Online Carpooling Service Fined In Canada 541
TechDirt is reporting on a disappointing development out of Canada. An Ontario transportation board has fined PickupPal, a Web-based service for arranging carpools, because a local bus company complained of the competition. (TechCrunch apparently first broke the story.) "[The transportation board has] established a bunch of draconian rules that any user in Ontario must follow if it uses the service — including no crossing of municipal boundaries — meaning the service is only good within any particular city's limits. It's better than being shut down completely, and the service can still operate elsewhere around the world, but this is yet another case where we see regulations, that are supposedly put in place to improve things for consumers, do the exact opposite."
What kind of fucking bullshit is this? (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously. The government should have no say in this, either in their part or on the behalf of others.
You're Doing It Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought the government was only supposed to provide services that the private sector can't or won't provide with reasonable cost and quality.
Re:Walking (Score:5, Interesting)
This sort of reminds me of a short story that Asimov wrote about a boy who decided he no longer wanted to use the transporters in every home in order to go to school. He preferred walking to school each day instead, much to the horror of his mother.
It just... piqued my memory, I guess.
Okay I was wrong.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I read the link figuring that there must be some good reason for this law. It may be an outdated reason but I figure there must still be some reason. ,"You need to know how much to charge the government so you can give that money to the government?"
I was wrong.
Of course it reminds me of something that happened to me at work.
My company sold software to a Canadian government agency. They pay a yearly fee for updates and support. On day I got a call from the Canadian tax department. They wanted to know how much the update disks we where shipping to the other agency where worth. This was before the Internet was available to mortals.
Well six floppies so about six dollars. I told them the updates where free.
They kept arguing with me to tell them how much the updates where worth. It seems that they needed to charge tax the people that where receiving the updates.... I told them that IT WAS THERE OWN GOVERNMENT!!!!
The told me that it didn't matter. So I asked them this
They said yes, and didn't even laugh. In fact they where a little ticked that I couldn't see the logic in it.
I told them that they had just invented Taxabation and they hung up on me.
We talked to our clients and set up a bbs so they could download the updates from then on.
Re:Walking (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more so Bastiat's story about the candle maker wanting to outlaw the sun for unfair competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlemakers'_petition [wikipedia.org]
I Live in Ontario (Score:5, Interesting)
I have never heard of these regulations. I doubt very much they are enforced at all. The fact that the got fined is only due to a complaint. If A) the public was aware, or B) the Premier was aware of those regulations, it would be dead in a week. This is actually very stupid move by the bus company if they are really worried about competition. I mean really, the province just started installing car pool only lanes on the 401, are they going to now say they are not committed to this sort of activity. Silly.
If I were PickupPal I would not pay the fine and write two letters, one to our Premier, and one sent to the various mainstream media outlets also indicating a letter was sent to the Premier.
This will kill the fine, kill the regs, and likely promote PickupPal, and car pooling in general. That's a quadruple win I think.
Jurisdiction over the web (Score:3, Interesting)
seeing that PickupPal is a web based company, can't they just more their operations outside of the Ontario transportation board's jurisdiction and tell them where to shove their fine?
Re:No sense... (Score:2, Interesting)
And the sad thing is that there are actually people who think like this.
Democracy (as the word is commonly used, i.e. to mean elected a bunch of pricks who rule over you, doing what they like until you get the chance to elect them (or another bunch of pricks) again) may well be better than the alternatives tried (it is better to be able to pick your ruler than not, at least that's the theory), but it still is a load of shit.
Try anarchy, now with extra helpings of freedom, and fuck off corporations, state, capitalism and tyranny. We don't need you to tell us what to do.
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Slightly more on topic, this is absolutely fucking crazy. It doesn't compete with the bus service, because cars are inherently more mobile than a bus run. Cars can go from point A, to point D, without all that visiting points B and C in between.
There are obviously two different markets, one, mass transport along fixed routes, two, point to point transport by small numbers of people.
Not to mention, if as FredFred says, only being able to go to work? Fuck off with that.
