Editorial: Lawmakers should start over on car-sharing regulations

Gov. Bruce Rauner issued an amendatory veto Tuesday on poorly crafted legislation that ostensibly sought to regulate a growing business in peer-to-peer car sharing but in fact would have hamstrung, if not seriously crippled, an emerging, potentially valuable service.

The legislation was formed in the worst tradition of Illinois government - slipping little-understood rules and significant taxes under the radar of public and legislative scrutiny. Its purported intent was to level the competitive playing field between car-sharing interests and those of traditional car-rental companies. Unfortunately, the car-rental companies had substantial influence in development of the law while companies that promote car sharing barely got the opportunity to react to it.

The result was a bill that introduced numerous confusing regulations and an onerous, debilitating structure that could stifle a service with the potential to, in the words of the governor in his veto message, "reduce congestion, lower the strain placed on scarce parking space inventory, and ... make it easier for people to afford vehicles while simultaneously lowering the cost of transportation for those who cannot afford full-time car ownership."

Car sharing is a service similar to Airbnb, the popular travel platform that lets private individuals rent out unused housing space on a short-term basis. Car-sharing services like Turo, Getaround and General Motors' Maven let companies and private individuals make their cars available to customers who are looking for a vehicle for short-term use.

With reason, traditional vehicle-rental companies are concerned that such emerging services - Turo alone boasts 233,000 users in Illinois - pose a threat to their business without having to abide by equivalent safety and consumer regulations. The concern is understandable. Those regulations provide a variety of protections, yet can be costly to implement and monitor.

The companies' response, however, was to induce lawmakers to gut an existing transportation bill and then load it up with restrictions and taxes on vehicle-sharing platforms, the people who make their vehicles available and the customers who would use them.

Rauner's amendatory veto, written through "close coordination with the broader stakeholder community" - i.e., the input from car-sharing companies the legislature sidestepped - attempts to address the multiple flaws in the bill, which passed with a veto-proof margin in the House and nearly that in the Senate. Lawmakers now have three options - approve the governor's changes, attempt to override them in favor of their original language or let the veto stand and the bill die.

At minimum, the governor's changes better serve the interests of Illinois consumers and businesses than the existing legislation. But what's truly best is for lawmakers to let this bad bill die, then go back to the drawing board, research for themselves all aspects of the vehicle-sharing market with fair input from all stakeholders and produce sensible regulations that provide for fair competition and strong consumer benefits.