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i moved my family to austin in 2000. the population since we got here has doubled. austin has, for the size of the city, oneof the most mediocre transit systems in america. traditionally, regulation has been put inplace for all the best of intentions. i’ve been a council member since januaryof 2015. my concern was getting in and saying, look,let's get some technical solutions to fixing the traffic congestion. it's meant to lower prices or offer us morechoices or provide higher quality goods or solve information problems.

but instead the new city council chose tofocus on uber and lyft. when uber and lyft first came around, thelaws were written for the taxis. the results of regulating in the transportationfield or the lodging field for example has not been particularly good, and they’vebeen the two most ripe sectors for disruption. i think government definitely has a role. i think it's state and local governments that reallyhave to think about this. this newer model had not been envisioned,was not planned for, and so uber and lyft when they began had to operate either in agray area or in some cases just flagrantly against the law.

extra background checks and a city fee; 23,000austinites signed an uber petition against these proposed regulations for the ridesharingservice. but right now an austin mobility committeeis discussing those proposed policies. the chairman of the mobility committee isa city council member by the name of ann kitchen. she came up with an ordinance saying thatfingerprinting should be mandated and then there were some other details, but in essence,it was a question of fingerprinting. and from the time that she introduced it,she argued that this was a public safety issue. the fingerprints are an identifier, it’sa biometric identifier, and our public safety experts tell us that it is the best way tomake sure that you’re checking the background

of the person that they’re who they saythey are. the problem here is that uber has its ownproprietary background check process, and it seems to be working. we are in many ways much, much, much saferin that environment than we are in a traditional taxicab. the director of transportation in the cityof austin recommended that the city adopt the background check that uber and lyft employ,and it should be extended across the board to include austin taxicabs. you go down and you hail a cab, it picks youup and drops you off somewhere, nobody knows

when you’ve picked up, when you’ve beendropped off, where you’re going, and if you ever get there. compare that to say uber. i’ve done about maybe 250, 275 rides sincei’ve started, and i would say a majority of the time i feel safe. there’ve been like two instances where iwas kind of like, oh what’s going on here this is what people warned me about. um. ha.

if you’ve read the regulation you’ll recognizethat what they tried to do is they tried to impose taxi franchise regulations onto rideshare. it's not just about the fingerprint backgroundchecks, it was also a fire extinguisher in the back of your car. the danger of applying yesterday's regulationsto today's high-speed technologies is that you could ultimately slow down what are someof the most innovative and pro-consumer innovations that we know today. think of all the amazing things that wouldn’tcome to pass if every time something new came along that disrupted somebody’s job we stoppedit.

tncs are very important part of a ground transportationbecause they’re an option. we are not talking about shutting down tncs. that is misinformation. you would think that the regulations are thereto protect the consumers, to make your ride, in fact, pleasant, but really they serve amuch different purpose and that is protecting the existing taxicab companies from continuedcompetition. regulation set up this nightmare, and essentiallytechnology has now allowed us to change the situation by allowing us to do an end runaround the old regulatory regime. i like to call that technological civil disobedience.

the idea that there's no regulation goingon in the shared economy just because the government doesn’t happen to be regulatingit is mistaken; there is plenty of regulation going on. it's market regulation. first of all, that is a kind of misnomer. i mean regulation really should sit with anoutside entity that doesn’t have an incentive in the process. when you take an uber ride, for example, youare asked at the end of the ride to rate your driver on a scale of one to five stars, andif you rate a driver three stars or less,

you will immediately get an email from uberasking what the problem was. there’s been studies that found that ifyou ride in a cab with a person of the same race or an uber or a lyft car with a personof the same race, you are much more likely to give them a higher rating. so there’s definitely biases in the ratingsystem and that alone or other similar models like that aren’t enough to regulate. within days, you had a grassroots movementto petition the city to protest the vote. uber and lyft said you know we're not goingto tolerate this ordinance, and they went out and collected 65,000 signatures on a petitionto have an alternative ordinance adopted that

would have retained a lot of these regulationsbut would have eliminated the requirement of fingerprinting for ridesharing drivers. leaving fingerprinting in place for taxi driversand pedicab driver and other drivers. within two weeks, they had blown through thegreatest number of signatures for putting something on the ballot in the history ofaustin, and they set the date for the election in may. i know that the council deliberately, deliberatelyframed the ballot language of prop 1 to get people to vote against it. saturday is austin’s election on the futureof ridesharing in austin, and if the voters

don’t go their way, lyft and uber have saidthey will leave the city. the rideshare people thought that they hadto spend millions of dollars educating people because the ballot language was faulty. you couldn’t listen to the radio withoutlistening to pro-prop 1 ads; you couldn’t watch tv without pro-prop 1 ads, full pageads in the newspapers, multiple mail pieces every day. so vote for prop 1. keep ridesharing in austin. good luck.

