Tag Archives: Florida

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Regulating Rides: Markets Are Better than Politics

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Jacksonville, Florida’s politicians have, once again, arrived at an impasse on the matter of how to regulate “ride-sharing” services UberX and Lyft (Christopher Hong, “UberX, Lyft remain in limbo as City Council looks to state for new regulations,” Florida Times-Union, May 17). Instead of asking the state’s legislature to bail out its regulatory regime, perhaps the city council should exchange the “how” for a “whether,” and answer “no.”

The best way to handle regulation of UberX and Lyft is to repeal all regulations pertaining to taxi and limousine services in Jacksonville (and, of course, in other locales as well).

If that sounds radical, it is. But “radical” is not the same thing as “extreme.” Rather, it refers to addressing matters at their roots. So let’s do that.

Taxi regulation is not, and never has been, about protecting customers. It is, and always has been, about protecting established businesses from competition.

In Jacksonville’s case, the purpose of the city’s medallion system is to keep prices high for the benefit of Jacksonville Transportation Group (owners of Gator City Taxi, Yellow Cab and Express Shuttle) by limiting cab numbers, making entry into the market very expensive, and thus ensuring that JTG operates without significant competition.

When JTG and its political allies spout off about “protecting the customer,” they’re just laying down a line of bull to cover up their real agenda: Maintenance of JTG’s de facto monopoly at the EXPENSE of the customer. This is equally true of similar medallion and regulation regimes in cities across America.

Instead of fighting this monopoly scheme, UberX and Lyft are — in Jacksonville, anyway — ignoring it. Which does get to the bottom of the matter, doesn’t it?

Of course, this upsets the local politicians, who are used to being obeyed. It also upsets JTG, which has become accustomed to making money through control of politicians instead of through open competition to provide the best service at the best price.

But it doesn’t upset the customers — citizens of Jacksonville who, thanks to UberX and Lyft, can now get a ride when they need one, instead of when JTG gets around to providing one, at a price set by the competitive market rather than by JTG’s political machinations.

Jacksonville’s council faces a simple choice. It can remain aligned with JTG by shoring up its monopoly, or it can align itself with the voters, the customers, the people, whom it claims to serve.

If it wants to do the latter, it will resolve that the city shall repeal, and henceforth lay no, restrictions on commercial ride services beyond those codified in state law. Which, in my opinion, UberX and Lyft, and their customers, should ignore as well.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Florida Senate: Wrong on Cuba

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RGBStock Havana

On March 24, Florida’s State Senate voted 39-1 to condemn recent moves by president Barack Obama toward normalizing US relations with Cuba.

There’s no nice way to put this: Those 39 state senators voted in favor of maintaining the Castro regime in perpetuity. They voted against freedom for 11 million Cubans. Incidentally, they also voted against the economic interests of all Floridians and against reunification for Florida’s families of Cuban descent.

Freedom is a virus. Wherever free people go, they spread the desire for freedom to those less free than themselves. That desire is infectious. It’s also deadly to authoritarian regimes.

For 55 years, the US government has quarantined Cuba via embargo. That quarantine didn’t prevent the spread of authoritarianism from Cuba to other parts of the world (see, for example, Nicaragua and Venezuela). It just prevented the spread freedom to Cuba.

We’ve seen this effect, and its opposite, elsewhere. The obvious pairing to demonstrate the claim is China versus North Korea. China has become progressively more free over the decades in which it has enjoyed normalized relations with the US. Not completely free by any stretch of the imagination, but much freer. North Korea, under sanction and embargo, remains an utterly totalitarian state.

In Cuba, the embargo’s beneficiaries are the Castros and their henchmen.

In America, the embargo’s beneficiaries are moneyed interests who don’t want to compete with Cuban sugar, cigars or tourist destinations, as well as generations of “anti-Castro” Cuban emigre politicos who procure donations and US government grants to think about and talk about overthrowing the Castro regime … with no prospect of ever actually doing so, and no desire to see it done unless the transition puts them, and only them, in power in Cuba.

In Cuba and in America, everyone else is a victim, not a beneficiary, of the embargo.

It’s time for Cuban students to start attending America’s universities and for Cuban farmers to start selling their goods in America’s markets.

It’s time for American tourists to start visiting Cuba’s beaches and for American engineers to start improving Cuba’s infrastructure.

It’s time for Florida and Cuba alike to gain the advantages of new nearby trade partners (Tampa is closer to Havana than it is to Atlanta).

It’s time to end the quarantine and spread the freedom virus.

If Florida’s politicians won’t lead on this issue, they should at least get out of the way.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Fake Privatization: Shut Down the Red-Light Racket

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Red light camera system at the Springfield, Oh...
Red light camera system at the Springfield, Ohio intersection of Limestone and Leffels. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Red-light cameras sound like easy money to revenue-hungry city governments. Instead of paying police officers to enforce traffic laws and ticket offenders, they outsource the job to companies like American Traffic Solutions and Redflex. Those firms install the cameras, monitor their output, and sometimes even handle the mailing of traffic tickets to motorists who run red lights, collecting a share of the fines from their government clients in return for their services.

But Americans aren’t very comfortable with receiving traffic tickets from private sector corporations on the basis of remote video monitoring.

Among other problems, they note that it’s generally impossible to establish who was driving a car when it ran a red light without actually pulling the driver over at the scene. They also question the legality of allowing private sector actors, often not even located in the same states as the alleged offenders, to issue traffic citations. And of course there’s the “creepy” factor: Most Americans read George Orwell’s 1984 in high school. We don’t like the idea of being watched everywhere we go.

The cities, and the companies, claim that the cameras are all about safety rather than revenue. They cite statistics claiming reduced fatality numbers at intersections equipped with the cameras. But a 2014 report from Florida’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Governmental Accountability says that traffic accidents increase by 12% — and that rear-end collisions of the type occasioned by sudden brake application to avoid running lights increase by a whopping 35% — at such intersections.

Citizen protests — and legislative and judicial responses to those protests — are beginning to cut into the red-light camera racket. On March 16, two Broward County, Florida judges threw out 24,000 red-light camera tickets, representing $6.3 million in prospective revenue. The reason? While local police departments formally issued the tickets, they did so on the assurances of American Traffic Solutions employees in Arizona, not on their own observation of offenses or even on the basis of viewing the videos themselves.

Which brings up a fourth problem. The cities with red-light cameras, and the companies which operate them, note that these systems free up police officers for other duties. They sell that as a feature. I consider it a bug.

Cops who aren’t kept busy enforcing traffic safety laws are freed up to instead enforce laws against victimless “crimes” like gambling, prostitution and drug possession. When we consider the results — a burgeoning US prison population and growing body count of Americans gunned down by police officers on our streets — it may be that red-light cameras cost more than they bring in.

Real privatization is about getting government out of various areas of our lives, not leaving it in charge of those areas while allowing it to shunt the actual work off to unaccountable, rent-seeking “private” actors. If city governments want to privatize their streets, they should put those streets up for auction. Otherwise, they should shoulder the costs and the responsibilities of providing public roadways themselves.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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