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Bill Worsham's avatar

Austin (TX) city council tried jacking with rideshare companies shortly after they entered the Austin market ten years ago, prodded by the (then politically relevant) taxi cartel. The cartel tried imposing various “safety” regs on the vetting of drivers (fingerprinting, etc) to hamstring them. I remember there was already data showing a drop in drunk driving fatalities exactly correlated with the arrival of ridesharing (and a lack of mass driver assaults of passengers). The companies pulled out.

I don’t even remember how the impasse was resolved but suffice to say Uber and Lyft returned minus the petty regs.

A humorous if not tragic anecdote from that time—savvy locals and visitors wanting to get to central Austin would book rides to addresses in the incorporated community of Rollingwood just across the river. Drivers knew the drill and would still drop them off downtown. Reverse the process for the other side of the trip. The tragic irony was the reason enclaves like Rollingwood and Westlake Hills even existed as downtown-adjacent incorporated entities to make this possible was as past defenses against predatory annexation by Austin and for parents to relocate to the adjacent independent school district to avoid forced busing (that is, to avoid the mandated hour-a-day cross-town busing of their school children to distant campuses in the name of school integration, not the actual integration) back in the day.

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Uncle Stanky's avatar

Progressives see the economy as one big scam. Their intent is to find money and figure out a scam to get some for themselves and for their allies.

Progressives see Amazon as a scam. They see rent and home builders as as a scam. They even see the grocery store as a scam. And they sure as hell see their employer as a scam.

Progressives don't care if the policy harms the business or consumers. Their only interest in the business is to extort money and the business serves no other purpose anyway.

That said, Uber and Lyft should just raise their price and see what happens.

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