the new services, the taxi platform services see this as a stand they must take to control costs (and don't want other jurisdictions getting the same ideas) I believe that is all it is.

>>I'm pretty sure Austin's goal was to protect the taxi magnates by putting their competition out of business.

This is pure nonsense. The fingerprint requirements are nothing new. Taxi companies have been following them for years. Uber and Lyft simply did not think they should be treated as taxi services, and threw a hissy fit when the City of Austin decided otherwise.

Furthermore, Uber and Lyft were not "put out of business." In fact, they continued to operate in Austin for two years after the law was passed. They left only when they failed to repeal the law. Also keep in mind they spent over $8 million on the public relations and lobbying campaign to get the law repealed. So yeah, make no mistake: they have plenty of money, and the only reason they left was as a way of saying "fuck you" to Austin.

That doesn't really make sense, and is an inaccurate representation of what happened and why. I wasn't in Austin while this was going down, but I know a lot of folks involved in city government (and I have more harsh words to say about the city's government than most people in many areas).

Uber/Lyft is who wanted special treatment; not the other way around. Every company/individual that sells rides in Austin follows roughly the same rules (with some tweaks to suit the mode of transit): cabs, electric cabs, pedicabs, etc. They all do the same background check and fingerprinting process.

Uber/Lyft wanted to do their own thing. The city said, no, you're going to have to do it the same way all of your competitors do it. Uber/Lyft spent nearly $10 million dollars (enough to pay for hundreds of thousands of fingerprint background checks, probably a decade worth of drivers) to do an end run around city council with a ballot proposition to not be subject to the same rules as their competitors. That proposition failed; badly.

Uber/Lyft left in a huff because they would not receive special treatment.

It is a remarkable act of rewriting history to claim that Uber/Lyft are being stifled by cab companies when they're only being asked to do what even the bicycle pedicab drivers do.

If they wanted a level playing field without those requirements (i.e. cabs, e-cabs, and pedicabs, would have also been exempt from that process and instead could use a private background check instead of the city process), I might have been on their side...and, so would the pedicabbers, e-cabbers, and probably the rest of Austin. What I saw was some spoiled brats at the helm of billion dollar valuation companies trying to get special treatment and throwing a tantrum when they didn't get it.

Also: The background check that Uber/Lyft claims prevents them from being able to operate at all in Austin costs about $40. And, both companies operate in other places that require similar processes (and every other company that provides rides in Austin does the same).

They're acting like entitled spoiled brats.

Uber/Lyft's central idea is that a marketplace system with per-driver reviews delivers a better experience than the traditional government licensing model, in factors like price, safety, and user experience.

Their whole business model relies on minimum government regulation, so fingerprinting to them is the first steps towards the end of their business model. It's an existential threat to them, I don't blame them for trying to nip this at the bud.

That's a slippery slope argument, which is generally considered a fallacy.

Uhh... yes, it's a fallacy to claim that just because A necessarily precedes B, realizing A will lead to B. But if A usually precedes B, not realizing A may prevent B.

This isn't new either. A month ago HN was generally supporting Apple's fight against the FBI. Apple recently spent a bunch of money fighting a seemingly uninteresting case of an old iOS version belonging to a known mass murderer: to prevent the "slippery slope" of the FBI using this tactic in more places.

It wasn't certain that the FBI would do this, but there was plenty of evidence that the FBI would have liked to, given the opportunity.

Pretty sure there's a fallacy about making analogies to things that are not analogous. The city of Austin is not the FBI. The voters of Austin made this decision; first through their elected representatives, and then through a ballot measure. There is nothing comparable about the FBI vs. privacy/encryption and the situation we are discussing. No secretive agencies or courts were involved. It is not a constitutional matter, at all.

And, if we really were calling slippery slope a valid argument, rather than the fallacy that it so often is: Austin's legal requirements for providing rides have been decreasing over the past decade, both in complexity and in cost of compliance. It's just not very slopey or slippery, as it has been trending in the opposite direction of what your slippery slope argument suggests would happen. I'm sure there's still room for improvement and simplification, but if the stoners I know who pedicab can figure it out, I'm confident the bright young lads who run Uber and Lyft can, too.