Me, I suggest that all interested person's in that province, ignore this fucking stupid law. If it should ever get to a jury trial, you would hope that they wouldn't convict. (Not a lawyer, not sure if this sort of thing is criminal or whatever.)
Similar Case In Germany (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
hey they all made millions, its only the taxpayers it didn't work for!
Re:No sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple solution that lets them say "GFY" (Score:3, Interesting)
traceroute shows they're currently hosted on servers-etx.hgn.ca, which are located in Ontario, Canada.
Just move the server to another country, and tell the Ontario Transport Ministry to "Go Fuck Yourself", same as businesses in Quebec host their sites outside of Quebec and tell the Office de la langue francais "Mange la merde." The OLF always backs down when push comes to shove over the question of regulating internet content, since they don't have jurisdiction - the internet is regulated exclusively by the feds via the CRTC.
While they're at it, they should cite the CRTC regulations that make the internet solely federal jurisdiction, and again tell them to "Go Fuck Yourself - Twice."
Re:This was on NPR a while back (Score:5, Interesting)
A carpool is quite a bit different from a bus, provides an entirely different service in an entirely different manner.
In and around Tampa, Florida, the state will GIVE you a van and buy your gas if you get 4 or more people to ride in it 5 days a week (I think they're looking for people with 40+ mile commutes each way). Turns out to be cheaper for the state to supply the vans than for them to increase capacity on the roads clogged with single riders.
Re:No sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a saying:
A company does a hundred things wrong, and 1 right you only here about the 1 decision. The government does 1000 things right and 1 wrong, you only hear about the wrong one.
This is true.
A company just needs to to tralk about it's failures, and very few people know. The government has a lot of people whose sole purpose is to tell everyone when smething goes wrong.
I worked in the private sector for about 38 years, and now I work for a city government. I see aso many thing being done correctly, for the benefit of the citizen. I see projects that are completed on time and within budget all the time.
I see a lot less waste. (you can confuirm that by going to the labrary and looking at the numbers)
But a son as 1 thing goes wrong, it's headlines. Sometimes it
s becasue of a stupid elected official, sometimes it's due to unforseen factors. Like the price of rock suddenly going through the roof, sometimes it looks like a mistake because of a lack of facts.
Bear in mind even a moderately size City has 1000's of projects going on every day.
I ahve been pleasantly surprised working for the government. I have also learned a lot about why things seem so expensive.
Re:No sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in Canada. Ontario, actually.
I have an appointment to see my MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament, for you non-Canadians) in a couple of weeks regarding another issue.
I'll sure as hell be letting him know I'm very unimpressed with this, and grilling him as to how the government can control what people do with their private cars, as long as no road regulations are broken.
Re:No sense... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, some countries take that approach. Ever taken a gypsy cab in one of them?
Also remember, you are discussing something in a country that is not the US. Here in Canada we take a bit of a different approach. In the US, if something happened, the passenger or his family would just sue everyone they could think of. Here were like to take a bit more of a proactive approach and try to prevent tragedies.
I'm always suprised... (Score:3, Interesting)
After getting no where with her, I pointed out to him what she had been saying. I have no doubt that they had a big argument about it because she now is adamantly against the idea of using the find a stranger in the parking lot method of carpooling. Some might think that I over stepped a line, but I really don't want to find out that she was found in a ditch raped an murdered. I know if I were a rapist, she would have easily been in the top 1% of target victim group because she is attractive, to small to put up a big fight, and was willing to get into a strangers car.
Simply put: Carpooling with strangers IS hitchhiking.
Each person needs to evaluate the risk/benefit of hitchhiking for themselves, but they should not delude themselves into thinking that they are not the same thing just because it now has a PC name and the government encourages it.
Re:No sense... (Score:1, Interesting)
They didn't give out tons of Alt-A and subprime loans because the government forced them to do so, they did it because it was - however briefly - very profitable. So long as housing values kept going up, the banks made a killing on the riskiest of loans because they did not properly account and fund for the inherently higher default rates. You had banks giving out loans to people with absolutely no documentation of income; that was not by force of government regulation, but sheer greed and stupidity.
