How should we regulate the 'sharing economy'?
Image from Shutterstock.
Cities are interested in transportation services offered by groups like Uber and Lyft, but they also have concerns about public safety, according to a recent survey (PDF) by the National League of Cities.
Nicole DuPuis, who is a senior associate with the organization’s Center for City Solutions and Applied Research, shared the survey information Thursday at the ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago. She was one of five panelists speaking at a CLE program titled “Is Sharing Really Caring? The Laws of Transportation Sharing, Uber, Lyft, etc.” It was sponsored by the Section of State and Local Government Law.
Various municipalities are approaching the issue differently, DuPuis said, but every state legislature has recently supported or passed some sort of legislation related to the so-called sharing economy. “What we have learned from this is that it’s really a hyperlocal issue,” she added. “There’s no one-size-fits-all; it’s very context-sensitive.”
DuPuis mentioned Dallas, which allows app-based ride services and requires two tiers of commercial insurance for their drivers. One tier covers drivers seeking passengers, while the other applies to drivers carrying passengers.
Airports also have different perspectives, says Michael Kamprath, assistant general counsel at the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority in Florida. Most airports allow drop-offs from services such as Uber and Lyft, he said, but pickups are often officially restricted, and the drivers have to be discreet. “They might take off the pink mustache,” Kamprath said, referring to the fuzzy adornments that Lyft drivers place on the front grilles of their vehicles.
Ride-booking companies often don’t seek regulatory approval before they start doing business, said Jacob Huebert, another panelist. “Uber just goes to city after city and starts doing its thing,” said the Liberty Justice Center senior attorney, who is based in Chicago. “Because people like it so much, it’s very difficult for the government to ban it.”
He and other panelists noted that questions about regulation are not confined to cars. Panelist Jon Riches spoke about his client Flytenow, which has a website where private pilots post flight plans and find potential passengers who help pay for fuel and other costs. Earlier this year, the group sued the Federal Aviation Administration, which considers private pilots using such sites to be operating commercially—and thereby skirting FAA regulations—since they advertise and accept compensation for flights. The case is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The FAA doesn’t object to private pilots finding passengers through phone calls or email, according to Riches, an attorney at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation in Phoenix. “Historically, the FAA has always permitted pilots to share expenses with passengers, like sharing the price of gas,” he said.
Riches summed up the regulatory dilemmas posed by the emerging sharing economy by recounting something he’d read: “Uber owns no vehicles. Facebook creates no content. Alibaba has no inventory. Airbnb has no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”
• See what people are saying about the events on social media, and follow along with our full coverage of the 2015 ABA Annual Meeting.
Updated for additional editing on August 2.