i actually had some of my friends that endedup voting against it because they were so angry that the amount of money that’s beingspent. they got suspicious. somebody’s trying to buy my vote, and theyvoted against it. proposition 1 which would have kept currentrules for ridesharing drivers in place failed. uber and lyft are no more in austin. they closed up shop in the city this morning. so our absolute first priority is to helpthe drivers sign up for other companies and get that, get that pool going.

the reason they ultimately passed it was becauseof progressive political ideology, which says that it’s the government, the federal government,state government, local government, it's government that is your best chance for safety, for prosperity,for whatever it might be. local government should not be in a positionof protecting a particular industry or a particular class of jobs per se. what they should be in the position of doingis providing a framework for individuals to compete and provide the best service possibleto consumers. in a well-functioning economy, industriesare services that are no longer desired or no longer producing what people want efficientlythey go by the wayside.

we should want that to happen. and it's giving us more choices, more competition,better prices, and yet we don’t see the harms that were alleged to be developing ifwe didn’t regulate it. whether it is the internet, ridesharing, oryou name it, people think that there has to be regulation there or else there will bechaos, and that’s simply not true. so the profit incentive works fantastic forthe majority of consumers, but if you're one of a small number of minority consumers, let'ssay, or disabled, there’s not much of a, of a profit incentive for uber to go rehaulthe entire app unless there’s some kind of outcry for it or some government pressureor some other kind of other external pressure.

don’t start with the worst case scenarioand try to regulate to solve it. instead, see how far self-regulation can takeyou. i'm very skeptical of anybody seeking specialprivileges or exemptions from a regulatory scheme, and the fingerprinting, in particular,didn’t seem like, somehow, the ride-sharing should not have to submit to that. we all do it. nurses do it. cab drivers do it. real estate agents do it.

all of us do it, okay? we will not allow a company to come in hereand say: “we're gonna set the rules for the city.” by having the consistent application of rules,whatever they are, to everybody, that if the rule was a bad rule, if it made no sense,if it was costly, burdensome, then the more widely that rule is applied, the more likelyit is that people would recognize the imprudence of the rule and repeal it or revise it. some say, well, we need to level the playingfield by regulating everyone up to be the same as the old players.

the better solution is to, instead, liberalizedown or deregulate down in the direction of the emerging technologies that are essentiallyborn free as opposed to being born in regulatory captivity. why don’t we offer deregulation to the taxicompanies and allow them to respond to market forces? it doesn't make sense that you need to changewhat's not broke. you don't fix what's broke. you leave it alone. but the taxi company said no, no they didn’twant anything to do with deregulation.

they wanted to impose these onerous restrictionon to the new rideshare model, knowing that would hurt their business model more thanit hurts the taxis. the purpose of regulation is not taxicab welfareor hotel welfare; it’s consumer welfare. i think in the aftermath of the prop 1 defeat,there’s a lot more regret than there is crowing about how we beat uber and lyft. we are one of the few cities in the entirecountry, i should say one of the few major cities in the entire country, where peopledo not have access to uber and lyft, and i think that has been clearly to the detrimentof the people of austin. austin is growing.

austin is becoming a bigger and bigger city. they can't stop that, but it’s like they’retrying to keep austin small. overnight 10,000 people were out of a jobbecause the city and these companies didn’t get along. you have mayor steve adler on one side tryingto find a solution to bring uber and lyft back into operation in the city of austin. on the other side, you have council memberann kitchen who says that she is not budging one bit on the rules to get fingerprinteddrivers behind the wheel only. people have just been forced to get used toit.

they’re still unhappy, but my guess is thatuber and lyft are not gonna come back until they get what they want. the fact of the matter is that there are verystrong arguments that can be made against the fingerprinting background check process. and this is all much ado about nothing. as we often hear, this is, in fact, the classicsolution in search of a problem. i don’t have any problems with a new industrydisplacing an older one that just doesn’t seem to be working, for instance, the taxicabindustry. but at the same time, i also see the needfor more regulation, a simple background check

is really not too onerous. the problem is we've already been down thispath and tried that sort of regulatory approach for other technologies and sectors, and itultimately led to less competition, less innovation, less choice, higher prices. it’s gonna take a big event, maybe a southby southwest, for austin to really get angry about this, and that hasn’t happened yet,but it is a desert. it is currently a transit desert.