I bought a house with 3% down and an interest-only loan at the very top of what I was allowed to borrow, and sold it before things went bad. I took even the 3% out and put it into other (unleveraged) investments and, with no change in lifestyle, I was not only putting away what would have been payments on the principal each month, but more money on top of that. Should I have stayed longer, I would have eventually rented out rooms and been bringing in even more money per week. I used these tools intelligently and responsibly, and am sad that they won't be there next time around, but both the banks and many of the people they loaned to are short-sighted fools who can't be trusted to use such financial tools appropriately.
Re:No sense... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
wrong. The "forcing" companies to make loans was only a few companies that were caught gaming the books. The feds choose to have them "help the poor" rather than levy appropriate fines. That said, they should have been harsh and shut down the FMs when they cooked the books years ago in spite of the harm because their cheating is what brought down the system. Mercy is what cause the banking crisis not regulations.
Uh, those few companies that you spoke are FannieMae and FreddieMac, who combined make up a vast majority of loans made in the US. They are pretty much in control of mortgages, student loans, auto loans, business loans, etc. So, by saying that it is "a few companies" is a bit of an understatement. But one point you don't dispute is that they were "forced" to give loans to people who couldn't pay them back, regardless of the rate.
However, you could have (should have?) pointed out that much of the problem was this new idea of rolling up these bad loans and dumping them on the stock market. This was a bad idea that made a bad problem much worse as it hid the bad debt on Wall St, putting off the inevitable collapse, and spread the risk of these bad loans to the stock market and sticking ignorant investors with the bill.
However, to get this back to the original point, this was something that should have been regulated to prevent the problem from affecting more than just banking.
Re:No sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree! The problem is, the website in question doesn't do anything to make sure it's not for profit. The one example in the newspaper article (which you can get to, eventually, by following the blog chain), is of someone paying $60 to go from Toronto to Montreal. Google maps says that's a 541 km drive. Having done it, it's mostly good freeway, i.e. highway driving.
Now, the peak gas price in Toronto was $1.38/L. Let's use 12 L/km as a reasonable fuel consumption (this is achieved by even many pickup trucks). So you'd expect the gas for the trip to cost, at worst, around $62. So this guy wasn't just splitting the gas with his customer... er passenger, was he?
Using my numbers he wasn't making a profit, but he certainly could have done so if he'd driven a compact or subcompact and didn't happen to buy gas at the highest price ever recorded. And that's the one case the newspaper happened to publish numbers for.
Re:No sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
The hybrid idea is nice in theory, and I think actually probably quite a number of countries have aspects of it (e.g. members of the upper house not elected by the general public, or the EU commission elected by governments not the public). However, I think in practice, we mostly seem to get the balance wrong. Indeed I think often governments can at the same time be too authoritarian in some areas and not authoritarian enough in others.
There's no doubt that though we haven't really found much alternative other than these hybrid aspects, democracy mostly seems to be not entirely satisfactory, and it is certainly not an absolute defence against a bunch of nutjobs getting into power. So it does get to me when particularly in the USA, people sing gushing praises of democracy. It's certainly preferable to the alternatives, but it is not some divine perfect form of government. Installing democracy is not really a valid argument for invading a country either.
A final note - if less socially-orientated governments invested a lot more in education, then democracy in those countries would work better (in addition to just about everything else benefitting, including the ability of the country to make money).
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
It isn't only price, it is freedom of choice. What could be more pro-choice, more about the freedom to control your own body than to pick who you choose to drive you around?
There is always a trade-off between safety and freedom and we should always lean toward freedom. Freedom in this case is allow customers to choose, anywhere between cheap unregulated drivers in a rickshaw to bonded, insured highly trained gun toting bodyguard chauffeurs driving armored Suburbans.
If the customer freely chooses to ride with the 16 year old male in a Pinto with a giant spoiler bolted to the back, and it blows up in a fireball of gasoline and NO2, scarring them for life, ITS THEIR OWN FAULT and NO, the government should NOT DO SOMETHING.