> Pretty sure there's a fallacy about making analogies to things that are not analogous

I hope there's a fallacy for superficially pointing out fallacies without actually examining the argument.

I brought up an example of a case which could have been argued away with the slippery slope fallacy, where many believed that Apple did the right thing (maybe even yourself), so it's plausible that Uber might too.

I could have drawn other slippery slope examples too. Like:

Just because I smoke doesn't mean I will get lung cancer. But if I don't want lung cancer, I shouldn't start smoking.

Boom: big slippery slope fallacy, and I might even get lung cancer without smoking. But reality is statistical, and not smoking is a smart cancer reduction strategy.

Back to Uber: Their concern is probably not that Austin will start cracking down further, but that other cities will as well. Uber doesn't give a shit about Austin. They have a billion dollar transportation market to go after, and if that means cutting off Austin (population 900k) to save the rest of it, it would be a wise choice.

> if the stoners I know who pedicab can figure it out, I'm confident the bright young lads who run Uber and Lyft can, too.

Uber is playing for the world, not Austin Texas. You may think that Uber is being entitled by asking for special treatment, but in Uber's mind, they probably see Austin as being entitled for enforcing these laws while other cities don't.

Only time will tell if they win and Austin capitulates due to public outcry or if Austin does well without ridesharing and the legislation crackdown happens elsewhere as cities learn they don't have to fear the backlash.

The companies that are trying to fill the void are following the rules. That facebook group is working outside of the law; some of the rides are probably illegal, and if it continues for long, it'll likely get cracked down on a bit.

Before rules were formalized for pedicabs and for electric cabs (which happened at different points in Austin history), the drivers worked for "donations" to avoid some of the legal trouble of selling rides without being licensed to do so. So, it's likely that the "donation-based" rides are skirting the law (though riding pretty close to the edge of it, and the e-cab company had a variety of run-ins with the city over that while they were sorting out the legality of the thing). The ones with a set price probably aren't legal, at all.

I know the fellow who owns the electric cab company in Austin, and I know a lot of pedicabbers. Those folks pushed the barriers to entry way down over the years, to the benefit of everybody wanting to offer ride services in Austin. The process is so much less onerous now than it was a decade ago, and, most importantly, it almost entirely stopped favoring traditional cabs a couple years ago. Everyone has cooked up a silly conspiracy theory where the taxi companies wield tremendous influence over city council; with the new 10-1 city council that's an absurd suggestion (Austin effectively ousted its entire city council and started over from scratch a couple years ago, with district-based council membership...it'd be pretty difficult to buy the current city council). I don't even believe it was a valid criticism of the old city council (I had many nasty things to say about the old city council, but being corrupt generally wasn't one of them).

The TNC debate has pushed the barrier to entry down a little further, and that's a good thing in a city with very poor mass transit. But, and this is a big but: We really need to acknowledge that Uber/Lyft were not asking for equal treatment to cabs; they wanted special treatment that would make it harder for cabs, pedicabs, and e-cabs, to compete with them (because they would all be subject to the old rules, and only TNCs would be exempt).

Or this could be a temporary market gap while companies are both building tech to replace uber/lyft, and/or waiting to see if uber/lyft fold.

My bet is in a year, if uber/lyft stay out of Austin, there will be a local replacement that obeys the laws that Austin decided on.

I don't think the fingerprinting requirements have taken effect yet. Uber and Lyft just chose to leave as soon as they lost the vote to stop them because they thought it'd give them more leverage.

They have taken effect, it's just that the city has decided to not enforce them.

City has said that it won't start enforcing until August (though technically could start enforcing as of May 1), and at that point only 50% of drivers need to be fingerprinted. Here's the original vote: http://kxan.com/2015/12/17/mayor-offers-11th-hour-compromise...

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