TAXI companies have filed two legal challenges. An injunction application wants an immediate stop to Uber and Lyft conducting business and the other challenge is a petition to quash their licences until their challenges are heard.
WHAT exactly have the members of the Public Transport Board been smoking to have been so moronic as to ignore the ridiculous disadvantage that they have placed the taxi industry in. Added to this is the not-so-subtle racism that Surrey councillors Brenda Locke and Linda Annis as well as the mainstream media have been whipping up against South Asians for quite some time now on some issue or the other?
And didn’t the NDP government under Premier John Horgan have the guts to intervene when the PTB made such a blatantly prejudiced decision?
As reported last week in The VOICE, BC Taxi Association President Mohan Kang told this newspaper that the association had accepted that “ride shares would be implemented in some reasonable form,” adding, “however, to implement ride shares in a manner that creates such a distinct disadvantage to taxis is not reasonable.”
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
Kang pointed out: “The taxi industry has not taken the position that there should never be a ride share regime in BC.”
The PTB was incompetent enough to have placed no limit on the number of vehicles operating for Uber or Lyft. Even a fool could tell them that this would devastate the taxi industry!
Other hard facts that the biased PTB ignored:
* “The lack of any defined operating area for ride shares is an unfair advantage to ride share, while taxis remain very limited to operating from small geographic areas.”
* “The ability of ride share to significantly undercut taxis with their pricing will be predatory to taxis and ride shares can surge their prices to any amount when busy, which taxis cannot do.”
* “Ride shares are not required to make any vehicles available for accessible transportation, which taxi licenses are required to do.”
* “Ride shares enjoy a much better insurance rate with ICBC, over taxi rates which are much higher for the same work.”
At least McCallum is fighting back for the taxi industry. He told the media on Monday that as many as 18 warnings had been issued to Uber drivers and he declared that from now on there would no longer be any warning tickets – there will be a fine of $500.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
For more on racism in mainstream media and The VOICE’s fight against it, read: