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Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

What do you define as a significant issue?

Something tells me you may not fully informed regarding Uber driver incidents that include murder, sexual assaults, kidnapping, fatal crashes, etc...

http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/rideshare-incidents

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I feel like I'd need to compare that to incidents with taxis and similar industries to be able to determine the significance. Then I'd need to see if any of the regulations allegedly being skirted would actually impact them.

Also, that site is literally a creation of the taxi lobby [1].

[1] http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/about

Well then you should probably go do that.

This was known to all cities prior to Uber. In Toronto, we had incidents where taxi drivers and customers were attacked in taxis.

Regulations were implemented and each taxi driver was licensed by the city. They had a picture of the driver in the vehicle. There is an emergency light in the back in case of alarm the driver can pull which allows another person to call 911.

There are many regulations that Uber is bypassing. It's a great idea, except the taxi service should not be based on the lowest cost, it should be based on safety. This is the one place you need regulations or strict standards.

Our taxi's weren't allowed on the road if they were over 5~years old, now that is changing again.

We are going backwards..

With Uber, you already get a picture of the driver, along with the plate number, make, and model of the car. You also already necessarily have a device capable of calling 911 by using Uber (your own phone).

This whole idea that Toronto (or London, or Quebec) is the only place in the world with the unique insight to regulate ride sharing services with their own unique snowflake policies needs to be dispelled. Many of these regulations (including the ones you're citing) clearly are relics of the past that don't reasonably apply to these services.

Residents of Toronto won't be able to move forward by clinging to the entrenched status quo out of misplaced beliefs that their regulations are future-proof, infallible, or provide any significant amount of additional safety to riders.

"You also already necessarily have a device capable of calling 911 by using Uber (your own phone)."

Because there is absolutely no way that calling 911 on the person sitting next to you and in control of a 2 ton vehicle is going to end badly. Nope.

I guess it just seems odd how taxis have existed safely in the other 99.9999% of the world without such a requirement.

At some point it's more about protectionism than safety. This is yet another example.

It's only protectionism if the existing taxi companies didn't have to do it. In fact, if Uber doesn't, but the taxi companies do, that's also protectionism, but for Uber.

Wouldn't Uber still be safer overall for passengers when it comes to intentional crimes (not accidents)? In Uber, a driver may commit a crime, but the nature of requesting a ride means there's now a direct link between a victim and the identity of a driver. A driver could only commit a crime one time before his identity became known, so there's no way to have a serial offender.

Compared to hailing a taxi, police can't necessarily trace a victim back to a specific driver, so that person could theoretically commit repeated crimes.

This personally gives me a lot more confidence when it comes to putting trust in a driver.

Also, from a cursory glance over that link, a few of those appear to be misleading headlines in which the actual story is "a person, who happens to be an Uber driver, committed a crime".

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