Give Someone a Ride, Get Arrested: San Antonio Threatens Lyft

As technologies like smartphones make communication quicker and
easier, as techniques like user and supplier ratings make consumer
choice and power stronger and more decentralized, as they all
combine to help us use products like cars more efficiently to meet
more human needs, as the “sharing economy” makes life better and
easier for those who choose to use it—as all these great things
happen, you can always count on the cops to come in and threaten to
arrest people over it.

See the latest from San Antonio, Texas, and its WOAI news
radio as “e-hailing” service Lyft tries to get involved in
providing a donation-based ride service to the people of San
Antonio:

San Antonio Police warned today that those on line car sharing
apps like ‘Lyft’ and ‘Uber’ are illegal, and drivers who pick up
passengers for cash risk being arrested.

  “You might be one of these drivers who is summoned
for a ride, and you won’t know who summoned you,” [Chief of Police
William] McManus warned.  “It could be a police
officer, and you’ll be in trouble.”

  1200 WOAI news was first to report earlier this week
that Lyft, which bills itself as ‘your friend with a car,’ is
looking for drivers in San Antonio.

  McManus said he sent Lyft a ‘strongly worded cease and
desist letter’ today, warning them not to set up operations in San
Antonio unless they conform to taxi regulations.

  “I want to warn anybody in the city who may be tempted to
use this service to be very very careful.”

  Lyft says it is no different from a friend giving
another friend a ride.  The passenger doesn’t pay a fare,
he or she gives a ‘donation’ to the driver.

  But McManus says no matter how you cut it, taking
anybody anyplace on city streets for cash is a violation of the
city’s strict taxi ordinances.

  “The problem with this is, the public is put in
danger,” he said.  “You don’t know who is going to show
up, you don’t know what the condition is that the car is in that
you’re going to get into.”

Except that through the use of an app that allows both driver
and passenger to see each other before pickup and see how each
other has been rated by other users and drivers, you do
know what you are getting into through a system that’s up to the
minute and generally far more rigorous than the city’s paper
regulations on “official taxis.”

A feature on the rise of, and regulatory backlash against, these
e-hailing ride services will appear in a forthcoming issue of
Reason (subscribe now!)

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