Honk If You're Angry About Ridesharing: D.C. Cabbies Stage Protest
Hundreds of D.C. cab drivers descended on downtown D.C. Wednesday with a message for Uber and the D.C. Council.
They honked their horns as if the sound would blow a hole in the Wilson Building, sending a message to D.C. lawmakers considering legislation that would legalize ridesharing services like Uber.
Protesting taxi drivers circled Freedom Plaza for two hours Wednesday. They say Uber and other ride-sharing services are getting an unfair competitive advantage from the D.C. Council.
"We want them to either deregulate the taxicabs like they let Uber, Sidecar and Lyft go without regulations, or regulate us so we've have a level playing field," said Royale Simms, an official with the Teamsters union, which organized the protest.
Some onlookers just shrugged their shoulders at the protest, like Christine Taverner. "This is why I'll keep using Uber, because cabs do stuff like this," Taverner says.
Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) says despite the noisy protest, she will not change her proposal to legalize Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. She says there is a good reason why app-based taxi services and regular cabs should be regulated differently.
"You have to realize that we're talking about two different kinds of services. One is the conventional taxicab service, and the others are the app-based services. They're entirely different models and they require different regimes of regulation," she says.
She says her bill also lets regular cabs operate like Uber as long as they adopt e-hailing technology, which she says gives drivers the level playing field.
The protest came on the same day that the D.C. Taxicab Commission announced that it will require the city's 7,000 licenses taxicab drivers to adopt an app that will allow passengers to hail cabs the way that users of Uber can with that company's app.
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