New fronts in the rideshare wars
Plus that Issaquah school bond tanks, a bid for a better state flag and some recommended reading
Hailing an Uber to get home from the big game won’t cost you an arm or a leg under a bill aimed at keeping tipsy sports fans off the road.
That’s the pitch for Senate Bill 5600 Sen. Emily Alvarado, D-Seattle, made to her colleagues on the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee last week. The proposal would install a surge protector of sorts, shielding Uber and Lyft riders from the sky-high prices people can pay to leave a Taylor Swift concert or the 49ers-Seahawks game.
In short, the bill would cap fares at no more than 120% of what your driver gets paid for the ride during packed events where a ride can set you back $200 easily. The bill would let local governments designate drop-off and pick-up zones to make sure your Uber can find you among the masses.
Uber drivers in Seattle, where such events tend to happen, get at least the city's hourly minimum wage of $20.76. Traffic nightmares like concerts and football games pay drivers a bit better between demand-induced surge pricing and the smaller pool of willing drivers. There are no numbers on how much better drivers are paid in lieu of hard and fast surge bonus policies at Uber and Lyft. Surge-priced rides are prone to massive glitches and Lyft has given daily commuters the option to bypass them altogether.
Let's assume your average Uber driver gets a generous 20% surge at a Beyoncé concert. An hour-long ride from Lumen Field to Tacoma would cost around $54.80. That’s a whole lot cheaper than paying for parking, designating a driver, or risking a DUI after pounding shots downtown.
The rideshare lobby was a hard nope on the idea when they shared their thoughts on the bill with the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee last week. Lyft’s man in Olympia, Nicholas Johnson, argued that capping fares would mean capping driver pay and would all but guarantee fewer drivers on the road.
SB 5600 would hit the books 90 days after the end of the session or well before the football hooligans of the world come to Seattle next summer for the World Cup. Expect an Uber to be anything but cheap in downtown Seattle around then.
TG
A fairer shake for chauffeurs
Premium rideshare drivers for swanky services like Uber Black are often doomed the minute their ride isn’t en vogue. Maybe Uber tells you it’s the wrong trim level or it’s got the wrong options. Now you’re on the hook for a six-figure car loan you can’t drive for work.
That was the gist of what a long line of rideshare drivers told the House Committee on Labor & Workplace Standards last week. Rep. Edwin Obras introduced House Bill 1332 after his constituents said they were dropping up to $70K on cars to drive for Uber Black, just to see their new rides crossed off the list. The Uber Black business is notoriously expensive for the driver and can get you canceled for no good reason.
HB 1332 would see to it that a Cadillac couldn’t be disqualified from premium rideshare services if the make and model still qualified. If rideshare companies wanted to nix a specific model from their fleets entirely, they must give drivers at least 60 days’ notice. Drivers whose rides were deemed ineligible for their features alone in the past five years could also reapply for service.
Rose Feliciano with TechNet, the lobby representing Uber and Lyft in this case, told the House Committee on Labor & Workplace Standards that the companies’ ride standards are exclusively customer-driven and subject to spur-of-the-moment changes. It's sort of a given that your typical Uber Black passenger is going to come with eccentric tastes, after all.
The bill made it out of committee on Friday. It piggybacks on a litany of legislation that lawmakers foisted on Uber and Lyft in recent years. These laws extended unemployment benefits, paid family and medical leave, and a guaranteed minimum wage to rideshare drivers.
As we reported in the past, the legislation above was largely the result of Olympia’s Democratic majority and the rideshare industrial complex wanting to sidestep a pricey fight at the ballot box. We’ll see if everyone can hug it out this time around.
TG
Eastside voters reject Issaquah school bond, again
Early returns suggest voters are absolutely tanking the Issaquah school district’s latest bond measure. With about 25% of the ballots counted as of Tuesday evening, 54% of voters were rejecting the measure.
That’s an ass-kicking in school bond politics because the Washington Constitution requires school districts to get 60% of voters to approve a bond. I went deep into the Issaquah campaign on Monday to explore the pros and cons of that restriction.
This is the fourth time the Issaquah school district has turned to voters for more money to build a fourth high school. The 2016 bond measure and 2022 capital construction levy passed and helped the school district reserve about $135M for the project, but the district still needed about $139M to start building the high school. A simple majority of voters approved the $642M bond and tax increase in the 2024 general election, but it wasn’t enough to surpass the supermajority threshold required to take on debt.
Early results from yesterday’s election indicate a defeat for the smaller, $232M bond that would have maintained the school district’s current tax rate but still allowed the school district to build.
