The Minneapolis City Council’s vote on minimum wages for independent contractor drivers has driven Lyft out of Minneapolis, and Uber out of both cities.
A friend of the blog emails with an initial reaction very close to my own:
The Minneapolis City Council doesn’t actually understand a lot. They want affordable options, but they want people to be paid high wages. It doesn’t always work that way.http://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-uber-lyft-ridehailing-minimum-wage-d60db6a2e2580dc1d93c438a8cffa5ee
That being said, Uber and Lyft were never affordable here in the Twin Cities like they are elsewhere. That is likely because the market here doesn’t support it like it might in cities with higher density populations.
This article mentions that “Seattle and New York City have passed similar policies in recent years that increase wages for ride-hailing drivers, and Uber and Lyft still operate in those cities.”
Yes, well, the cost to use those services was lower to start with because they actually could make money there. So, they are likely still making money even if passengers are paying more to ride. I would bet those services were barely making it here as it was. It’s not hard to drive most places, it’s not even particularly expensive. The downtowns of MSP are mostly dead anyway, so who is using Lyft and Uber at this stage anymore? As far as I can tell, the council’s stupid ordinance just gave them the excuse to pull out.
That was pretty much what I thought; it was yet another case of a prog city council demanding the world violate the laws of economics to give them what they want.
But wait. There’s more.
It’s the current DFL – so one must always check to see if there’s an ulterior motive involving transferring wealth from taxpayers to the DFL’s non-profit/government complex.
And of course there is:
There you go – Soviet-style ride sharing.
Because the DSA needs to make sure they get a cut of all that ride-share money.