Smart-Taxi Smackdown: Regulators Ponder the Future of Uber, SideCar, and Lyft

Lyft's pink moustaches have become a meme.Lyft

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If you don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area or a handful of big cities, you probably haven’t noticed the revolution in the taxi and livery cab businesses. In the Bay Area, local startups Uber, SideCar, and Lyft have made it a breeze to snag a ride in a taxi, a limo, or even your neighbor’s aging Honda Civic. All it takes is firing up one of their apps on your smartphone. These companies’ GPS-based dispatch systems allow almost anybody with an Android or iPhone and a clean driving record to make money as a quasi-legal gypsy cab driver. This ride revolution has made getting around town cheaper and easier, but has sapped the livelihoods of traditional cabbies and raised safety and security concerns.

Uber now operates in dozens of cities, and SideCar isn’t far behind, having expanded its gypsy cab (or “ride-sharing”) service last month to Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, and Washington, DC. Lyft’s trademark pink mustache, meanwhile, has become a pop culture meme. But the success of these alt-taxi firms may ultimately depend on whether California regulators put the kibosh on them—since other cities and states could well follow California’s lead.

Today, the California Public Utilities Commission will hold a workshop aimed at drafting new regulations for the companies, which it deems “new online-enabled transportation services.” Up for discussion will be whether these services must play by the same rules as traditional transportation companies—which include hefty insurance requirements, handicap accessibility, and set safety standards. 

Many taxi and limo drivers, and even some of Uber’s own “partners” (drivers) think they should. I caught up with both sides at Uber HQ, where an ad hoc group of UberBlack drivers calling themselves Limounion was holding a protest, claiming Uber was taking a cut of their tips—a skirmish I wrote about here.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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