Similar battles are being waged all across the sharing economy as municipal and state governments wrestle with questions about what kinds of licensing, taxes, and oversight make sense for businesses that operate virtually and “employ” a rotating group of regular citizens.

Last year, Airbnb found itself in hot water in a dispute over whether the company should be subject to the city’s 14 percent hotel tax, a battle it fought—and lost. After being hit with the CPUC fines, both Lyft and SideCar refused to comply and adopted the Airbnb argument: that the old rules need to be updated instead of reining in the new companies. “Asserting that we are operating a transportation carrier,” SideCar founder Sunil Paul posted on the company’s blog, “is like saying that Airbnb is a hotel chain, that Travelocity is an airline, or that eBay is a store.”

sfmag, 29.04.13.

i believe that ridesharing is an integral part of a working transportation system—one that increases people’s mobility options.

i hate taxis (esp. when cycling around in SF; and they’re expensive), the bus may never come, BART closes after midnight, outside of walking distance, i may not have my bike with me or am not going somewhere with a bikable route… immensely thankful for rideshare. LYFT! in particular.

i have, three times, hitchhiked for rides to get home after music shows because those cities i was in didn’t have rideshare.

also, i still believe it’s “The revolution will not be motorised.” but yeah, rideshare’s pretty awesome.

East Palo Alto officials added signs and flashing lights in this crosswalk after 6-year-old Sioreli Torres was killed in 2011. photo by Noah Berger

Joseph Molinaro was not jaywalking when he was hit and knocked 30 feet on Sept. 26, 2009. The 85-year-old was in a crosswalk. Investigators found that the driver’s failure to observe the pedestrian’s right of way was the primary cause of the fatal collision.

But Pittsburg police did not give the woman driving a ticket, and the Contra Costa County district attorney did not file criminal charges.

Sixty percent of the 238 motorists found to be at fault or suspected of a crime faced no criminal charges during the five-year period, CIR found in its analysis of thousands of pages of police and court records from Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties.

When drivers did face criminal charges, punishment often was light. Licenses rarely were taken away. Of those charged, less than 60 percent had their driving privileges suspended or revoked for even one day, an automatic penalty in drunk driving arrests.

Forty percent of those convicted faced no more than a day in jail; 13 drivers were jailed for more than a year. By contrast, those charged in accidental shootings often serve lengthy jail terms, according to media reports.

Walkers are perhaps the most unprotected users of the transportation system. The human body is no match for 3,000 pounds of speeding steel. Autopsy reports routinely describe blood-soaked clothing, fractured skulls, cracked ribs and broken limbs. In the Bay Area, minorities make up a majority of the dead, and the elderly are more likely to die walking than people from other age groups.

Families of the victims and advocates say that until there are more serious consequences for drivers who kill pedestrians, the deaths will continue.

“If there isn’t a penalty, the message is that it’s all right to run people over and kill them,” said Elizabeth Stampe, executive director and the sole paid employee of nonprofit advocacy group Walk San Francisco. “There’s a joke from New York that maybe isn’t very funny: If you want to kill someone and get away with it, use a car – and that’s true here as well.”

read more: center of investigative reporting, 29.04.13.

California’s signature environmental law needs to be reformed because NIMBYs are using it to block smart growth.

Parker Place provides a case study in how CEQA could be reformed.

Ali Kashani thought he had a sure thing. In 2008, the longtime Berkeley developer proposed to build one of the greenest housing projects in East Bay history. Kashani has long been an advocate for smart-growth development — dense housing and mixed-use projects built on major transit corridors in urban areas. And the architect that he commissioned for his smart-growth project in Berkeley designed it to meet LEED Platinum standards.

….In other words, the Parker Place project is a liberal environmentalist’s dream.

…But nothing’s ever a sure thing in Berkeley, a city that is home to some of the most vocal and stubborn anti-growth activists in the state. In November 2010, after the Berkeley City Council approved Parker Place, a small group of these activists sued to block the project, using the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to do it. And now, more than four years after Kashani unveiled his proposal, it’s still tied up in litigation. “They really don’t like infill projects,” Kashani said, referring to how anti-growth activists view urban development. “And they’re holding up good projects that could be on the market.”

“The law has become so dysfunctional,” said Jennifer Hernandez, an attorney for the Holland & Knight firm and a Berkeley resident who advocates for broad reforms of CEQA. “To call this environmental protection anymore … it’s really about quality-of-life” issues.

The California Legislature has approved minor reforms to CEQA during the past decade in an effort to spur smart growth. But CEQA still allows anti-growth activists to pervert environmental law. For example, the group that sued to block Parker Place contended that the city’s environmental study was “inadequate,” essentially because the project involves the cleaning up of polluted soil and groundwater.

Yes, you read that right. A project that would not only help fight climate change, but also would clean up contaminated soil and groundwater in downtown Berkeley has been blocked in court thanks to a law that’s supposed to protect the environment.

read more: eastbayexpress, 13.03.13.

Last week, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill that would require drivers in California to officially recognize that cyclists exist.

Reading from Assembly Bill 840:

This bill would require the [driver’s license] examination to also include a test of the applicant’s knowledge and understanding of the provisions of the California Driver Handbook relating to bicycling, including, but not limited to, bicycle markings, bicycle lanes, and bicycles in travel lanes.

