ATLANTA, GA. -- Back in late March, Uber officials argued against fingerprinting drivers before the Atlanta City Council. The city is considering legalizing ride-hailing companies, Uber and Lyft, to provide regular, legal pickups at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Then in late April, Uber and the city of Newark, N.J., entered into an agreement for the Newark Liberty International Airport. Uber will reportedly pay about $3 million upfront, and then $1 million each year over 10 years, comply with certain liability insurance requirements and enforce a zero-tolerance drug and alcohol abuse policy. That city and Uber had also previously disagreed about fingerprinting--but the current deal leaves the requirement out. Instead, Uber agreed to third-party background checks of all of its drivers.
In early May, a group of Atlanta’s city and airport leaders went to Newark to take a deeper dive into that city’s airport agreement with Uber. The Atlanta delegation reportedly included Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s Deputy Chief of Staff Katrina Taylor Parks, Senior Advisor Melissa Mullinax, Hartsfield-Jackson Chief Financial Officer Roosevelt Council and Tracy Harrison, the airport’s ground transportation director.
What we learned is that there’s actually additional due diligence in Newark’s contract… that actually yields more information than a fingerprinting would,” Parks told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Fingerprinting “does not give you everything all of the time. So what Newark did was they added layers…. that it made more comprehensive,” she said.
However, the city of Austin rejected leaving passenger safety to Uber’s background checks in early May, and the company effectively lost the referendum that would require local regulation of its drivers. Then, Uber left Austin over fingerprinting.
In Atlanta, city officials are holding on the new ride-hailing regulations, but movement is expected in the next few weeks to try and establish legal pickups at Hartsfield-Jackson by July 1, 2016.
Read the original story on the Atlanta-Journal Constitution website.
