Council Approves Proposed Changes to Taxi By-Law

640toronto.com
Nov. 23, 2016

Uber is one step closer to being regulated in the City of London.

Councillors voted during their meeting Tuesday night 7-4 in favour of proposed changes to London’s taxi bylaw that will eventually bring Uber under the umbrella of municipal oversight.

Councillors Morgan, Hubert, Hopkins and Armstrong were opposed while Councillors Turner, Squire, Zaifman and Usher were absent.

Speaking after the meeting, Councillor Jesse Helmer said the group hammered out some decisions on some of the issues surrounding the app’s regulation like surge pricing and background checks.

“So this by-law is a draft that’s kind of evolving over time, we’re targeting March as the time when we’re going to actually have a new by-law in place, so we’re going to be dealing with this issues again, we certainly haven’t resolved it yet but we have narrowed down some of the issues,” said Helmer.

Staff will report back to city politicians on a number of issues, including whether Uber cars should have cameras in them despite having an electronic record of passengers and drivers - something traditional taxis don’t have.

Helmer acknowledged it’s been a controversial point.

“I do think it’s an issue of contention, certainly people have very different views about it,” he said. “I think the vote when we dealt with it at Council was something like 7-6 so it was a close vote when we dealt with it in September. I think it’s going to come back up in January when we deal with this issue when we deal with this issue of the cloud-based systems, which we referred to staff to come back in January.”

Staff will present more information in the new year for Councillors to consider before the completely revamped by-law is expected to come into effect in March.