Vancouver Is Silicon Valley North. So Why Doesn't It Have Uber?

Visitors to Vancouver who want to use Uber are in for a surprise. Open the app and instead of the familiar city grid, there's a petition asking users to help bring ride-sharing to the province of British Columbia. "Make Uber in BC a reality," it says. In May Daniel Saks, who runs a San Francisco cloud-services startup called App Direct, flew in for a two-day business trip. Saks has used Uber in more than 60 cities; in Vancouver he paid a private driver $1,000 to ferry him around. "It's the only city in the world that I need to hire a driver," he says. "It just boggles my mind."

Few major cities have been quite as inhospitable to Uber as Vancouver, which sent the company fleeing four years ago after regulators declared it a limousine service and essentially destroyed the business logic. Yes, Uber has hit roadblocks elsewhere, most recently in Austin, Texas, where it pulled out after losing a vote requiring drivers to get background checks. But a political deal between Uber and City Hall seems at least possible in Austin, where commuting chaos ensued after Uber and Lyft left town. Such a compromise isn't expected anytime soon in Vancouver, where politicians say they're in no hurry to make peace with a company that some see as a foreign interloper and a threat to the local taxi industry.