Taxi

The Los Angeles City Council should be commended for its recent approval of Uber and Lyft pick-ups at LAX. By recognizing these services' enduring appeal for airport travelers, Los Angeles' city government now stands at the forefront of municipal ride-hail regulation.

Yesterday Transit Center, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), Move L.A., and the Shared Use Mobility Center, joined forces with two dozen other organizations and businesses to host Live Ride Share. The conference was billed as the “first to focus on shared mobility in Southern California [and] highlighted the profound changes occurring in transportation around the world and the economic, political and lifestyle ramifications of these developments in SoCal.”

Yesterday, the Los Angeles City Council, in a unanimous vote after no debate, approved a ten year contract for Authorized Taxicab Supervision Inc. (ATS) to continue to oversee the 2,300 taxi cabs that access the airport.  The Council's unanimous approval for such a long-term contract is something of a surprise when you consider a 2007 report by then-Comptroller Laura Chick that blasted ATS' management, Los Angeles World Airport's (LAWA) oversight of the existing contract and the opposition of the Taxi Workers' Alliance.

The vote was the culmination of more than a year of contentious debate over the future of the city's taxi system. In 2009, in anticipation of the approaching deadline, the city commissioned a taxi study to guide future decisions. In either haste or impropriety, the city's awarding of the taxi study contract was tainted by dubious processes, then terminated. Remaining  funding was deemed insufficient for the study's completion. Taxi company interests pressured the council to extend lucrative franchises essentially unchanged. Taxi workers pressed for completion of the city study, expecting results to include steps toward labor and environmental reform.

This afternoon's Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee was dominated by the taxi controversy explained in this earlier post. In brief, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) is overseeing a taxi assessment to set future taxi policy, and LADOT awarded a contract for that assessment in a manner that bypassed agreed-upon processes.

Photo, by Joe Linton, from the L.A. Taxi Workers Alliance protest at City Hall in August The agenda for this Wednesday’s Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee includes an important hearing on the future of Los Angeles’ taxi system. As is evident in cities throughout the world, taxis can play an important role in providing a healthy … Continued