The school district faced strong opposition from the Committee of Concerned Advocates for Responsible Education (CCARE) political action group, primarily led and funded by the Providence Points retirement community which would neighbor the planned high school campus. The majority of local voters rejecting the bond points to much broader opposition to the school district’s efforts to raise money for school construction.
SK
A bid for a better state flag
Doesn’t Washington’s flag… suck? Ask any transplant who’s moved out here—heck, even born-and-raised Washingtonians—and you’re likely to hear something to that effect. Lawmakers have heard the critics loud and clear.
House Bill 1938 from Rep. Strom Peterson, D-Edmonds, would send the state back to the drawing board to brainstorm a new banner for our fair state. The bill reads like something of a mea culpa, noting the flag’s “poor design” and how it “fails in other ways aesthetically.”
“The legislature further finds that the flag fails in other ways aesthetically. It uses too many colors, and its design is essentially a seal on a green background with text. This is widely regarded as an outdated and uninspired approach to flag design.”
Peterson also notes in his bill that George Washington’s portrait is a drag on the flag too, given his “limited historical connection to the state itself.” You could say the slave-owning first president, who was dead and buried almost a century before our state’s founding in 1889, makes for a poor symbol for an increasingly progressive state.
The job of creating a new state flag would be up to a redesign committee, which would seat the director of the Washington State Arts Commission, four tribal representatives, an appointee of the Secretary of State, and a bicameral/bipartisan delegation of four state lawmakers, among others.
As for potential designs, we would be remiss not to give a shout-out to the “Doug.” The decades-old banner was designed by Portland, Ore., native Alexander Baretich in the early nineties as a symbol for the unofficial nation of Cascadia, encompassing Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. As you might guess, it was named after the Douglas fir emblazoned on it—the same tree nestled between the digits of your standard Oregon license plate.
Eagled-eyed observers and history nerds may recognize the Doug flag’s color scheme, which just so happens to resemble the flag of the African nation of Lesotho. We’ll assume it was just a coincidence.
Among the other potential contenders is Bellingham graphic designer Bradley Lockhart’s design.1 We’ll refer you to Pria Mahadevan and Emily Denny’s rundown of his artistic process for Columbia Climate School.
TG
Recommended Reading
Ley cops a plea in fake registration case
Shari Phiel of The Columbian brings us the news that Rep. John Ley, R-?, pleaded guilty to two lesser charges to settle a felony voter fraud case stemming from his 2022 bid for a House seat in Southwest Washington’s 18th Legislative District.
Ley claimed to live in the 18th when his actual home was in Camas, in the neighboring 17th District, a court ruled. He survived a similar challenge to his residency during last year’s campaign, in which he narrowly defeated Democrat John Zingale.
Ley’s admission is what’s called an “in re Barr” plea, meaning he pleaded guilty to lesser related charges he didn’t commit to avoid the risk of conviction on a greater offense. He still maintains he was following the letter of the law. Had he been convicted of the more serious charge, Ley could have been ousted from his seat in the Legislature.
2PQ
A plan to revive the mosquito fleet
They like to get way down in the seaweed of ferry policy over at The Urbanist, so naturally Ryan Packer is all over Rep. Greg Nance’s plan to kinda-sorta revive the Mosquito Fleet—the loose network of privately run ferries that once crisscrossed Puget Sound.
State law now effectively bans private ferry service to protect the perpetually troubled Washington State Ferries from cherry-picking competition. Only King and Kitsap counties are allowed to run passenger ferries, and mostly on routes that the state system abandoned after the repeal of the state motor vehicle excise tax more than two decades ago. Business is booming on those boats.
Nance’s House Bill 1923 wouldn’t create an old-school ferry free-for-all. Instead, the Bainbridge Island Democrat’s proposal would expand the list of local governments authorized to provide passenger-only service. For example, San Juan County could run boats from its island communities to Bellingham or Anacortes, or the city of Kirkland could ferry people across Lake Washington into Seattle.
PQ
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Yrsa the Westie returns to the reader-pet spotlight
Yrsa becomes part of the select group of reader pets who have appeared more than once in this space. Photo courtesy of her human, subscriber Matt Landers. Matt and his colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center sent us four pet photos this week, so we’re going to do a series. Want to see your pet in this space? Drop us a photo and some caption material.
Lockhart also redesigned his hometown’s official flag
Fun fact, there used to be daily service from Observer World Headquarters on the western side of Vashon Island to downtown Seattle. The Woman Who Lets Me Live With Her really wishes that still existed because it would be a boat directly from her house to her office.