Uber gets its preferred regimen.
The El Paso City Council approved an ordinance designed to ease regulations and fees on taxis and ride-sharing companies like Uber.
Amendments to the Transportation for Hire Ordinance, which Council approved unanimously on Tuesday, requires all businesses have an operating authority permit and drivers pass a background check. It will also do away with 26 fees and cut costs up to 95 percent.
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Other loosened regulations include no longer requiring drivers to have a medical certification and outdated two-way radios. City vehicle inspections will be eliminated and driver and vehicle permits will not be required. The age limit on vehicles has also been removed.
The newly-passed ordinance also requires companies to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles upon request. That means Uber would have to have an agreement with a cab company to pick up a client if they did not have a vehicle available.
See here for a preview of the vote, and this story from May about the direction El Paso took in redoing its rules. They basically took the approach of easing or removing regulations that had been in place for traditional cab companies rather than retrofitting existing rules to Uber. And yes, that means no fingerprint requirements, which as you can see from that first story is not what the cab companies wanted. As is their way, Uber had threatened to leave El Paso if the rules weren’t changed; their triumphant press release following this action congratulates them for becoming “the 13th Texas city to adopt modern ridesharings rules”. One presumes Lyft has an interest in this as well, but as of today they don’t operate in El Paso, so we’ll see if that changes.
Houston needs to abolish all limits on market entry for any vehicle for hire/so that everyone in the city isn’t forced to pay 28% additional in their taxi or uber rides ,giving Houstonians the ability to “hire their driver direct” (hello)Mayor Turner needs to remove the city away from any and all regulations other than safety,vehicle inspection is all ready done by the state of Texas (hello2).Houston still writes tickets for taxi drivers that wear shorts-but not uber.Turner needs to lead on the vehicle for hire issue not keep us 40 cities behind. And most importantly Sylvester Turner needs to stop taking hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from big taxi Texas man,Houston has 2400 taxi medallions and 2000 are owned by one man and let’s just say Turner is well aware of whathe’s doing -but I’m telling…..Houston has the most corrupt taxi medallion ownership in the world with one man owning more taxi medallions than the single highest owner in new York and Los Angeles combined.Turner has already allowed this issue to get away from him but he could help council members keep this horrible human labor violation off the professional records.