A few weeks ago I traveled to DC. I looked into renting a car but the prices that week were higher than usual for some reason. So I decided to take a chance and for the first time (for me, anyway), use those ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft I’d been hearing so much about. (I even used Wingz on the way to the airport.)
Turned out I made the right choice. Got to where I needed to throughout my visit, for less total cost than a rental or the same number of cab rides, and didn’t have to worry about parking. Bonus: I felt tantalizingly hip, in a Silicon Valley-nerd way. (Which is a step or two below Hollywood-hip, but two steps above DC hip.)
Well, you can imagine how rental companies and, especially, cab drivers (who pay thousands for the right to drive in a given city) feel about these new services. They’re busily doing their crony-capitalist best to limit, outlaw or garrote them through government regulation. You can imagine which side cities, which earn millions every year from selling cab-driver privileges, come down on.
Enter Nate Chaffetz, a distinguished alumnus of Taliesin Nexus’s , who produced this short on just such a political tussle in Seattle, where the city council is being arm-twisted by the cab industry into limiting the number of UberX drivers who can be on the road at the same time.
as council members employ pretzel logic to explain why the cap they imposed on the number of Uber drivers is actually a good thing for Seattle consumers.