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Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

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Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#61

Post by twoodfin »

subroutine wrote: post #46

ITT there seems to be a lot of sentiment that city/county local governments shouldn't be able to implement policy on anything but the most trivial matters. As if politicians and corporations residing in other cities are better suited to make impactful local policy. I dont get it... Then again I am still scathing from a similar case study in my home town of San Diego, with Airbnb. Our city council passed some policies…

Or to put it another way, San Diego property-holders now have more control over what they do with their property than San Diego elected officials.

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#62

Post by Xylakant »

woodpanel wrote: post #45
joecool1029 wrote: post #37

Honestly, I would much prefer everything get regulated at state level. I live in NJ. There are 565 municipalities here. Every single one has different regulations. For example, if one were to pick up a prearranged regular fare from Terminal A at EWR (Newark Liberty International), they might not know that this terminal is in the City of Elizabeth. The city sometimes has plainclothes detectives write $783 tickets. For…

Echoing you concern and somehow related: in Germany it is almost impossible to get state of the art software infrastructure on the road for customers of public transit because of the fragmentation of transportation providers. Municipalities run their own systems and while not all of them are actively sabotaging attempts at increased coherence, none of them has any incentive to increase coherence either. If it weren't…

> were you can use all of Germany's public transit for ~4.200 € / year.

Well, you can't. You can use Railway and S-Bahn because S-Bahn is traditionally owned by the DB. You can also use other public transport in the specific regions that the DB negotiated for, the ones that are included as "city" on a long distance railway ticket. These regions do not even always align with the regions for public transport, for example "City" in Berlin is not aligned with the A,B or C regions for local tickets, it's mostly A plus some.

The full list is here https://www.bahn.de/p/view/angebot/cityticket.shtml

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#63

Post by klodolph »

joecool1029 wrote: post #37

Honestly, I would much prefer everything get regulated at state level. I live in NJ. There are 565 municipalities here. Every single one has different regulations. For example, if one were to pick up a prearranged regular fare from Terminal A at EWR (Newark Liberty International), they might not know that this terminal is in the City of Elizabeth. The city sometimes has plainclothes detectives write $783 tickets. For…

Keep in mind that New Jersey has the highest average population density in the country, and it’s 34x more dense than Oregon, on average! New Jersey’s population density is an almost an order of magnitude closer to Portland’s population density. Then when you take a look at the municipalities in Oregon and New Jersey, even bigger differences appear. Oregon’s population is overwhelmingly concentrated in Portland and the greater Portland metropolitan area (which includes Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham). Something like 50% of the state population lives in the metro area as of 2010 census, and it’s a small part of the state, geographically. Over 500k in Portland alone. Look at New Jersey and you get a radically different picture, at least if you look at municipalities. The distribution between municipalities is much more even.

Also note that the airport, Portland International Airport, is within Portland city limits, proper.

I would say that lessons learned in New Jersey do not translate well to Oregon. Speaking as someone who lived years in Oregon and years in New York, it’s easy to underestimate the differences. It took me a while to understand (as little as I do) the political and geographical divisions in New Jersey, and let me tell you, they are not like the political and geographical divisions of Oregon.

Here’s a population density map of New Jersey: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Jersey_Populatio...

List of municipalities in New Jersey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_New_...

Population density map of Oregon: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oregon_population_ma...

List of cities in Oregon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Oregon

Just to paint more of a picture, Salem and Eugene are ranked #2 and #3. From my personal experience as a driver, these cities are NOT like Portland and it would be absurd to regulate them in the same way. Even “downtown” Salem and Eugene, such as they are, do not suffer from traffic in remotely the same way that Portland and the surrounding metro area does. What makes this worse is that Portland has been experiencing high growth rates for many years now, and the traffic infrastructure has not been able to keep up with the number of cars on the road. Traffic is shockingly worse compared to ten or twenty years ago, and Portland needs to be able to make the policy and infrastructure changes to fix that.

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#64

Post by blahblahthrow »

joecool1029 wrote: post #37

Honestly, I would much prefer everything get regulated at state level. I live in NJ. There are 565 municipalities here. Every single one has different regulations. For example, if one were to pick up a prearranged regular fare from Terminal A at EWR (Newark Liberty International), they might not know that this terminal is in the City of Elizabeth. The city sometimes has plainclothes detectives write $783 tickets. For…

Conversely, what if every single person in a small town agrees on a regulation that they feel is in their best interest? Why shouldn't transport providers be bound by that? These are mostly local services, it's only the behemoth tech companies coming in to offer "ride sharing" that really benefit from uniform laws across the state in 99% of cases.

