3 ms·

How is such a contract legal in the first place? Shouldn't a city have to treat all businesses equally as a matter of law?

• lancepioch 7y ago
  Which law are you referring to?
  • deogeo 7y ago
    I suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause - the city is treating people very unequally if it allows one company, and forbids others.
    • Nasrudith 7y ago
      Sadly that strong interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause never got held as precedent. It sounds like it would be great for anti-corruption purposes.
• untog 7y ago
  In short, no. The city gives public space for Lyft to install these docks. Forcing them to treat every company equally in that regard simply wouldn't work, not to mention that the cost of building the network in the first place requires some guarantees in return. A bike share system needs lots of docks in order to be successful, granting one company a monopoly isn't that crazy in that context.
  • deogeo 7y ago
    The guarantees should then be limited to making available to Lyft enough space to build docks. Banning competition far exceeds that.
    • joshuamorton 7y ago
      It doesn't matter in practice (and in fact there's some decent arguments that one is better than two or more: consider the current ford Go-Bikes in SF. Would it be better or worse if there were 2 or 3 mutually incompatible bike racks? You end up fragmenting your transit system). You can only offer so many rack locations, so if Lyft takes 2/3 of them, no other provider can be as effective anyway. If we were looking at another kind of public transit, say, subway trains or busses that were subcontracted out to private companies, would you expect 2 competing subway providers? Or two competing bus systems in the same city? I wouldn't.
      • untog 7y ago
        NYC used to have three separate subway systems. To put it mildly, it was not effective, and we're still contending with three effects of it today.