Occupational Safety and the City: Licensing Regulation and Deregulation in the Taxi Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many large cities in North America have jurisdiction over licensing rules that shape the employment and health conditions of ride-hail and taxi drivers. Yet there is a lack of research on the role of licensing agencies relating to the occupational health and safety (OHS) of taxi drivers. Most taxi and ride-hail drivers in Canada are self-employed workers and are, by default, exempt from OHS and worker compensation laws. Additionally, municipal licensing regimes in Canada and the US have undergone various changes as a result of pressures from new platform-based ride-hail services, like Uber and Lyft. The analysis is part of a larger study on the health and safety conditions faced by ride-hail drivers. The research approach adopted a multi-level sampling and analysis strategy with the aim of connecting taxi drivers’ everyday work experiences to company and sector practices, and with various regulatory arenas, including municipal licensing, taxation and car insurance. In this paper, the analysis draws from in-depth interviews at these different levels: with taxi and ride-hail drivers, with taxi and ride-hail managers, and with key informants in government, law, insurance, tax and elsewhere. The paper identifies features and impacts of municipal deregulation in the era of on-demand taxi services, focusing on a large Canadian city in a province where municipal authorities regulate the vehicle-for-hire sector. The research identified regulatory changes that included removing centralized taxi vehicle inspections, cancelling mandatory driver training, and instigating rapid changes to competition in the taxi workforce by issuing unlimited numbers of ride-hail licenses. Our analysis indicates that regulatory changes adopted by the city administration have compounded work vulnerabilities and hazards for taxi drivers, while extending hazardous conditions to ride-hail drivers. These hazards suggest the need for interventions at a range of levels, actors and agencies, rather than solely by city licensing officials.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".