by mattchristensen00 | Sep 12, 2014 |
By Caroline Said California regulators told Uber, Lyft and Sidecar that their new carpool options are a no-go because they violate a state law against charging different fares to passengers in a hired vehicle. The companies and transit experts condemned the move as squashing an environmentally friendly option. But it turns out that the California Public Utilities Commission, which sent warning letters to the companies last week, merely wants to spur them to get legislators to overhaul the law. “Our hands are tied,” said Marzia Zafar, PUC director of policy and planning. “We wanted to make the letter public to let the (ride companies) and the Legislature know that there is this code. It may be outdated; it may not. The Legislature will have to review it and make a judgment call.” Current law “strictly prohibits a charter party carrier from charging passengers on an individual-fare basis,” said the letters, available at http://tinyurl.com/lxmvh8n. “The commission lacks the flexibility to allow a transportation service that is contrary to the statute.” That law was written to prevent limo drivers from poaching passengers from shared vans like Super Shuttle, Zafar said. “Maybe this is an opportune time to review the code,” she said. Sources said that Uber is preparing a detailed explanation of why it believes it already complies with the law. The company was typically provocative in a prepared response. “We thought we had seen it all, and then the California PUC decided they would try to shut down app-based carpooling,” Uber wrote. “The only conclusion we can come to is that the PUC doesn’t like technology, environmental progress, or anything...
by mattchristensen00 | Aug 29, 2014 |
By Eric Jaffe It’s become a given that ride services like Uber et al are disrupting city mobility, but for all the digital ink spilled over that trend, we don’t have much data on what exactly the disruption looks like. (That is, other than the occasionallyquestionable data the services supply themselves.) So it’s important for outside observers to pull the veil back a bit, and a research team at UC-Berkeley led by Lisa Rayle has done just that with a new working paper on “ridesourcing” services, as they’re calling Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, and friends. The study focused on ride-service users in San Francisco. Some were intercepted immediately after a ride, some discussed a ride they’d taken in the past couple weeks. The researchers compared their findings with two 2013 data sets on taxi ridership—one a survey conducted by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and the other a trip log from a local taxi company. The report is wide-ranging and worth a full read, but here are some of the highlights. Ridesource users tended to be 25 to 34 years old (with very few over 45) and a bit wealthier than the general population. The services replaced transit trips at times (24 percent of users said their alternative would have been to take the bus) and added traffic to the network (8 percent said they wouldn’t have made the trip at all). At the same time, 40 percent of users said they drove less than before, and many trips began near a rail (28 percent) or bus (85 percent) stop, suggesting a possible transit complement. Read the entire article...
