&gt;  I&#x27;ve never even seen an &quot;anti&quot; ad.<p>Well if we want to match anecdotes, I live in the area and have only seen &quot;anti&quot; campaigning.  FWIW, I&#x27;m in North Austin, where it turns out the opposition apparently did really well.<p>&gt; Quite frankly I have no idea whether the regulatory reforms Uber&#x2F;Lyft wanted were sensible or not. [...]  SV investors spent an absurd amount of money trying to convince everybody of that, and Austinites are a very skeptical bunch who decided not to take their terms.<p>I think this is a weird characterization, to the point where your bias is showing.  Both your comments and the article you link to make it seem as if the ridesharing startups launched an underhanded campaign in order to change the status quo to suit themselves.  But that&#x27;s not the case.<p>The reality is that regulatory changes to specifically target Uber and Lyft were adopted months ago, those companies reacted by saying, &quot;WTF WTF let&#x27;s not do this&quot;, managed to bring it to a special election to get the city to reconsider the new regulations, and that attempt failed.<p>I find your own comments as well as the articles that try to focus on storytelling to be the ones that rely the most on readers who aren&#x27;t entirely sure of what&#x27;s going on.  Speak some reassuring words that suggest to the confused reader, &quot;someone&#x27;s trying to pull the wool over your eyes; voting &lt;<i>this way</i>&gt; would show them it can&#x27;t be done!&quot;, spin some yarn about companies trying to buy their way into deregulation to benefit their bottom line, and that&#x27;s how you win a campaign to use the law to get the ridesharing companies in question to go away and preserve cab companies&#x27; customer base.