By The Staff | The Save Jersey Blog
The roiling national debate over Uber – the groundbreaking app which has put the tax industry on the very of extinction – is ramping up here at home, Save Jerseyans.
On Tuesday night, Camden’s city council passed a resolution calling on Trenton to regulate the company’s Garden State activities. A-3765, if passed (it already cleared the Assembly’s Transportation Committee), would require Uber, Lyft and similar companies to conduct background checks, carry insurance and inspect its vehicles.
“The reason taxis and limousines are required to go through proper background checks that include fingerprints and carry a higher level of insurance is for passenger safety,” explained Murray Rosenberg, head of the New Jersey Taxi Cab Association that unsurprisingly supports the legislation. “Uber and similar companies continuously argue that they are above the law. Putting profits above passenger safety is a bad business model.”
Click here to check out the resolution.
The politics of Uber is a national affair with presidential candidates vying openly for the “Uber vote.” New York City recently arrived at a compromise with Uber which includes fingerprinting but taxi driver-initiated litigation is still pending. Houston requires fingerprinting, too, and even Republican-controlled states like Wisconsin have enacted ride share regulatory laws. The natural counter-argument against regulatory attempts, of course, begins with the obvious point that municipal-granted taxi monopolies are preventing competition, and progress, presented by transportation network companies.
The question: where to draw the line?
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There is a need for limited government regulation. A good example of this is common carrier regulation. Inspections of vehicles, background checks on drivers and insurance requirements are common sense regulations to protect the public. Uber drivers who do not have their vehicles inspected, their backgrounds checked or carry appropriate insurance are working against the public interest.