Her passengers were uber-excited that ride-hailing has finally arrived in Metro
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:24:30 +0000
Teri Towner spent her weekend driving a bunch of new friends home.
“I’m a people person,” the newly minted Uber driver and Coquitlam city councillor said. She said people were “over-the-moon ecstatic” that ride-hailing has arrived. “I had a blast.”
Towner was part of the official Uber Metro Vancouver launch. She has been an enthusiastic tweeter about Uber who took a gentle jab at Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum’s opposition to the ride-hail service after she drove passengers from Coquitlam to the city where the future lives.
“As Uber driver, I drove passengers from Coquitlam to Surrey, Sat. night,” she tweeted. “Glad I didn’t look for another patron while I was there! How do we let Surrey know transportation is a regional issue & not city by city.”
The thought of being ticketed and going to court to fight it meant she drove back to Coquitlam without passengers.
“I’m just glad in my dead time after dropping them off I didn’t open my app and pick up someone to take back to Coquitlam and getting a fine,” Towner said on Monday. “That would have infuriated me. It’s ridiculous.”
She gave seven rides in all.
Towner, the mother of two teenagers, has lived in Coquitlam for 20 years and been a councillor since 2014. A graduate of SFU’s business school, the 51-year-old spent 10 years in retail banking and 16 years before that in human resources for utilities firms.
Her motto is “growth and comfort do not coexist,” a quote from IBM’s CEO, Ginni Rometty.
Towner’s 15 years as a driver for Operation Red Nose led her to pursue the required Class 4 licence to become a ride-hail driver.
A quick scan of her curriculum vitae might leave you wondering where she found the time: Besides her city duties, she co-founded and chairs the Tri-Cities Friends of Refugees Task Group, sits on boards of volunteer organizations, is a Toastmaster, does work for anti-bullying, anti-racism and anti-hate networks, is a running leader for Vancouver Sun Run clinics … the list goes on.
So, adding a Class 4 licence to her portfolio took valuable time and wasn’t without its annoyances, she said, starting with the 272-page ICBC book on driving commercial vehicles and its chapters on the turning radius of a bus, serpentine belts and so on.
The process — including a medical exam, knowledge and road tests, and a car safety test for her new Hyundai Tucson — took almost three months and cost about $500 in total, Towner said.
“A lot of the chapters are irrelevant when it comes to driving my own personal car, which I’ve been doing for 35 years. I strongly believe after going through this that if you have no criminal record and have a driver’s licence, that should be good enough.”