All eight of the ride-hailing companies operating in Austin met a city requirement to have at least half of the rides they provided in July come from drivers who passed fingerprint-based background checks, according to a city memo released this week.
Achieving that Aug. 1 benchmark — the first major regulatory milestone since the Proposition 1 election in May — shows how quickly the smaller competitors built their networks of drivers, even with the fingerprinting checks and other requirements that prompted Uber and Lyft to leave Austin.
Taken as a group, the smaller companies provided more than 350,000 trips in July, almost 11,300 a day, during what would normally be a slack period because enrollment is light at area colleges during the summer.
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The city since January has received 3,771 fingerprint-based, criminal background reports on potential ride-hailing service drivers, according to the memo from Austin Transportation Department Director Robert Spillar to the Austin City Council.
All of those, including those whose checks occurred earlier in the year, were vetted against a list of disqualifying criminal offenses set out in a June 2016 ordinance, Austin Transportation Department spokeswoman Cheyenne Krause said. Of those applicants, 86 were rejected for failing their background checks.
The companies, most of which still have some drivers working for them who haven’t been fingerprinted, reported having 8,985 drivers. However, the memo says, individual drivers might be counted two times or more in that total because many of them work for more than one of the eight companies: Fare, Fasten, GetMe, InstaRyde, RideAustin, Tride, Wingz and Z-Trip.
The companies, by city ordinance, had to by Aug. 1 have at least 50 percent of their rides for the preceding month provided by a city rules-compliant driver, either as a percentage of hours driven or miles driven. According to the memo, using information supplied by the companies, Wingz and Z-Trip were at 100 percent. RideAustin was next, at 89 percent, followed in order by InstaRyde (86 percent), Tride (73 percent), Fare (69 percent), Fasten (58 percent) and GetMe (55 percent).
It gets harder from here – by next February, 99% of hours driven or miles driven must be provided by compliant drivers. I suspect the city may wind up being a bit lenient on that, if the companies lag and it makes sense for them to do so, but we’ll see. Point is, the companies that are in Austin post-Prop 1 have cleared the first hurdle. Was that so hard? You tell me.
The only question here is ,when is Sylvester turner going to make taxis open entry like the rest of the country so everyone doesn’t have to keep paying right to labor fee’s?????
Turner fumbles at todays taxi address about ending taxi medallions, how much money did he take????????when will the chron let people know how bad their being ripped off???