Council's transportation committee voted unanimously last week to draft bylaw amendments that would add new regulations to the taxi industry, and permit ride sharing services like Uber to launch

The head of the Halifax Taxi Association is disappointed with the city's latest move that brings Uber one step closer to HRM.

Dave Buffett says the city didn't take time to properly analyze the stats, and last week, the city's transportation committee voted unanimously in favour of staff recommendations to draft bylaw amendments that would affect both the taxi industry, and transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber, and Lyft.

Buffet telling NEWS 95.7 he's taking issue with the city's expectation that Uber will improve transportation services.

"The industry, the HRM taxi industry provides over, and we can back this with computer statistics, this isn't anecdotal evidence which Council is relying on, we complete over four million satisfied, completed rides per year, and anybody that's taking a cab regularly in HRM has waited from time to time, there's no denyin it," says Buffett. "But over 90 per cent of our rides are satisfactory."

Buffett says city hasn't taken the time to analyze the information provided to them properly.

"They didn't extrapolate the information properly, so for example, Dartmouth has historically had a really poor cab service, that's no longer the case because Casino Taxi, Yellow Cab, everybody can pick up in Dartmouth," says Buffett. "So that eliminates that problem, they didn't look at that, they didn't look at the demographic."

Buffett says they also didn't properly go over the data on ride sharing services.

"They did not ask staff to break down the information, and staff did not break it down, council didn't break it down, it's kinda like when we were kids in school in math class, you gotta show your work," explains Buffett. "It was a 13,000 person survey, which is really only a mini survey relative to the population of HRM."

According to the amendments, taxi brokers would have to pay an annual $300 fee for a licence while TNCs would have to pay an annual fee of $25,000, although that number might change.

Since the transportation committee motion must now go to Regional Council for a full debate and vote.