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December 17, 2021 - 3:30 PM
Uber has been denied permission to expand outside the Lower Mainland and Whistler and the mayor of the B.C. Interior's largest city is not pleased.
The ride-hailing company, which has been operating in the Lower Mainland and Whistler since January 2020, would cause undue harm to existing ride-hailing companies in the rest of the province, according to a ruling Dec. 15 by the Passenger Transportation Board.
“That view definitely does not align with what we are hearing and experiencing in Kelowna,” Mayor Colin Basran said in a written statement. “Our airport is the largest one in Canada without ride-hailing services, and we hear about that from domestic and international passengers all the time.”
Basran cited safety as an important reason to allow Uber to expand.
“They offer another option to get home for people who might be intoxicated,” he said. “Other cities have seen a drop in impaired driving charges after ride-hailing companies began operations. The local taxi industry does not have the surge capacity to fully meet holiday demand.”
In its application, Uber claimed Kelowna was ranked second in Canada for the most police-reported impaired driving offences in 2015.
Part of the board’s reasoning to deny the application was that it saw evidence indicating a weaker demand for passenger transportation since the pandemic started. It reported that in January 2020, there were 1,017,921 taxi trips in the Lower Mainland. The next month, once Uber began operations, the number for taxi rides dipped to to 849,520 while 420,425 Uber rides were taken.
As of May 2021, more than one million ride-hailing trips were taken in the region while the number taxi trips only rose to 589,328.
READ MORE: Ride-hailing company Uber's application to expand in B.C. rejected
The report did not show a decline in tax rides in Kelowna, but cited lower passenger volumes at Kelowna International Airport as evidence that the local industry hasn't recovered, although it compared old figures from 2019 and 2020. It also justified its reasoning by mentioning how a rival taxi company said there has been a significant decline in tourism.
The mayor, who's statement also did not include any figures for Kelowna, claims the number of taxi trips in the region have “more than fully recovered.”
It makes no sense to Basran how Kelowna could be excluded since it is one of the province’s biggest technology hubs. He said the City’s done its research and was planning for ride-hailing services to be part of its Transportation Master Plan.
“There are so many good reasons to allow ride-hailing services in Kelowna, so we will be following up with the board and the provincial ministries responsible for these decisions, including pointing out the data that shows Kelowna has bucked the provincial trend and has recovered taxi ridership beyond pre-pandemic levels, which seems to be the board’s main argument," he said.
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