Saturday, March 01, 2014

They Must Have Taken a Wrong Turn at Albuquerque ...

... because Seattle, Washington's city council is quite obviously very, very lost.

On Thursday, the council voted to "regulate the number of drivers that companies like UberX, SideCar and Lyft have active on their systems at any given time."

But Uber, SideCar and Lyft aren't located in Seattle, Washington. They're all located in San Francisco, California.

It's one thing for the city council to try to regulate the number of drivers offering rides in Seattle by regulating those drivers. That's a stump-stupid idea, but at least they can make a plausible (to supporters of political government, anyway) argument that they have the power/jurisdiction to do that.

The power to regulate what a company two states away may or may not display on its web site or communicate to its users/members in Seattle ("Fare waiting at 1100 Olive Way")? Um, no. Not a chance.

Hopefully some local Seattle companies will weigh in with common sense here and prevail upon the council to re-think (actually, think for the first time about) this. If this idiocy is allowed to proceed, it won't be long before some city council in Utah tries to tell I Can Has Cheezburger that it can only serve up 100 LOLCats an hour there.

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