Archive Note — 2026: This post was originally written in August 2018 during an ongoing dispute over St. Augustine’s vehicle-for-hire regulations. I was frustrated by what I believed was inconsistent enforcement among traditional taxis, rideshare companies and other transportation providers. I’ve substantially edited the original language while preserving the argument and my frustration at the time. Regulations have changed since this was written.
By 2018, I had spent considerable time writing city officials about St. Augustine’s vehicle-for-hire regulations.
Abraxi Taxi had commercial taxi insurance, maintained its vehicles and spent money complying with the requirements we understood applied to traditional taxi companies.
My complaint was not that Abraxi deserved fewer rules.
My complaint was that businesses needed to know what the rules were and whether they were actually going to be enforced.
St. Augustine’s transportation market had changed dramatically. Traditional taxis were competing with rideshare vehicles, shuttles, pedicabs, golf carts and other forms of transportation.
Different businesses could reasonably fall under different regulations. But from the perspective of a small taxi company investing money in compliance, the system often seemed confusing and inconsistent.
I had contacted city officials, attended meetings and repeatedly asked for clarification.
Eventually my position became fairly simple:
Enforce the regulations, rewrite them, or remove them.
Small businesses can work with strict rules. They can work with relaxed rules.
What they have difficulty working with is uncertainty.
Abraxi Taxi would continue carrying commercial insurance and maintaining safe vehicles because those things made sense regardless of what government required.
But if the city established regulations for vehicles for hire, businesses deserved to know what those regulations meant and how they would be applied.
Looking back, I probably could have expressed all of that with considerably fewer adjectives.
Abraxi Taxiom:
If a rule isn’t worth enforcing, it isn’t worth having.
