Friday, June 13, 2014

Letter to my State Senator re: AB's 612 and 2293

If you haven't heard, two bills are about to go up for vote in the California State Senate that have implications for ride-sharing services, such as Uber, Lyft, etc.  You can read the bills here:


Although I am generally in favor of ride-sharing services, there are some aspects, especially in AB 612, that are not necessarily bad for consumers.  Ultimately however, I think these bills will stifle innovation.  AB 2293 seems especially bad, because it defines drivers as being on the clock as long as they have the app "turned on," whatever that means.

Here is the letter that I wrote to my local state senator regarding these two bills.  If you live in California, please consider sending a similar letter to your local state senator.


Dear Senator Block-

I am resident of your district, living in downtown San Diego.  I am writing to encourage you to vote no on both AB 612 and AB 2293.

I strongly encourage you to vote no on AB 2293, which in my opinion creates an unreasonable standard for when commercial insurance should apply to ride-sharing services.  Just because an app is "on" does not mean that commercial activity is going on.  What if I am taking a personal trip to the store and am open to sharing my ride but no sharing actually happens?  Hopefully you agree that sharing rides is important from an ecological perspective, and such a law will limit future innovation and interfere with existing services, especially drivers that participate in multiple services simultaneously.

Another issue is what does "on" mean?  What if the application is being ran in the background but not being used or attended to, which is easy to do on modern smart phones.  I am certain drivers will be unnecessarily penalized by large insurance companies in situations where they should have been covered.  I certainly expect insurance companies to exploit the law as much as possible and in ways I expect lawmakers did not intend.

I also encourage you to vote no on AB 612.  I don't think it is appropriate that on-line ride sharing services are explicitly called out in this law.  Although I am sympathetic to the idea of requiring primary commercial insurance be offered by corporations like Uber and for background checks to be conducted of drivers, I think those should be requirements of all transportation services and that it is unnecessary to call out specific services.  

I am also worried about the impact on innovation of such a law.  This will obviously create an even larger barrier to entry for such services, which I am not sure is in the best interest of consumers.  Perhaps a different law that requires clear disclosure of what, if any, insurance, background checks, etc. have been done as part of the sharing service would have a similar effect, but allow consumers to make a choice as to what level of safety they are comfortable with.  To be honest, I think this would be a good idea anyway as I suspect few consumers have any idea what is required of taxi drivers vs. Uber vs. others.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Jeffrey Nichols
Ph.D., IBM Research
San Diego Resident