Red, Green and Blue reports that a bus company is challenging a ridesharing service called PickupPal in a regulatory battle in Canada saying PickupPal represents unfair competition. Read more here.
In reading further on PickuPal’s blog, I find that Ontario has incredibly restrictive carpooling regulations. Carpooling regulations!? Who knew carpooling was regulated, I mean like anywhere. In these regulations, it seems you’re only allowed to carpool to work, can’t cross municipal boundaries, and more seeming nonsense.
Wow, these regulations have really cut off citizen’s ability to serve themselves. Well, PickupPal is trying to change the regulations, though there’s undoubtedly another side to this story.
For instance, if ridesharing displaced enough business to cause the bus system to fail, then what about the folks who rely on regular bus service to get to and from work and have no affordable alternatives? I wonder if ridesharing could provide enough regularity to serve bus dependent folks for their work-related transportation needs.
While I support citizens creating, protecting, and responsibly using commons of all sorts, this may not be a cut and dried issue. Both systems represent a sort of commons. The issue would be more clear to me if one these companies was owned and democratically controlled by citizens through a cooperative. I would support the citizen effort as long as it worked well.
As it is, both companies appear to be privately owned. It would be easy to criticize the bus company for what appears to be a dubious claim of “unfair competition” against a popular effort by PickupPal. But let’s not ignore the fact that PickupPal is a private company that seeks to exploit the labor of ordinary citizens to create a valuable commons which it will own exclusively.
???, just because a business is communally owned doesn’t mean it serves the community or environment best. Unions are cool right., well the truckers union lobbies against railroad improvements.
Andronico’s Grocery store exists in Berkeley because a three store cooperative grocery business, collapsed under its own self righteousness. And everyone wanted it to succeed.
It was mismanaged, the meat section polluted the whole store with its offensive smell, cause the staff were slacking on the cleaning, the service all throughout the store was rude and slow. The coop didn’t have the will, or grace to make sure everyone was doing there job, or that the slackers got fired.
And so instead we have anti union Wholefoods out of Texas, Andronico’s over priced goods(BUT THEY PAY THEIR UNION EMPLOYEE’S BETTER THEN WHOLE FOODS OR BERKELEY BOWL), and home grown Berkeley Bowl another anti union feudal fiefdom.
If PickupPal or the bus company misuses their gov’t chartered right to do business, then they loose their charter. If they rake an unfair profit, then the charter needs to be renegotiated. If a communally owned venture would serve the area better, then perhaps we should help to foster a coop transport business, and lobby for it to get chartered.
A good investigative journalist writes a story with the quotes of people they interview, the least the journalist says the better. Journalists deliver the story as they find it, for you to resolve your own conclusions, Pundits tell you what to think and how think it.
don’t be a pundit, you got a cool organization.
Some good points John. I appreciate your passionate response. I agree that cooperatives and unions aren’t universally good.
I appreciate the history and perspective you share too. I’ve heard similar tales of failure, though they’re overshadowed in my mind by notable successes. I attribute this overshadowing to a distortion in my thinking. Your comments make me realize that all is not rosy in cooperative-land.
My bias for cooperatives stems from research I did on telephone cooperatives and other cooperative structures in rural America, which most agree have had a big positive impact on the quality of life there. Some see this success as one of the brightest moments in the history of the cooperative movement.
Thanks for challenging me on this because the rise of telephone cooperatives could be special case which may not be replicable in other communities or markets.
This has to do with historical circumstance, mainly that the government created a highly successful program in the 30s (or thereabouts) that helped rural Americans finance and build their own telephone companies in places that the big companies refused to serve. There are hundreds of these little phone cooperatives in the US still. The vast majority of them are well managed. And they are owned and controlled by their customers (they’re consumer cooperatives, not worker cooperatives).
Aside from demonstrating this bias for citizens getting a bigger share in the wealth they create, I’m more or less point out in my post that I don’t know what would serve folks best in Ontario. Discovering what is best for the common good is an age-old puzzle. I’m not sure I can even manage my own network of friends and family for the common good, never mind weigh in credibly on what transportation regime would best serve Ontario!
The telephone coops sound cool, tell us more. I was living in upstate new york, where there were allot of small telephone companies. They seemed real helpful.
I’m always curious about different coop opportunities.
I never knew the gov’t was fostering coops.
With the direction our economy is going, We may soon be able to argue for that kind of gov’t investment
Asa,
I co-authored a paper with my grad school mentor Linda Garcia (truly brilliant, credit goes to her of course) that covers the history briefly. Check it out here:
http://www.fao.org/sd/cddirect/cdre0033.htm
This is one of the great untold stories of people coming together to solve their problems, but with an initial a leg up from the government, ongoing regulatory support, and a great model to work with.
In the emerging civic culture I partly chronicle here, the myths will increasingly be about these types of collective achievements. In these myths, the hero is the community itself rather than an individual.
This is already happening. Wikipedia is one such community as hero tale.