City of Yellowknife staff looking into whether ridesharing services might need the city’s attention have reached a conclusion: it’s not going to be a thing any time soon.
Last month, as council studied plans to update the bylaw that regulates Yellowknife’s taxis, some councillors asked whether the same bylaw should be expanded to include ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber.
At a meeting on Monday, Rylund Johnson – the city’s manager of municipal law and policy – said he had made enquiries with those companies after July’s council discussion.
While Lyft didn’t offer a “meaningful response,” Johnson said, he was able to speak with Uber’s head of communications and public policy.
“A fair summary of that conversation is that they have no immediate plans to come to Yellowknife,” he said.
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“The days of Uber just showing up in a city unregulated, without permits and licences, are over. They no longer do that. That was their business model perhaps in older days, and they’ve taken a corporate position that they want to be provincially or territorially regulated.”
Johnson said that means the question of what to do with Uber and Lyft becomes less an issue for the city and its bylaws, and more an issue for the territorial government.
“If they were going to come to the Northwest Territories, it would really be an ask to the Minister of Infrastructure to set out that legislative framework,” he said.
Though other ridesharing firms do exist, Uber and Lyft are by far the best-known. In Canada, Uber is the more prevalent, though you’ll have little luck using either app in the NWT.
“Lyft is currently only in five cities in Canada,” said Johnson, characterizing the lack of widespread adoption of that service.
“I don’t anticipate the sixth city they announce will be Yellowknife.”
