Taxi companies and Uber are both awful, so it’s fun to watch them fight each other. On Tuesday, El Paso’s City Council voted to reduce regulations imposed on taxi companies, instead of increasing regulations imposed on Uber, as the taxi companies had hoped for.
From KVIA:
Joe Olivar, the owner of a local cab company Border Taxi, was disappointed with Tuesday’s developments. He was pushing for stricter regulation of Uber drivers, including fingerprinting-based background checks.
“You guys are making a big mistake, no one operates with the same integrity. I hope the city council is accountable when something horrible happens,” Olivar said, as he repeatedly brought up the issue of public safety.
“You wanted a level playing field, that’s what we’re doing,” El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser replied. Most of the council agreed that adding regulations was not the answer. “How many blockbuster stores do we have left” asked City Rep. Peter Svarzbein. “Could you imagine regulating Netflix? How you do you regulate a technology,” he said.
Olivar said the council’s approach was “fullhardy.”