Informed Outrage Only: Stop blaming Metro for Transportainment
The TLC is a tiny, overworked office with limited ways to intervene on Broadway. Like so much in Nashville, the real power lies with the State of Tennessee.
This one brought to you by Nicole, known for her capacious knowledge of Metro and its many overlapping bureaucracies. Follow her on Twitter at @startleseasily
If you’ve paid attention to the news in Nashville, you know that transportainment (sometimes called “transpotainment” by people who don’t know any better) has become a contentious topic lately. With COVID-19 restrictions lifted, tourism surged downtown. A group called “Safe Fun Nashville” popped onto the scene a couple of months ago to lobby against the Broadway-industrial complex. Downtown shenanigans were even featured in the New York Times. Metro Council Member Freddie O’Connell (District 19, which includes the downtown core) introduced a bill that would beef up regulation for many of the “party vehicles.” Currently, state law prohibits the Metropolitan Transportation Licensing Commission (TLC) from regulating vehicles >15 passengers or >10,000 pounds.
O’Connell’s bill is cosponsored by a supermajority of the Council and will be up for third and final reading at the October 19th Council meeting, barring a deferral. The TLC has been at the center of much of the controversy, often blamed for the proliferation of party vehicles downtown. Most of the people blaming the TLC have little to no concept of (1) the TLC’s jurisdiction under state law and Metro ordinances; and (2) the way the TLC functions and deliberates on such matters. I would venture a guess that the very people bemoaning the TLC’s abdication of their duties in this respect had never heard of the TLC before this summer. In the minds of its critics, the TLC is a rubber stamp that exists to, like, make life miserable for people who live and work downtown, I guess?
If you are new to Transportainment, ignore the alarmist tweets from the Safe Fun Nashville account. Leading up to TLC’s most recent consideration of applications for additional pedal vehicle permits (including “pedal taverns” loathed by many, but also pedicabs, a point-to-point transportation method that could reduce congestion and carbon emissions downtown – and are widely used in peer cities like Austin), these tweets might make you think we needed pitchforks to get the TLC to say “no” to future applications.
If you were tracking this issue before the outrage machine kicked into gear, you knew that the applications were never going to be approved. Intense public outcry included, notably, heavy hitters such as the Nashville Downtown Partnership and the Convention and Visitors Corp (CVC). Reader, I’m not going to get into CVC President Butch Spyridon’s role in all of this, because frankly, I don’t care. All I want to do is defend the TLC, which is apparently the hill on which I’ve decided to die.
Staff of the Transportation Licensing Division (henceforth “the Division,” to avoid confusion between the Commission and its staff) include Director Billy Fields, two office staff, and two inspectors, who are responsible for regulating:
· Taxicabs,
· Other passenger vehicles for hire (like limousine companies and livery services),
· Wrecker and towing services,
· Booting services,
· Horse-drawn carriages,
· Low speed vehicles (i.e. golf carts for hire),
· Shared urban mobility devices (i.e. scooters), and
· Pedal vehicles (pedicabs & pedal carriages, the technical name for pedal taverns)
With an average salary less than $60,000, our two inspectors are overworked and underpaid. There is simply too much to do and not enough people to do it. Keep in mind, these folks have to cover everything across all of Davidson County. We don’t have a dedicated “Downtown Division” cruising the streets to catch pedal taverns that have gone rogue. Maybe we should, but that would take additional staff and additional resources, which Council would have to approve. And with all the hoopla around transportainment, maybe they’ll factor this into the next budget. They did add an additional staff member into the FY2021-22 budget to focus on scooters, which is certainly better than nothing. Until then, this is what we’ve got. And it’s not like MNPD is enforcing the regulations either. So, now that we’ve (hopefully) settled the debate about the staff’s role in this, aka underpaid overworked punching bags for the “Who Will Enforce Our Laws?!” crowd, let’s move on to the Commission itself.
The TLC, like other Metro boards and commissions, is made up of citizen volunteers appointed by the mayor and approved by the Council. The seven commissioners serve two-year terms. The current slate of commissioners include people who work and live downtown, attorneys (it wouldn’t be a Metro Commission if it didn’t have attorneys), people who work in the transportation industry, the Executive Director of the Tennessee Disability Coalition, and a man who once referred to himself as “Billy’s Bike Guy” (he loves bikes). Basically, it’s a group of people who care about Nashville and are not getting paid to get yelled at about how they’re ruining it.
Every year (yes, every year), the TLC considers new applications for pedal vehicles, at a publicly-noticed meeting, with a public hearing. As someone who has watched literally every single TLC meeting available online -- going back as far as 2012 -- I can assure you that the TLC does not make these decisions lightly. They are not a rubber stamp. They take as much public comment as the public wants to give and they debate the pros and cons of adding vehicles to the market for hours. Please watch literally any of the previous public hearings regarding pedal vehicle applications. Here’s the recording of the 2019 meeting.
Perhaps the best argument against blaming the TLC for the transportainment tumult is that their authority is severely limited by state law; Metro can’t regulate any vehicle for hire that weighs over 10,000 pounds or carries more than 15 passengers. This is how we end up with unregulated gems like the Nashville Tractor and the seemingly endless stream of DIY party buses. While the pedal taverns annoy folks, it seems like the current complaints center on safety and the sheer volume of party vehicles. At the Council's Transportation & Infrastructure Committee October 5 meeting, CM O'Connell noted that he receives very few complaints about the currently regulated portion of the industry (which includes pedal taverns). The vast majority of constituent complaints, according to O'Connell, concern the unregulated vehicles (party buses, tractors, and the like). These vehicles are the jurisdiction of the State of Tennessee.
The TLC can only throttle the market entry of those vehicles which it has the authority to regulate. It can’t do anything to stop your neighbor with a tractor from attaching a hot tub to the back of it and charging people for a less-than-sanitary tour of Broadway.
If you’re just now realizing you had this all wrong, and the TLC should never have been the target of your outrage, don’t feel too bad. When even a former Council member and a current living legend have subpar takes on an issue, you can’t be expected to get it right. You may be asking, “Okay, so who should we blame for downtown?” And to this, I answer, “It doesn’t matter.” Instead of focusing on who to blame, those who wish to see changes should be pushing for the state legislature to allow Metro Council broader authority to institute regulations; for Metro Council to institute said regulations; and for Council to allocate enough funding to hire the staff needed to implement said regulations.
The Transportation Licensing Division staff are drowning as it is, and I fear that advocates for regulation will simply gloss over the part where, you know, you actually regulate. And then we’ll be back here again a year from now, with the same people screaming the same stuff about the TLC, and I’ll have to be like, “Guys, I already went over this!” and it’s just going to really annoy me. So, please, if you’re going to be involved, be involved! And take the time to do a little research first. And if you didn’t know about any of this, now you do.
Nicole tweets about all things Metro at @startleseasily