One other payment will not clear up Boston’s supply driver issues

The Boston Metropolis Council is contemplating an answer to unsafe streets solely it might love: slap a tax on supply meals orders.

Drivers for DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats have raised the ire of Boston and its leaders for months.

Final June, Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox and Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge despatched a letter to executives from DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Applied sciences that described an “alarming enhance in illegal and harmful operation of bikes, mopeds and motorized scooters” by their meals supply drivers.

Lots of these drivers are working unregistered autos, the letter acknowledged. The 2 metropolis officers additionally described witnessing different violations that included working pink lights, driving on metropolis sidewalks, driving the incorrect manner down one-way streets, rushing, and collisions.

The answer was easy: Violations, the letter acknowledged, could end in fines, lack of license or automobile seizure.

It’s roughly the identical penalties that may hit anybody driving dangerously.

However some Boston Metropolis Councilors suppose that including a 15-cent payment to meals orders is the reply. They need the payment as a possible modification to a “street security and accountability for supply suppliers ordinance” proposed by Mayor Michelle Wu.

Wu’s ordinance can be simple: “crack down on harmful operations by supply employees utilizing bikes, mopeds and motorized scooters.”

The ordinance requires these supply firms to acquire umbrella legal responsibility insurance coverage protection for all employees using their platform with a view to obtain a allow to function in Boston. The coverage should cowl all employees, no matter what automobile they use to make deliveries, Wu wrote in a letter to the Metropolis Council final month. And it’ll look to safe information from firms that paperwork “unsafe and unlawful operations by supply drivers” on Boston roads, which the mayor says will guarantee safer streets and “assist the town maintain these firms accountable.”

So what would the Council’s potential payment do?

“It could theoretically be a 15-cent per order payment that may assist cowl prices of the enforcement of the ordinance,” Councilor Gabriela Coletta Zapata instructed the Herald.

Is the town planning to rent extra visitors police? What prices can be “coated” by the proposed payment?

And, simply as importantly, who would actually be paying that payment?

“This may make supply costlier within the metropolis and discourages customers from ordering and doing enterprise with eating places in Boston,” Stephen Clark, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Restaurant Affiliation, wrote in letters to Wu and the Metropolis Council final week.

Councilor Ed Flynn will get it: “Though I assist a lot of the proposed ordinance, I’ll vote in opposition to it based mostly on a brand new tax that can finally be handed on to eating places and the general public,” he mentioned in an announcement to the Herald. “It’s not the time for a brand new tax in Boston. We should reveal fiscal self-discipline and duty.”

We should, however that doesn’t imply we’ll. Fiscal self-discipline in Boston is one thing deftly prevented by our leaders, as nimbly as side-stepping a supply bike.