San Francisco’s Prop D

Selling the City to Uber

Today San Francisco voters will decide the fate of Prop D., a ballot measure to enact a very small sales tax on Uber and Lyft rides. While the measure requires a two-thirds majority to win approval, it appears poised for victory with virtually every local leader on board, with the exception of a small handful of environmental champions and the San Francisco Green Party.

Interestingly, Lyft and Uber are all-in on the sales tax, too. Every one of the 12 paid ballot arguments in the official ballot handbook was paid for by Uber, a clue that might make one say “Danger, Will Robinson!”

The short story is that the chump change generated by this tiny tax won’t come close to paying for the damage done by the ride hailing businesses operating in San Francisco. But Uber’s lobbyists got to Sacramento first, and the legislature limited ride hailing taxes to the token fee proposed by Prop D.

Measure D’s proposed tax would bring in about 35 cents a ride, a fee that contrasts sharply with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s proposal to more than triple Chicago’s current 72 cents per-ride tax, which is already double what Prop D would charge.

San Francisco now faces massive congestion caused by tens of thousands of ride-hailing cars flooding city streets daily and poaching riders from mass transit — an explicit goal of Uber’s business plan. When the city of Chicago calculated the damage done there by Lyft and Uber, the price tag came in at $40 million a year, and that was a few years back, before the Uber phenomenon reached today’s hyper stage.

Lyft and Uber are more than happy to pay a token tax in exchange for the legitimacy that will come with passage of Prop. D. Going forward they will use the revenue generated by this tax as a shield to deflect objections over the damage done to San Francisco.

Approval of Prop D would make San Francisco complicit in it’s own ruin, in the prostitution of our city to Lyft and Uber. Harsh, but there it is.

Prop. D is an incremental response to the pillaging of San Francisco by ride hailing companies. But it is in sync with the incremental and even upside-down responses that have been promoted for many of the challenges besieging the City.

The gridlock on San Francisco’s streets is but one symptom of the larger crisis afflicting San Francisco.

Homelessness is rampant in one of the richest cities on the planet, a city with so much money we’re regularly minting new billionaires.

Housing is now officially unaffordable for everyone but the wealthy. A two-bedroom apartment rents for $50,000 a year.

Our public schools are suffering due to decades of starvation budgets.

And in this crisis hucksters move in to take advantage.

Charter schools and privatization are pitched as remedies for the damage done by decades of school budget cuts.

YIMBYs encourage us to sell out to developers in hopes that the trickle-down effect of green lighting yet more market-rate housing for the wealthy will magically lower rents that were driven up by catering to the wealthy in the first place.

And now comes Prop D.

Mass transit in San Francisco has been in a decades long struggle. And the very business model of the ride hailing companies is to cannibalize mass transit.

The proponents of Prop D make an understandable proposal: make the best of a bad situation. Take the chump change. Make another poor patch to keep the boat afloat.

Meanwhile the tech barons keep pulling up the precious planks of our city and selling them as “created” riches.

Make no mistake, Uber and Lyft are eager to have San Francisco sign on the dotted line.

Prop. D legitimates Uber and Lyft. It affirms a social contract that says Uber and Lyft have a place in San Francisco.

But the fact is, these operators don’t. Another kind of ride hailing operation might contribute to San Francisco. But not these guys.

Today I will be voting No on Proposition D.