This past Saturday none of the ride sharing services could handle demand and all went down. No riders could request and an no drivers could accept.

Also when the service does work glitches like seeing the login screen when you are already logged in are routine.

Source: I'm in Austin right now for sxsw and I'm a former Austin resident.

Also this whole debacle was a clear and present tax grab for the city please dont pretend it wasn't.

Now on balance Uber and Lyft ran an AWFUL campaign against the regulations when they already do background checks but still that was always about money.

(B) Except for any TNC participating in the Safety Assurance Program, each TNC shall pay an additional fee of one (1) percent of the TNCs annual local gross revenue for the Compliant Driver Education Fund to be used to assist and incent drivers to become compliant."

Also, it was about much more than just fingerprinting. Fingerprinting was emphasized because it would have affected Uber and Lyft's business model the most by reducing the supply of drivers due to higher onboarding friction.

Here's the ordinance: https://www.austintexas.gov/edims/document.cfm%3Fid=245769

Some more interesting parts:

- "A TNC shall establish a driver-training program designed to ensure that each driver safely operates his or her vehicle prior to the driver being able to offer service"

- "during periods of abnormal market disruptions, dynamic pricing shall be prohibited."

- ...and the whole reporting section where they have to hand over all their internal operating data to the city

A tax grab for me implies taking some money from some entity for a completely different reason. Like, paying for a civic ice rink with the money.

For now. I generally prefer for-profit approaches because their motivations are far more transparent. They want to make money for the investors.

Non-profits exist to serve the wishes of the donors, which may be opaque. For instance, the Ride Austin investors might suddenly decide that they really want to focus on transportation to/from low income areas or art festivals. That would degrade service, and there would be no accountability to the customer in that regard.

Not only are food coops a pretty big deal in Austin, but when I lived in Austin even the electricity company that I got my power from was a coop (https://www.pec.coop/) and if the coop made too much money it redistributed the profits back out as credits to member accounts. I generally ended up with one out of twelve months effectively being free because of profit credits being redistributed back out to my account.

The whole culture of coops and nonprofit service organizations is something I really miss about Austin now that I no longer live there.

Non profits, you can get a lot of people arguing about how to best fulfill the intents of the non-profit. In that situation, whoever argues the most persuasively or loudly wins, and it's the customers that suffer.

This is great and all, but wouldn't that money be more effectively utilized maintaining or upgrading the grid or investing in renewable energy? Seems like the co-op model never really invests in progress.

I am very interested to see if aggressive pricing and cost/route optimisation can unlock enough demand to make pooling actually viable economically, which none of the Uber/Lyft alternatives really seem willing to try.