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#65

Post by pdx_flyer »

Calling Portland "dense" is hysterical.

As a Portlander, I can say we are a terrible example of what NIMBYism does to efforts to lower housing costs by adding density.

Our city has a decent public transit setup and if the focus was on adding usable density with improved transit options, rather than people trying to protect neighborhoods, we'd be much better off.

I am fine with Lyft wanting this regulated at the state level. It seems like a weird hill to die on for Portland.

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#66

Post by klodolph »

adrianN wrote: post #56
woodpanel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Echoing you concern and somehow related: in Germany it is almost impossible to get state of the art software infrastructure on the road for customers of public transit because of the fragmentation of transportation providers. Municipalities run their own systems and while not all of them are actively sabotaging attempts at increased coherence, none of them has any incentive to increase coherence either. If it weren't…

Japan has bunch of different rail providers that run parts of the network. I wonder how the interoperability problems are solved over there.

Well, sure. But long distances are usually covered by Shinkansen, and shorter distances are often covered by one of the regional JRs. All of these are supported by JRS (https://www.jrs.co.jp/english/) which run IT and the railway information services. You only need to buy one ticket for a JR trip even though several companies may be operating the trains you use.

For more local service, there are also private railways and various metro systems. They sometimes have agreements to allow transfers between them, like the two Tokyo subways. So if you are going to use two different subway systems in Tokyo, you buy a transfer ticket and have to pass through a gate in the middle of your trip to transfer to the other system.

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#67

Post by r_klancer »

Of interest to HN.

Specifically, the bill Lyft has proposed and is attempting to pass would eliminate the ability of every Oregon city from taking the following common sense steps to protect TNC passengers:

   ...
   - Collecting local data, which is critical for understanding congestion and climate impacts.
   ...

TNC providers are not eager to reveal any more of their data than they have to, for reasons of proprietary advantage. Similarly they understandably don't want to take on the operational cost of having to comply with many local requirements. (I work in data at a tech company; I can sympathize with their point of view.)

Yet if urban mobility ultimately becomes a good provided by tech monopolies, we want to make sure local governments are in on the loop with respect to the knowledge and data those companies have, and have some leverage to enforce local requirements.

Applications to current issues regarding privacy regulation, antitrust and tech monopolies, and the potential rollout of autonomous vehicles are left as an exercise for the reader.

Also, recommended: "Inside the Transportation Data Tug of War" - https://www.move-forward.com/inside-the-transportation-data-...

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#68

Post by CaptainZapp »

klodolph wrote: post #66
adrianN wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan has bunch of different rail providers that run parts of the network. I wonder how the interoperability problems are solved over there.

Well, sure. But long distances are usually covered by Shinkansen, and shorter distances are often covered by one of the regional JRs. All of these are supported by JRS ( https://www.jrs.co.jp/english/ ) which run IT and the railway information services. You only need to buy one ticket for a JR trip even though several companies may be operating the trains you use. For more local service, there are also private railwa…

They sometimes have agreements to allow transfers between them, like the two Tokyo subways.

That's a pretty gross understatement.

There are more than a dozen companies operating public transport systems in Tokyo alone and it's all interconnected. They don't only seemlessly interconnect (via PASMO or SWICA smart cards), but they also share common designators for their station labellings.

So if you are going to use two different subway systems in Tokyo, you buy a transfer ticket and have to pass through a gate in the middle of your trip to transfer to the other system.

I remeber exactly that. But that was around the year 2000, where it was really difficult to use public transport without a guide as a foreigner. Today, with a smart card, consistent and unique labelling of every station, regardless who operates it, and all ticket machines talking perfect English it's a breeze.

Re: Lyft lobbying to prevent Portland from regulating impact of ride-sharing

#69

Post by CaptainZapp »

beerlord wrote: post #41
a_imho wrote: post #22

How is Lyft different from any taxi service?

Because its much better, and so attracts more people to the service. Uber has a great potential to be used as public transport, with dynamic route pathing based on supply and demand. Something traditional public transport could never do.

Uber has a great potential to be used as public transport, with dynamic route pathing based on supply and demand

Yeah, Silicon Valley companies taking over our public transport infrastructure.

What could ever go wrong with that?

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