re: Austin, TX people: Is Uber/Lyft leaving your town?

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There we really no winners on either side of the debate. The ride share companies made it a "vote for us or we will kill these kittens" sorta mantra. If they positioned and advertised themselves as to why their background checks and proposed regulations trumped the Austin city council's proposal, I could have seen them winning. That's why I voted for their proposition. But from the get-go, they acted like man babies and the advertising was annoyingly relentless (robo-texts, emails, flyers, Facebook ads, etc.). Granted, the city council here comprise mostly of dumb, bleeding-heart, big-government liberals, but they didn't get a lot of local sympathy, even for the ones voting for them. If anythjng, this just opens up opportunities for other ride sharing apps to fill the void. They don't have the brand recognition of uber and lyft, but they can at least employ the drivers Uber and Lyft abandoned (which the whole reason they said they couldn't accept fingerprinting and permit fees was because they "cared" about their drivers).

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Yep, exactly. Our city council is a bunch of dumb communists, but Uber acted like strong-arm thugs.

Way, way to much advertising and general annoyance. Their paid canvassers even came up to us at a snow cone truck and started harassing us about it. I mean, relax. That kind of overkill turns people off.

They also started off on the wrong foot by beginning with and framing it as a "vote for us or we will kill these kittens" deal, just as you said. Their threat to pull out lost them a lot of votes just on the basis of people wanting to say "**** you, don't try to blackmail me". If they had just presented their case for the proposition on the issues instead of starting with a threat, they may well have won.

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I don't understand why people would vote against it.

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People don't like being threatened. That's what it boiled down to for my neighbors and people in the bar I was in yesterday. It was emotional, not logical. Uber went about it all wrong. If instead of putting a gun to Austin's head they had campaigned for Prop 1 on the basis of the virtue of their own background checks and the free market, they may well have won. But threatening to pull out while still doing business in Houston and New York when they have the same law just stuck in people's caws and voting against Prop 1 was their middle finger.

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There is a mentality for some people in Austin that is anti-growth. Basically, they want to turn back the clock to 1994 where austin was still bustling, but not a magnate for migration to the city.

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Back to the '70s, not even '94. The city council has sabotaged almost every highway plan since the '70s on the basis of "don't build it, and they won't come". It didn't work. "They" came anyway, and now the highway "system" is a disaster. You should look up the old '70s and '80s highway plans. There are .pdfs of them online. Sensible solutions that are badly needed today and would have made for a workable transit system instead of the anarchy we have now. You can also see how they managed to block it all. In many instances, what should have been a corridor for a major arterial road that's badly needed today is a nature preserve or something of that sort so that the road can't ever be built.

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Texas gives zero fricks about free markets

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The Uber/Lyft thing isn't a free market issue though.

Those two are flipping out over a better background check system, their operators having to have a sticker that identifies they are a ride share car, and not being allowed to stop in moving lanes of traffic. They can eat shite and are already being replaced by a competitor that has no problem with having some basic fricking safety for the passengers.

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What I see happening, and it's kinda already started, is that the city-center will shift North from Downtown, and the Northern 'burbs will continue to explode as more people move outside of Travis, but close enough to the Northen city-center (Domain area). The schools are better, taxes are better, and it's easier to get around.

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To give credence to your theory, just look at what is happening to Burnet north of 45th. That whole stretch from there to 183 used to be run down and crappy as hell, just as recently as like 5 years ago. Now it's full of new condo and highrise apartment buildings and trendy stores, restaurants, and bars galore. Now the Domain is expanding to include the Rock Rose district, which has a lot of the downtown and Rainey bars and restaurants, so the full spectrum of entertainment and shopping will exist up there.

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I know someone in NOLA that was rejected by Uber when a DUI from 2 years ago showed up on his record. He thought he could slide in under the radar and be approved. So Uber is checking records.

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It goes both ways with Uber. I know of a guy that drives in Austin that had a couple dwi's in a small county in Texas. He also has been to state jail for drug charges.

Somehow, Ubers background check didn't catch any of it. He was surprised when he made it thru the process. I gotta believe if he was finger printed his previous charges would show up.

This guy is reformed and doing well, but if Uber didn't catch his past, how do they catch others?

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I'm still surprised Uber and Lyft made the child like decision to take the ball and go home because they didn't win.

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That's what I've been saying. I get they don't agree with it, but act like a professional organization, and not like a bunch of petulant children.

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That's what I've been saying. I get they don't agree with it, but act like a professional organization, and not like a bunch of petulant children.

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for reference sakes, I'm both a Lyft AND Uber driver. . .

the rideshare companies' argument is that this will severely hamper their recruiting efforts of new drivers, which I kinda agree with. it's about the long term effects.

I know that Lyft's background checking is pretty stringent. you have to have a pretty clean background, or you can't drive on their platform. Uber is a very cutthroat company, and wants to flood the roads with their cars, and therefore doesn't have as thorough of a screening process for applicants. I don't think they deliberately allow criminals/shady people to drive, it's just that they may not be as stringent as Lyft, as well as the volume of applicants for Uber is crazy high, which makes it difficult for them to vet properly

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Do all the regulations on taxis even do anything other than line government coffers?

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this is why we can't have nice things.

Are uber drivers required to have the same license as a taxi driver? If not why?