City hall, it will surprise no one to hear, does a poor job of coping with disruptive change. To understand how poor, consider what happened on Tuesday. The licensing and standards committee was deliberating how to regulate two things: food trucks and taxis.
Take food trucks first. They disrupt the dining business by offering a curbside option to sitting down at a restaurant. But other cities have managed to allow food trucks to operate on their streets without too much bother. Go to Austin, Tex., Portland, Ore., or Vancouver and you can get fish tacos or burritos or fancy cupcakes fresh all over the place. Toronto just cannot seem to manage it.
A first attempt to expand Toronto street offerings beyond hot dogs and French fries was a disaster. Officials came up with rules that required vendors to shell out thousands for licensing fees and an unwieldy city-approved cart. A second, much less restrictive attempt prohibited food trucks from operating within 50 metres of a restaurant. That effectively kept them off many busy downtown streets.
On the third-time-lucky principle, the committee took another stab at it on Tuesday by reducing the no-go zone for food trucks to 30 metres from the nearest restaurant. Vendors said they might be able to live with that. But restaurant owners and business-improvement-area leaders lined up to complain that the trucks would ruin them by blocking storefronts and luring away diners.
Now consider taxis. The disruptive change looming over the cab industry is Uber, the ride-sharing company that lets people order a taxi or private car from their phones with an easy-to-use app. Riders love it; cabbies hate it. The city says Uber is violating the law by running a cab service without a licence.
But its regulation of the existing industry has been just as poor as its handling of the food trucks. One reform in the late 1990s tried to deal with the issue of absentee taxi owners and shabby cars by introducing two kinds of licence – the standard licence, which could be sold on the market; and the ambassador, which could not. A second reform last year ended the two-tier model, moved to a new single licence and transitioned to an owner-operator system. On Tuesday, the licensing committee voted to go back to the two-tier model.
The complicated, endless debate has consumed countless hours at city council committees as opposing taxi lobbies duke it out. This Tuesday's featured a noisy walkout by the owner-operator crowd that led the committee chair to order a brief recess in proceedings.
In the background of it all is Uber. As its app and others like it grow in popularity, the taxi business as we know it is sinking. All the noise at city hall is just the sound of chairs being rearranged on the deck.
In both cases – food trucks and taxis – it is producers rather than consumers that get all the attention. Taxi owners and drivers lead protests to city hall; taxi riders generally do not. Restaurant owners and BIAs send delegates to city hall; diners just looking for a burrito do not.
Governments tend to listen to the loudest, best organized voices. It happens, for example, when Ottawa puts dairy producers ahead of consumers by supporting a supply-management system that keeps prices high. A government has to learn to filter out the braying of producers and put the consumer first. In the case of food trucks, that means giving diners a chance to find a food truck in a convenient spot even if the owner of a nearby restaurant worries about the competition. In the case of taxis, it means giving riders the chance to order up a car in the easiest way possible even if that threatens the taxi business as we know it.