My neighbor Lisa’s minivan, a pearly blue 2008 Chrysler Town & Country, has a hundred and eighty-four thousand miles on it, reflecting the fact that in a car-centric city like Austin, Texas, to be a parent is also to be a part-time shuttle driver. She’s racked up miles driving the boys to and from school—not to mention Scout meetings, band camp, wrestling tournaments, and her older son’s first date. She also ferries them on summer cross-country road trips lasting many weeks. (Her husband, who works at I.B.M., joins them for shorter segments along the way.) In 2014, she took things a step further by obtaining a commercial driver’s license, so that she could operate a rig full of equipment for the high-school marching band. Then, last year, she went pro: she started driving for Uber and Lyft.

Her career was short-lived. We’ve had an unusually cool, rainy spring, and along with the rains came a deluge of flyers and ads and robocalls and texts, nearly all of them urging a vote for Proposition 1, a ballot initiative backed by Uber and Lyft that would rewrite the city’s rules for ride-hailing services. The most contentious part of the proposition would have lifted a requirement that the drivers be fingerprinted, just as taxi drivers in the city are. For our yes vote, we were offered carrots: Taylor Kitsch, the Canadian actor who played the bad-boy heartthrob Tim Riggins on “Friday Night Lights,” was deployed to the University of Texas campus to cajole students. (He also filmed a cringe-inducing ad.) And sticks: Uber and Lyft threatened to leave town if the proposition didn’t pass.

All told, they spent more than nine million dollars on the campaign, which was about eight million dollars more than anyone has ever spent on a local campaign here. The coalition opposing Prop 1 spent less than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. One theory about why the measure ultimately failed is that voters were disgusted by the amount of money Uber and Lyft threw at it—or, relatedly, that people were just so fed up with all the pestering that they chose to register their annoyance at the polls. In other words, they voted against the campaign itself.

Another theory is that the city’s progressive community, in the role of David, rose up and slew a tech Goliath. Maybe it was inevitable that the story of the city council versus the ride hailers would be patterned after our dominant municipal narrative, that of old Austin versus new Austin. In the cranky middle-aged person’s version (to which I am susceptible, on days when I’ve been sitting in traffic for too long), this town was once a verdant community of underemployed hippies and punks, of guitars and cut-offs and grungy night clubs, until it was overrun by tech workers and CrossFit nuts, ruined by new construction, consumerism, the Internet, and a plague of small plates. Uber and Lyft, app-based services that appealed to the young, smartphone-packing sector of the population, were naturally identified with new Austin. Representing old Austin was an alliance of progressives and good-government types who rallied to combat the notion that corporations could essentially veto city regulations. (Indeed, the old guard celebrated the election victory at Scholz Garten, which has been a lefty politico’s watering hole since the nineteen-fifties.)

The drivers didn’t quite fit into this picture. New as the ride services were, they seemed to offer an income stream for the casually employed, the musicians and slackers who used to define Austin’s culture but who are gradually being priced out of the city. In my limited experience with Uber and Lyft drivers, there was no pigeonholing them: I encountered a high-school teacher, a young software developer, a suburban real-estate agent, and a man who’d just moved from New York with his family and was trying to start a crowdsourced news Web site.

Then there was my neighbor Lisa. She voted for Prop 1, she told me. We were talking in her back yard, which until recently had been a stretch mostly of dirt—she’d used her Lyft and Uber earnings to install grass, limestone terracing, and a crushed-granite patio. “At first I thought it was really about fingerprinting, but then I think it really wasn’t, it was all about corporations trying to decide what regulations are versus the city deciding what regulations should be,” she said, of the election. She had mixed feelings about it all, but ultimately she thought that people who really wanted their drivers to be fingerprinted could just take a regular taxicab, and that the city council had squelched free enterprise.

The council and the two companies had clashed from the get-go, and as it dragged on the controversy seemed less like a showdown between old Austin and new than a battle of wills between a high-school vice-principal and a couple of cheeky sophomores. Two years ago, Lyft and Uber turned on their apps here, even though the city hadn’t yet allowed ride-hailing. A few Lyft drivers were promptly ticketed, their cars impounded. The services nonetheless went on operating for months before the council gave its O.K., at which point it said that they could continue to use their own background checks, rather than fingerprinting, until permanent rules were approved. Then, in December, the council passed an ordinance that called for the companies to gradually implement fingerprint checks, required the cars to display some marker identifying them as Lyft or Uber vehicles, and forbade drivers from stopping in the middle of the road. Though fingerprinting is already the law in New York City and Houston, the companies drew a line in the Austin sand, arguing that the procedure is flawed, expensive, and would discourage potential drivers from signing up.

Before the ordinance was adopted, Uber released an online commercial targeting the council member Ann Kitchen, the chair of the mobility committee and an advocate for stronger safety rules. In it, a young couple orders a ride and waits for a very long time, as car after car goes by, until at last two horses clip-clop into the picture, pulling a cowboy on a buckboard. “Remember life before Uber?” a screen title asks, as though people here had been Ubering since the nineteenth century. “Please tell Ann Kitchen we don’t want to go back.”

On May 9th, two days after Prop 1 failed, the ride services suspended operations in Austin, and some would-be riders found themselves stranded. The Austin American-Statesman quoted frustrated former Uber and Lyft customers who were cancelling weekend plans, begging rides from co-workers, and soliciting drivers on Craigslist. In a city with spotty public transportation and fluctuating demand for taxis—lower during an ordinary day, higher on nights when lots of people go out—that is to say, a city whose variable need for rides Uber and Lyft were so well-suited to meet, many of us had quickly grown accustomed to the services. While most residents also have cars of their own, it now seems all but inconceivable that the visitors who come for festivals like South by Southwest—for SXSW Interactive, no less—these technophiles in a tech-centric city might be forced to look up from their devices and flag a taxi or a pedicab.