Which begs the question: How is this not already law?

Also, does the fact this hasn’t been on the books explain why so many motorists don’t seem to know what they’re doing when driving around cyclists?

With my sincerest gratitude to the many drivers out there who adeptly share the road with their two-wheeled friends, I have to ask: What’s wrong with the rest of you?

… And so, as we await the passage of AB 840, here are a few laws that every driver should know to follow:

• If the cyclist needs the whole lane, the cyclist gets the whole lane.

All my Emily Post-ing about being considerate notwithstanding, the law really is pretty clear on this. Even if you think the cyclist made a poorly considered choice in opting to ride on the street that you happen to be on, sharrow or not, you seriously aren’t allowed to edge the rider off the road. Cyclists should try to stick to the right side of the lane — but not if there’s a reasonable chance that he or she will get hit with a door while doing so. So ease up, driver. Wait to pass when it’s safe and we’ll all get there on time and with our collarbones intact.

• Check behind you before swinging your door open onto the street.

Seriously, guys, this one is so obvious, I’m only including it because it offers a logical transition from the above and because I am still being victimized by car doors all the goddamn time.

• Please stay the fuck out of the bike lane.

I understand your complaints, I know that the cyclist cruising slowly up the Valencia Street bike lane scoping out spare tables or friends or women at your five most favorite restaurants, is annoying. But you know what else is totally annoying? Intracranial bleeding. So unless your vehicle has a siren, a towing winch, or rear compartment full of deliverables, please get out of my legally designated safe space.

sfweekly, 01.03.13.

thank you, sfweekly/ben christopher! now if everyone can reblog the shit out of this, print it out and paste it everywhere, like on parking meter machines, that’d be rad.

122782:

Just the other day a cop told me “We are the police.  We trump everything.” when I asked about several police cars parked in a bike lane.

Hoping this cyclist gets the justice she deserves.

on another note about cops—not only do they park their cars in the bike lanes, on crosswalks, on lanes blocking traffic when there are more sensible places to park or pull over someone to write them a ticket, but even cops with bikes park them in a stupid way blocking people.

yesterday i was walking on shattuck just north of university ave., and a cop just kickstanded/kickstood(?) his bike almost on the middle of the sidewalk while writing a ticket or something to three homeless men. like wtf! you could’ve propped your bike right next to the wall and not impeded heavy foot traffic.

(via thegreenurbanist)

She and Carlos Villarreal, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, both argue that the law would clog the courts with bench warrants for unpaid citations, divert police resources away from more pressing problems, and do nothing to actually help homelessness.

Moreover, they say it could potentially violate the civil liberties of homeless people — Della-Piana points out that the measure leaves no exception for girl scouts sitting on sidewalks to sell cookies, but most likely, they won’t be the ones targeted.

“There’s pressure on the commercial real estate folks to come up with something because we’re in an economic crisis and people need to find someone to blame,” she said. “Pinning this [downturn] on homeless people is a red herring.”

eastbayexpress, 03.10.12.
also read this letter to the editor re: this piece. “Standing up for sitting down”
more info on NO on S1. 

photo by matt s.

and from the berkeley daily planet, 16.10.12: 

Anyone who thinks Berkeley needs an anti-sitting law to bring people to the commercial districts must have missed the Sunday Streets event [this past Sunday].

..If my rule-breaking is ethical and safe (and Idaho-legal), why does it annoy anyone? Perhaps it is because we humans are not good at weighing the dangers we face. If we were, we’d realize that bicycles are a tiny threat; it is cars and trucks that menace us. In the last quarter of 2011, bicyclists in New York City killed no pedestrians and injured 26. During the same period, drivers killed 43 pedestrians and injured 3,607.

Nor are cyclists pedestrians, of course (at least not while we’re pedaling). We are a third thing, a distinct mode of transportation, requiring different practices and different rules. This is understood in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where nearly everyone of every age cycles. These cities treat bikes like bikes. Extensive networks of protected bike lanes provide the infrastructure for safe cycling. Some traffic lights are timed to the speed of bikes rather than cars. Some laws presume that in a bike-car collision, the heavier and more deadly vehicle is at fault. Perhaps as New York City’s bike share program is rolled out, these will become the case here.

Laws work best when they are voluntarily heeded by people who regard them as reasonable. There aren’t enough cops to coerce everyone into obeying every law all the time. If cycling laws were a wise response to actual cycling rather than a clumsy misapplication of motor vehicle laws, I suspect that compliance, even by me, would rise.

If Kant were a New York City cyclist. nytimes, 04.08.12.

too bad the law (eg. california vehicle code) doesn’t recognize this (except in idaho and other progressive places). fuck you, john forester. despicable old man sitting around in lemon grove (east san diego county) typing shit in bike forums refusing to believe the fact that bicycle infrastructure leads to higher cycling rates (like climate change deniers, but bikes), while still adding “Bicycle transportation engineer” to his signature. what a fucker. this man is the “father” of “vehicular cycling”, making bikes follow the same rules as cars in the cvc. so there’s your reason to hate him, too. (yeah I know I shouldn’t spread hate, but..) or now you know to ignore his comments if you come across him on the interwebs.