Amid increased enforcement, LAX police issue citations to UberBlack and UberSUV drivers

http://www.dailynews.com/business/20140224/amid-increased-enforcement-lax-police-issue-citations-to-uberblack-and-ubersuv-drivers

By Brian Sumers, February 24, 2014

Police at Los Angeles International Airport have begun to enforce little-known rules that make it more difficult for two of the most popular ride-sharing services — UberBlack and UberSUV — to pick up passengers at terminals.

Los Angeles World Airports police have issued about a dozen citations to drivers for UberBlack and UberSUV in the past two weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter. Drivers are being cited for not producing to police detailed information about their passengers required by airport rules and regulations.

The citations have not affected services, and both UberBlack and UberSUV continue to make LAX pickups, according to a company spokesman.

The services, which have revolutionized the livery industry with their mobile phone-based dispatch systems, were thought to be in compliance with airport guidelines. But some of the UberBlack and UberSUV drivers apparently have been tripped up by a relatively minor bureaucratic hurdle.

The problem is what’s called a “waybill” — information carried by the driver that shows some key information about the passenger and the driving assignment. According to Sgt. Karla Ortiz of Los Angeles World Airports police, drivers must know and be able to produce the name of the customer, the terminal pickup location, the arrival time of the customer, the airline flight number, the date the ride was arranged and the destination.

But the phone application isn’t set up to receive nearly that much information. Drivers don’t learn the destination from the phone app. And it doesn’t ask for the passenger’s flight number.

Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for Uber, said in an email that the company is familiar with the waybill requirement and said that drivers, who are essentially independent contractors, should compile passenger information.

 “We communicated previously to UberBlack and UberSUV partners that drivers should call the rider as soon as they accept a request from LAX to record all fields that are incomplete on their electronic waybill,” Noyes said.

Airport officials say the waybill system ensures that only drivers with a need to be at the airport are there waiting for pickups. Ride-sharing drivers have far more freedom to operate elsewhere in the Los Angeles region than they do at LAX, where they are heavily regulated.

“This is just part of the enforcement to always look at the waybill,” Ortiz said. “This is the only way we can make sure that people who are conducting business at the airport are doing it properly.”
Drivers for UberBlack and UberSUV have generally not run afoul of airport police.

Unlike drivers for other services, such as Lyft, UberX and Sidecar, who are often driving their personal cars and are not registered as commercial drivers with state regulators, drivers for UberBlack and UberSUV usually have proper permits from the state to allow them to make airport pickups. Drivers for UberBlack and UberSUV also generally pay LAX a $4 fee per ride, a fee that nonprofessional drivers dispatched by ride-sharing companies like Lyft do not pay.

Most of the recent enforcement action at LAX has focused on casual drivers for Lyft, UberX and Sidecar services.

At the time, Noyes said customers should instead take UberSUV and UberBlack, which the company said were in compliance with airport rules and regulations.

Alex Darbahani, president of KLS Transportation Services in Beverly Hills, said his drivers, who are not part of any ride-sharing applications, have been dealing with the waybill issue for years. He said compliance is not that difficult, so long as drivers have access to the data. His drivers record the pertinent information on a yellow sheet of paper.

“If the cops pull you over and you don’t have a waybill, you’re going to get cited,” Darbahani said. “You have to have in writing the customer’s name what airline they are arriving on and what time they are arriving.”



During a recent two-month crackdown against drivers for the three services, officers gave out 200 citations. In January, as a result of the crackdown, UberX — the most popular of those services, and part of the same company as UberSUV and UberBlack — said it would no longer facilitate LAX pickups.