Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan02
While a individual cab might not be a big business, they all have to be associated with one of the 10 brokers, and in a $100 million+ industry I'd suggest checker which has more then 50% of the fleet definitely qualifies as a big business,
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If council could be bought by an industry making 100+ million, the multi-billion dollar real estate industry would have them all in their pockets and we wouldn't be hearing the constant crying and moaning from all the people here who want an endless supply of suburbia. .
Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
The city have had multiple studies saying taxis are fine. Independent of ubers existence the city has incompetently handled the taxi issue.
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You're treating a chaotic collective as a single entity. One of the features of a taxi commission is that it operates semi-independently - I doubt very much that, until Uber came along, the majority of council and the bureaucracy gave more than a cursory though to the taxi situation. Why WOULDN'T they trust the results of these studies? In this particular case, maybe the shouldn't have, but you can't run a city on your gut feel and anecdotal evidence from angry people on the internet.
I think there is a vast overestimation of the importance of this issue to your average Calgarian. For every drunk hipster stuck on the side of the road at 2 AM in a blizzard, there's another 99 citizens who take a cab once a year to get to the airport during offpeak hours and never ever see a problem. Nobody has ever gotten elected on challenging "Big Taxi", and assertions to the contrary, no one ever will.
Again, I'm not saying the situation is acceptable, I'm saying you can attribute the lack of solutions to inertia and a perception that an imperfect but understood model is preferable to changes that might actually cause new and worse problems. And, of course, that it's not really been a big issue with the public until now.
Expecting things to change overnight, even with the impetus of Uber coming in and stirring the citizenry up, is not realistic - that's not how big bureaucracies work. That the mayor and councillors have to play the public image game and support the status quo doesn't mean that they are antediluvian idiots who are beholden to their bags of loonies delivered by Checker every month: I am certain that out of public view, posteriors are being kicked and actions contemplated, but the legal questions around Uber make it impossible to simply give in and let them do as they please. Uber drivers might (foolishly) disregard legality and drive uninsured, but the city cannot be as cavalier with the law..