Break the taxi cartel
On Monday morning, the streets around Toronto’s City Hall were turned into parking lots. Hundreds of taxis gathered across a handful of city blocks to protest Uber, the smartphone-based ride-sharing service, which they say is operating at an unfair advantage. At the same time, Justice Sean Dunphy of the Ontario Superior Court began hearing the first of two days of arguments in the City of Toronto’s request for a permanent injunction to shut down all of Uber’s operations.
The irony of this taxi protest, and the one in Toronto two weeks ago, and the recent one in Montreal, is that with cabs preoccupied with choking downtown major routes, busy commuters were forced to seek out alternate means — Uber, say — to get where they were going. This is the last thing taxi drivers should be encouraging, if only indirectly; when people try Uber, they tend to like Uber, simply because it’s faster, easier and often cheaper than conventional taxi services. These recurring protests aren’t helping the public image of the old cartel, either, which means that even if the court rules in the city’s favour, much of the public will still be on Uber’s side.
Furthermore, the decision to grant an injunction (which will almost certainly be appealed) won’t remedy the fact that Toronto’s archaic taxi regulations are badly in need of updating. The city should not be capping the number of taxi licences, which just artificially inflates the value of plates while supply struggles to keep up with demand, or mandating that limos set minimum fares or keep a certain stretch-to-sedan fleet ratio. Taxi drivers have a legitimate gripe in contesting that they city requires they adhere to strict licensing and safety standards, while Uber drivers operate by the company’s own rules. But the solution is not to ban Uber across Toronto and other Canadian municipalities; the solution is to finally take a torch to the old, outdated taxi rules.
That is not to suggest cities should adopt a “Wild West” approach to taxi licensing. Indeed, while Uber says it has its own policy of monitoring driver and vehicle performance, the odd incident has been known to occur, as has obviously occurred with conventional taxis in the past. The solution, thus, lies somewhere between the status quo and a free-for-all, wherein the city has some oversight in terms of safety and insurance, but at a suitable distance such that the market itself decides which cars (and drivers) to keep on the road. It’s not totally taxi anarchy, but it’s not the heavy bureaucratic hand to which the industry has grown accustomed, either. The sooner that change happens, the better: people have places to go, and downtown’s in a jam.
For traditional cab companies, the problem is this: when people try Uber, they tend to like it