Part of Business in Vancouver’s ride-hailing report series, Life in B.C.’s uber slow lane. BIV delves into the long and winding road to nowhere, taxi licence devaluation, Uber driver revenue realities, ride-sharing traffic jams and the apps already servicing Metro Vancouver’s Asian community.
Vancouver's distinction as the only major North American city that still doesn’t have ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft hasn’t escaped notice.
“Thanks Vancouver! I’ll be back when you have @Uber!!” comedian Doug Stanhope tweeted in May after a show in the city.
Darren Hill, a city councillor and ardent advocate of ride hailing in Saskatoon, which also doesn’t have ride hailing, finds it astonishing that his city will likely beat Vancouver when it finally sees ride hailing arrive there this year or in early 2019.
“I’m there quite often for work, and I’m surprised that there still is no ride-sharing access in the city of Vancouver,” Hill said. “I have had nothing but problems with the cab companies.”
If there is one benefit to being last, it might be that B.C. and Vancouver can study how other provinces and cities dealt with the concerns that transportation network companies (TNCs) bring and avoid some of their negative impacts.
One of those impacts that might appear to be counterintuitive is increased traffic congestion and decreased public transit use.
Calgary, which has had ride hailing since April 2016, has found it has increased parking congestion in the city core.
“When you increase your downtown footprint by a couple of thousand more livery vehicles, that obviously is going present its challenges with ensuring minimizing of illegal parking, parking at taxi stands and so on,” said Jodi Hughes, licensing co-ordinator for Calgary’s Livery Transport Service.
“It [parking congestion] has increased over the TNCs entering the market, because of course you have thousands more people in the same 30-block radius.”
Some studies also suggest ride hailing can reduce public transit use.
“Read the reports from Boston and New York and London; [when] these services … approach these cities, they say, ‘We’re going to reduce congestion, we’re going to get cars off the road,’” said Kristine Hubbard, operations manager for Beck Taxi in Toronto, which has had ride hailing since 2014. “It’s absolutely the opposite.
“If your mass-transit system is important to you, take a look at the reports from the transit providers in the same cities. People are being pulled off of mass transit, which results in loss of income for those systems.”
The City of Montreal has blamed a 13% decline in bus use since 2012 on ride hailing and bike sharing. And a study last year by the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California found a 6% reduction in the use of buses by ride-hailing users and a 3% reduction in subway use.
A more recent University of Toronto (U of T) study concludes that ride hailing could complement public transit use but still increase traffic congestion.
“We find Uber’s effect on transit ridership grows over time, increasing transit ridership by 5% after two years,” the U of T study concluded.
But the study found that, even if ride hailing increases public transit use, it could still worsen traffic congestion “by either increasing the total trips taken or by flooding the streets with Uber drivers looking for a fare.”
Whether it is Calgary, Saskatoon, Toronto or Vancouver, the major concerns with ride hailing are similar: public safety and impacts on the taxi industry.
Wherever ride hailing has entered a market, taxi use tends to drop. In an attempt to mitigate the impact on the taxi industry, some municipalities have either tightened rules for ride hailing or tried to liberalize taxi industry regulations, or both.
In Calgary, the city liberalized taxi industry rules and issued 222 new licences to address a long-term chronic cab shortage. It also restricted street-hailing to taxis. TNC drivers can only pick up customers who use an app.
Like Vancouver, Calgary had an over-regulated taxi industry that wasn’t serving the public, according to Calgary Coun. Evan Woolley.
“It just wasn’t working,” he said. “There were some pretty horrible examples of … people not being able to get rides. When it’s minus 30 on a Halloween in Calgary and nobody can get a ride and people are stuck in hotels, that becomes a public safety issue. We had an unbelievably over-regulated and fairly complex taxi [industry]. We hadn’t released new licences since the ’80s, and our city had doubled in population.”
In Saskatchewan, the province has tried to level the playing field by requiring TNC drivers to have Class 5 driver’s licences and to undergo police background checks. Like taxis, they’re also required to charge a minimum base rate.
Some municipalities have also introduced special accessibility surcharges on TNCs to compensate for the fact that, unlike taxi companies, they’re not required to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles.
Toronto authorities offered the taxi industry the right to change pricing based on current market demand to compete with the TNC price-surge model, but the industry rejected the idea.
Hill said there are legitimate concerns about protecting the taxi industry from unfair competition but warns against over-regulation.
“They’re not identical services,” he said. “So when somebody says, ‘Make it a level playing field,’ well, there has to be a playing field, of course, but it’s not the same playing field because they are two different services. My concern is that, if we over-regulate and restrict, the ride-sharing companies will just turn and walk away.”
Woolley agreed and has some advice for B.C.’s provincial and municipal governments.
“Don’t over-complicate things. We took an effort at over-complicating things and it didn’t work, and it took us another six months to get our heads around ‘keep it super simple.’” •
