MyAssBook

Oh, this is sweet. A lottery for accessible taxi licenses, in a city which has just decimated the taxi industry by granting unlimited free taxi licenses to Uber... and what do we get? Whomever is designing policy for the City of Hamilton has come up with this ridiculous idea of a lottery for accessible taxi licenses... that would require the applicant to spend about $45,000 for an accessible vehicle, in order to have access to a taxi market that has been utterly decimated by the stealth introduction of unlimited taxi licenses to the Uber cab company. (Compare that to Uber's sweet deal. Instead of even spending the $45,000 to provide even ONE SINGLE accessible Uber cab, all Uber has to do is pay an annual $20,000 for an exemption to the AODA law. It's a nice law if you can buy it.) My first guess is that most of the people on the taxicab priority list, who have been waiting for 25 to 30 years for a standard taxi license, thumbed their noses at the city's dastardly bai…

Poor Uber Driver Oh my. This is a sad story. Here is an Uber driver voicing his concerns in the Uber driver's forum about whether or not his "sharing economy" gig is paying off. It's possible that this is not a genuine post from a genuine Uber driver. I see that. It's the kind of schlopp I would write if I were in a mischievous mood. On the other hand, given what I already know about the Uber scam, and the people it exploits in order to get them to employ "assets they already own," in Tim Hudak's famous phrase, it's entirely reasonable to believe that this is a REAL Uber driver, who is just beginning to figure out who is making money, or should be making money, and who is getting royally boned. (See my story about the Uber driver who drove a football player from Chicago to Buffalo for minus $38.50.) I knew it was a scam from the beginning. That is why, when people asked me why, instead of tolerating the City of Hamilton's demonstrably abs…

Or.... you could just call a taxi..... For some time now, I have been trying to draw the attention of politicians in some Ontario jurisdictions to certain dangers attending their suspicious embrace of the Uber taxi company. In addition to Uber's obvious disregard for the law, and dubious insurance coverage there are also issues of passenger safety. So far, I have not received a single reply from a single politician, or hired bureaucrat, addressing the obvious and predictable safety concerns I have attempted to warn them about. (Toronto mayor, John Tory, has even blocked me on Twitter.) Given their often repeated claims that one of their core values in deciding whether to award Uber an unlimited number of taxi licenses is safety, I might have expected at least one response. Not a single response. Dead silence. I have tried to point out the dangers associated with the use of distractive devices for taxi dispatch. The reply was, Zip, zero, zilch. And I have tried to point out …