Getting There: How moves might affect Lyft, Uber
Funny how this whole Uber and Lyft issue has played out over the past year and a half.
Back in the summer of 2014, the transportation network companies’ position was basically, “We’re coming to Austin to do what we do, no matter what your dang city rules say.” Which they did, brazenly flouting city regulations and absorbing whatever fines befell their drivers.
Now, with rules in place that they largely dictated to the previous City Council, but confronted with a new council looking to tighten them, the implied message is, “Impose regulations we don’t like, and we might just up and leave Austin.” They did so earlier this year in San Antonio, though both have hammered out a compromise to return.
And apparently all of this is because of the newest in-vogue buzzword at Austin City Hall: friction.
Friction is a good thing if you’re trying to stop something, like a car (or perhaps a runaway business innovation). But for Uber, Lyft and their use of freelancers to provide rides to strangers, friction is very, very bad.
And fingerprint background checks, we are told, cause friction.
When all this app-based, ride-hailing stuff began about three years ago, the companies dubbed their business “ride sharing,” fostering the homey idea that it was only people helping people. Really, just carpooling. Except that the driver would get paid, and a company that did the matchmaking electronically would pocket 20 percent of the transaction.
At the time, I took pains (as did others) to point out that, no, that is nothing like carpooling and a whole lot like cabbing, only with a different, high-tech linkage between cabbie and customer.
But as time has gone on, I’m seeing that the secret of Uber and Lyft’s undeniable success is in fact the difference between them and traditional cab companies. Such as seeing the face of the driver on your phone before he or she shows up, having information about their car and past ratings with other customers, and the ability to track the vehicle as it approaches. Such as the gen-
erally congenial interaction with drivers who might be driving only as a sideline and for only a few hours a week.
Such as the short interval (most often) before the (mostly clean) vehicle shows up. Such as the cashless transaction.
Such as the lack of friction, in other words, in the ride itself.
But to Uber and Lyft, all of that depends on having a very large stable of drivers on the street at all times, which keeps those waiting times short. And that, it appears, is at the heart of the companies’ implacable resistance to fingerprint-based background checks.
To become a cabbie in Austin, you have to have a chauffeur’s license, something that requires having your fingerprints taken. Then the city runs those prints through Department of Public Safety and FBI databases, turning up any arrests and most convictions of crimes. If that check turns up any of a variety of convictions — including driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, fraud, sexual offenses, acts of violence — then the license is denied.
The advantage of such checks is that with fingerprints, it is almost a 100 percent certainty that the person applying for the license can be definitively identified and thus accurately checked for a criminal background. The disadvantage is that having your fingerprints taken requires going some place to do it, and it raises the possibility that someone might be disqualified for an incident that led to an arrest but not a conviction. Such prospective drivers might have to produce evidence of their innocence, or at least of an unsuccessful prosecution.
Which amounts to friction, some expenditure of time and trouble to be cleared for driving.
With Uber and Lyft on the other hand, an applicant driver simply provides a Social Security number, driver’s license number and a few other identifiers, and the companies conduct what is called a name-based background check. That includes, company reps say, an online public records check and having a third-party investigative company go to the courthouse in every county where the person has lived to check for criminal entanglements.
But the applicants have done none of this legwork, other than providing those basic identifiers online. Then either they pass, or they don’t. No friction, in other words, and, the companies say, a much larger pool of independent contractors driving for them.
However, city officials say, the problem is that applicant Joe Jones might in reality be Mugsy McThuggin, possessor not only of a dangerous rap sheet but also expertly forged paperwork with the Jones moniker. That raises the possibility that Jones/McThuggin could pass the check, and then later hurt a passenger in his car. Versions of this have happened in the still short history of transportation network companies.
People have been hurt in cabs as well, of course. A fingerprint background check is no guarantor of perfect safety.
At this point, with a month to six weeks before the City Council finalizes its new regulations, it appears that a solid council majority supports requiring the fingerprint checks.
Mayor Steve Adler even suggested that the city require both, reasoning that if the namebased checks are as rigorous as Uber and Lyft say, then a combo might mean an even lower chance of mayhem.
But as the experience so far with ride-hailing as shown, having the votes on council for something isn’t necessarily the end of the story.
What those companies have is leverage in the form of tens of thousands of satisfied customers and, particularly in the case of Uber, a heaping helping of corporate chutzpah.
Impose fingerprint checks, and the companies just might leave. This could get interesting.