Give ’em hell.

Originally published on Facebook (of all places) with each of the drivers I mentioned tagged so you can see they’re real Austinites.

Thank you to everyone who’s checked-in with me or said something kind to me over the past several days. Last week was rough for all of us who fought so hard to get this far.

Do you remember that part in Les Misérables when they’re singing a ridiculously inspiring anthem of freedom and hope, but you can tell they’re all about to get slaughtered? I burst into tears about 30 seconds before anyone else in the theater the first time I saw it. That’s exactly how it felt watching the past few weeks of Austin’s Prop 1 discussion unfold.

I’ve learned a few things watching Austin’s City Hall grapple with Lyft & Uber over the past two years:

1. City Hall has way more control over my life than the White House.
2. It’s amazing how many people defend really polarized perspectives based on a 30-second soundbite or the headline they read in a tweet.
3. Lyft and Uber don’t really understand Austinites.

Austinites are independent and obstinate, and we find opulence repulsive. (It reminds us too much of North Dallas.)

We lost Prop 1 when we let the conversation focus on Uber and Lyft. Although snapchat filters and celebrity appearances might help a campaign in Southern California, this is Central Texas. We still celebrate the Alamo, a battle at a tiny fort where everyone was slaughtered by foreigners. What Austinite would actually go vote to save two faceless corporations from California?

But Prop 1 wasn’t ever about Lyft and Uber, it was about our neighbors and friends who the city doesn’t trust to do our job.

Two years of Weekly Lyft Driver Meetups. You’ll notice some folks were there week after week. We joined for the earning opportunity, but we stayed for the community.

Prop 1 was about Sarah, a single mom who never thought she would be able to raise her daughter without government assistance.

Prop 1 was about Shannon, who suffers from debilitating chronic pain and found a job flexible enough for her to do a kick-ass job on those days when she’s able to get behind the wheel.

Prop 1 was about Kyle, who has been donating 100% of his ridesharing earnings to charity for almost two years because he was tired of looking out his window and watching people stumble out of bars and drive off.

Prop 1 was about Ashli, a personal trainer who found the only flexible side-job she can always rely on when a client cancels at the last minute.

Prop 1 was about the AISD school teacher who lives across the breezeway from my apartment and needed something she could do when her students were on vacation.

Prop 1 was about me, a Purdue graduate and Dell layoff survivor who overcame depression because of Lyft and the quirky and encouraging Austin Lyft Community.

“Dear Austin, I am not a rapist.”

Prop 1 was about our team of Lyft Drivers who donated half or more of our tips and collected donations to raise over $4,000 for AIDS Walk Austin last year.

Lyft for Good: Drivers Donate to Austin AIDS Walk

And Prop 1 was about those of you that haven’t experienced the moment when you need another job that you can start doing in 48 hours or those of you who don’t realize how much you might love driving with Lyft.

But Prop 1 was also about the ridiculous hoops that the city wants us to jump through just to give you a ride. There’s nothing in the Council’s changes that are proven to improve my safety, my passengers’ safety, or the safety of the general public over the regulations we already had. Sure, for me the city’s application process will be so easy…

(Several parts of the city’s unfinished ordinance from December include the phrase “will be determined by a future ordinance”. They’ve yet to finalize the vehicle standards or outline the city on-boarding process. These requirements are only the beginning…)

• Get my car reinspected by a city-approved car inspector according to a standards list that is still TBD (because the annual inspections the state require aren’t good enough?)
• Get interviewed by a company representative in person (because this is murika and you should speak English? I really can’t figure out this one.)
• Take a city-approved driver education course (because having a perfect driving record isn’t good enough?)
• Put a city-approved sticker on each car that identifies it as a ridesharing vehicle. (Because it’s not like these are personal vehicles? Everyone loves extra stickers on their cars. And I’m sure it can’t be copied like the driver’s photo, the car photo, the driver’s name, and license plate number and GPS location in the app.)
• Get fingerprinted during business hours (because every driver is available between 9:30 AM and 4:30 PM on a weekday.) Oh, and if the incomplete records that your fingerprint is checked against come back without all the details, you’ll need to go back to the county where the arrest occurred and get a document that says you’re innocent (because ridesharing drivers are guilty until proven innocent.)

A letter from Emily Castor to Houston Lyft Drivers when Houston’s City Council chose to “stand up to Uber” and destroy an industry.

Lyft left Houston in November 2014 and hasn’t returned. Uber chose to stay and recently announced that over 20,000 drivers started, but didn’t finish, the City of Houston’s on-boarding process.

This is ridesharing’s Achilles Heel, and our opposition knows that. Without a steady supply of drivers, the business model erodes. And let’s not overlook the fact that there’s no research that supports the additional regulatory hoops that the Council added in December. Their changes are not shown to improve my safety, the safety of my passengers, or public welfare, but they do create additional hassles for applicants, especially those with a regular 9-to-5. What hurts one of us hurts all of us.

I’m almost as disgusted that the Travis County Democratic and Republic parties turned this discussion into partisan quarreling as much as I’m disgusted the City Council voted 9–2 right down party lines in December for their new changes for “safety”. I thought the new 10–1 Council was supposed to represent Austinites, not party politics.

When we fought back by starting a petition drive, the Council had the gall to say that Uber was bullying them. Yes, Uber’s “Kitchen Mode” promotion was a bit tactless, but come on folks, learn a little forgiveness. As an aside, I don’t drive for Uber, and I’d like to continue to do my job unfettered by your perceptions of a company I don’t work for.

There was no reason the City Council needed to replace the 2014 regulations that were written by volunteers with new ones solely written by politicians. There was no reason they should have abandoned the TNC Working group (a diverse group of stakeholders that that helped the city create our original ridesharing regulations in 2014). There’s no reason that they should have added all the unnecessary requirements that they did in December.

“The committee was unable to find any careful empirical studies on the effectiveness of any of these methodologies [for background checks] with respect to passenger safety. Current practice, which strikes many as reasonable and prudent, is not evidence of best possible practice.”

— The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, Dec 2015

The report in it’s 188-page glory. This is the facts about Ridesharing, the good, the bad, and the parts that we just haven’t researched.

Yup, we’ve all been debating a choice that no one has ever researched. (I tried to get the Council to commission this research, but that’s a different story.)

Meanwhile, an Uber driver and passengers saved a woman who was jumped by a man at 7th and Colorado last Thursday. If anyone thinks for a second that requesting a ride with Lyft or Uber was less safe than walking around alone downtown at night, the media and City Hall are to blame for their fear-mongering exaggerations and dramatizations.

Fix it, Austin.

We deserve safe, reliable, transportation options, flexible part-time and full-time income, and regulations based on science, not the way we’ve always done it. Because the way we’ve always done it is exactly how we’ve ended up with insufficient transit, a taxi system that desperately needs more freedom to compete with ridesharing, and an idiotic dependence on single-occupancy vehicle trips.

“The commute from downtown Austin to Round Rock currently takes about 45 minutes during rush hour. But by 2035, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute estimates, it will take two hours and 30 minutes to go those 19 miles.” — NPR

I believe we can’t survive Austin’s projected growth without Ridesharing.

Contact the City Council today and let them know what a difference ridesharing makes in your life. Let them know that you know exactly what is in the city’s changes from December that will now take effect since Prop 1 failed. Let them know that you know they built in enough loopholes in the ordinance to provide an out if things got ugly. Let’s make it ugly.

Give ’em hell,
Skylar

Bring Lyft Back to Austin

Originally published on Facebook (of all places). As always, no one paid me to write my story, and definitely not Uber.