Greg's Corner

Did Austin miss Uber and Lyft during SXSW?

This past weekend the infamous tech and entertainment festival known as South by Southwest (SXSW) took place in the Southwest’s capital of cool, Austin, Texas. During the festival on Saturday night, the skies opened up, and rain descended upon ATX. Many of the revelers wanted to get a ride back to their hotels, but their requests for ride shares went unheeded.

In a lot of hip cities like Austin, you can get a ride from ride sharing apps Uber or Lyft. Last May, both of those services left Austin due to new regulations the city imposed on ride sharing services. The city wanted Uber and Lyft to do fingerprint background checks on their drivers much to the protests of the two leading ride sharing companies. Rather than fingerprint their drivers, Uber and Lyft preferred to leave town leaving Austin with no ride sharing services.

Much like nature, commerce abhors a vacuum, and it didn’t take long for new services to take the place of Uber and Lyft that were willing to play ball with the city. Those services are Ride Austin and Fasten. The problem with these new services is they didn’t seem to have the capabilities of scale that their predecessors had when the rains started to fall.

Due to the massive traffic to the respective apps, the apps crashed hard and left both riders and drivers stranded. Both companies were said to have server issues and claim that the issues were resolved by Sunday.

Both tourists and locals lamented the absence of both Lyft and Uber, but will that situation ever be resolved? Is the city being too protective of the city’s taxi services, or are Uber and Lyft being unreasonable by not fingerprinting their drivers?