I understand why everyone gets upset at this - there are rarely enough cabs, especially when I need one now. But the law is and has been very clear about paid transportation. Why don't we focus more on updating the law instead of asking politicians to break it?
I don't like excessive regulation any more than the next guy, but creating a new business in a regulated industry and then calling all payments "donations" just to get around the law feels like a practice that is... dangerous at best.
The regulations were crafted by elected representatives of the people, if they aren't good, we can change them. This is Washington State, we passed both marriage equality and legalized marijuana at the ballet box. Surely we can legalize cars with ridiculous pink moustaches.
The Seattle city council was updating the law. It was entirely within their power to update the law in such a way that it removed restrictions on cab and for-hire companies and kept TNCs lightly or not-at-all regulated.
This may go to a deeper level than you intended, but law -- especially business regulation law like this -- is SO detailed and complex that I think that most citizens despair of being able to easily comment on changing it in any way that is not entirely generalities (such as: "I don't think that we should cap Uber's car-count").
I was listening to the Seattle city council meeting, and one of the councillors asked -- someone, staff or maybe the bill author -- "Why did we strike the section that lists the innumerable things that we don't want professional drivers to do (like, 'transport a prostitute' and such)?" The bill author responded, "Oh, well, we're reclassifying the TNCs as for-hire companies, so we already have law explaining all the things they can't do." (I'm paraphrasing, of course).
This struck me as both ridiculous -- I'm fairly sure that we don't need separate business regulation making it... more?... illegal for cab drivers to aid and abet separate crimes -- and also a cause for despair. The city councillors who have been focusing considerable attention on this particular subject for weeks now are unable to keep the bill straight in their heads. How impenetrable will it be to everyone else?
Sidebar: a lot of anti-prostitute laws are actually anti-pimping laws. I almost guarantee the reason that 'no transporting prostitutes' law is on the books is that at some point someone had the wise idea to front his pimping operation as a car service. John pays a prostitute, she pays her 'driver', and if the police get involved he don't know nothing.
So they make up something to charge the pimp with.
