New Westminster is onboard with a plan to develop an inter-municipal business licence for ride-hailing companies.
The Mayors’ Council recently endorsed TransLink’s plan for a regional approach, which would allow ride-hailing companies to pick up and drop off passengers in all municipalities and would include a single fee structure. The region is working toward having an interim inter-municipal licence in place by the end of January.
“I think all of the municipalities are going to be working hard over the next month-and-a-half to really try and come together and create that regional approach,” said Mayor Jonathan Cote. “I am cautiously optimistic we will be able to iron that out, hopefully, by the end of January.”
On Dec. 12, TransLink voted to expedite plans to develop an inter-municipal business licence for cities in Metro Vancouver.
Cote said a number of municipalities had started to put forward “a bit of a patchwork” of regulations, which raised concerns at the provincial level that it could inhibit ride-hailing from being introduced.
“The provincial government has made it very clear that they want to see ride hailing come in in the province of British Columbia. There were definitely some signals to the Mayors’ Council that if the Metro Vancouver region couldn’t work collaboratively and work together, and do so in a little bit more timely fashion, that they might be looking at actually taking that responsibility away from cities,” he said. “I think that’s what has motivated the Mayors’ Council and the cities to speed up the work that they were already contemplating about trying to develop a regional approach.”
At its Nov. 25 meeting, New Westminster city council endorsed some guiding principles developed regarding the introduction of ride-hailing. The principles included having staff participate in a regionally coordinated approach to business licensing for ride-hailing companies and developing strategies to mitigate the effects associated with ride-hailing.
“New West has really taken the position that we would like to partner with the region’s municipalities about setting up a regional approach to setting up a licensing system for ride-hailing,” Cote said. “Having every individual city doing their own thing isn’t an ideal situation and doesn’t allow cities to properly and efficiently be able to regulate that.”
More than a dozen ride-hailing companies have applied to operate in Metro Vancouver.
On Monday, the Passenger Transportation Board approved the first ride-hailing company in B.C. Green Coast Ventures, a Tofino-based company, plans to operate as Whistle in smaller resort communities outside the Lower Mainland, including Tofino, Ucluelet, Whistler, Pemberton and Squamish.
When will ride-sharing be available in New West?
“That really depends on the approval from the provincial process. As soon as that approval has been given in the Metro Vancouver region from the provincial process, those ride-hailing companies will be able to operate in the City of New Westminster,” Cote said. “Our hope is that early in the new year we are going to be able to create a regional framework that, whoever is operating in the city, will then have to be part of it. There will be nothing that will stop, on Day 1, the ride-hailing company from being able to operate in the City of New Westminster.”
Coun. Chuck Puchmayr recently expressed concern that ride-hailing could become the “vehicle of choice” for people in a city that has already has a high transit use.
Coun. Jaimie McEvoy said studies are coming out of universities in California and Britain that say ride-hailing companies compete with transit and end up putting more vehicles on the road.
“I do think we need to remember we have an environmental lens here, we have a disabled access lens,” he said. “In some cities, the arrival of ride-hailing has been devastating to those kind of social and environmental considerations.”
McEvoy is also concerned about the potential for setting up an “unequal situation” where the taxi industry must meet all kinds of regulations and ride-hailing companies don’t have to do any of that.
“You have never seen Uber say ‘we want the same regulations as taxis have’,” he said. “They never use that language about a level playing field. … They’d much rather have taxis at a disadvantage of existing regulations and argue that they are not a passenger transportation company.”
