About a dozen supporters of ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft gathered in front of Birmingham City Hall Friday to encourage the city council to bring the companies to Birmingham. They were joined by City Council President Johnathan Austin, who took questions and said yes, he does want the ridesharing companies to come to Birmingham. “They’ll be here. They’ll be here sooner than you think,” Austin told them. “The Birmingham City Council wants Uber.” There are still gaps between what the city wants and what Uber wants, though, and those who gathered at Linn Park expressed their concerns. “Millennials, young people in Birmingham, aren’t being represented,” Thomas Reid said. Reid questioned one of the sticking points in the debate, the city’s requirement that ridesharing companies’ drivers carry commercial liability insurance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Most drivers in these systems don’t drive for them full-time, and they should be able to be covered by their personal auto insurance when they aren’t driving for the company, he said. Charles Kessler, the party secretary of the Libertarian Party of Alabama, who organized the event, said the free market, not city regulations, should dictate whether ridesharing companies succeed or fail in Birmingham. “We want people to be able to start businesses without being suffocated by the city council or others here in Birmingham,” Kessler said. “Uber doesn’t operate within the Wild West. They very much take care of their customers. They use the laws of supply and demand.”
B’ham news:
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“I think the decision should be made by private citizens. If you think Uber is a good company and you feel safe with them, you will do business with them. If you don’t, you will do business with someone else,” Charles Kessler, Vice Chair Libertarian Party of Alabama, said.
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“I’d rather use ride share than taxis but it is going to be a substitute for driving yourself to different places. There is some evidence when Uber and Lyft are in a market, drunk driving arrests fall,” Art Carden, a Samford University economic professor, said.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — Friday, a group from the Libertarian Party of Alabama held a protest in front of City Hall to rally for ride sharing here in Birmingham.
Many are wondering what it will take to get the likes of Uber and Lyft to the Magic City.
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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — A group of Alabamians is hosting a rally Friday in hopes of showing Birmingham City Councilors just how much support there is for app-based ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft in the Magic City.
The event’s organizer, Leigh LaChine of the Alabama Libertarian Party, says that though the lack of transportation options in Birmingham has been a problem for a while, the issue was recently highlighted by Sloss Fest, when thousands of visitors to the state’s largest city found themselves stranded in downtown Birmingham with no way to get back to their hotels.
“We want for Uber and Lyft to be able to compete in the free and open marketplace, and for the citizens of the Magic City to be able to choose for themselves which forms of public transportation they will use,” LaChine told Yellowhammer Thursday afternoon.
LaChine said that there is an opportunity for a ballot initiative in Birmingham to force the City Council’s hand, but the number of signatures needed on a petition calling for the vote is quite high—10 percent of the number of voters in the last election.
Samford University’s Economist Art Carden is slated to speak at the rally. In an op-ed for AL.com last week Dr. Carden said, “Resistance to innovation hurts the Birmingham brand. The city’s refusal to accommodate ride-sharing innovators is sending prospective visitors and residents the message that they cannot expect the same amenities they take for granted in other cities.”
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Resistance to innovation hurts the Birmingham brand. The city’s refusal to accommodate ride-sharing innovators is sending prospective visitors and residents the message that they cannot expect the same amenities they take for granted in other cities. If the Slossfest Twitter explosion is any indication, we are at the point where people are surprised when they can’t get Uber or Lyft in a major city.
There are substitutes for ride-sharing. Get a designated driver. Get to know a cabbie you can trust. And so on. We’re fortunate that this is so, but we wouldn’t need to waste our creative energies on work-arounds if a cheaper, higher-quality, more convenient option hadn’t been effectively taken off the table last summer.
The world is changing, and if we want to keep up we need to embrace innovation and recognize others’ freedom to choose how to get around. There are worse things than lousy taxis, but #BhamTaxiProbs are symptoms of a much deeper refusal to embrace innovation and trust people with liberty. Rules that encourage innovation and a culture that celebrates it turned ours from a world where life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short to one that is connected, rich, comfortable, refined, and long. If history has taught us anything, it is that these are not automatic. We can feed the goose that lays the golden eggs, or we can kill it—or at least gravely weaken it. That’s what we do with regulations that restrict innovation.
Art Carden is Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University’s Brock School of Business and a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a member of the Adjunct Faculty of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
That’s a lot of coverage for that few people.
It was at 11 am on a week day..
Well done.