Pedicab Man

Years ago the city of Charleston passed laws to regulate pedicabs. Right from the start, when they used the name rickshaws to describe these vehicles, they got it wrong--a rickshaw is a two-wheeled vehicle pulled by hand; what they were regulating was a 3-wheeled tricycle, a pedicab. Naturally, rather than allow the FREE market to determine the number of cabs, the city put a limit of 15 cabs and then created a bureaucracy to enforce the rules. For a time none of this really matter since no one from the city seemed to know what was going on with the pedicabs or didn't care or where too lazy to do anything about it. In this unregulated vacuum the free market did its thing and pedicabs became part of the landscape. The number of bikes on the street fluctuated based on demand for the service. Even in the busiest of times it was rare to wait over 10 minutes for a cab. Everyone was happy: the hotels, the cab companies, the riders and especially the customers---tax payers.