This week, the NYC’s black car association (limos and car services) filed suit to block the e-hail pilot that was set to begin today. The argument is that there has traditionally been a formal divide in NYC between taxis you hail on the street (yellow cabs) and cars you reserve in advance (black cars / limos / car services); that that divide serves an important public interest goal; and that e-hail crosses that divide. This raises two questions: 1) why do we distinguish between street hails prearranged pickups? and 2) does e-hail actually cross that line? I’d like to start with the first one because I think it’s more interesting. What we have is a rule — a bright line between heavily regulated, street hail-only yellow taxis and more lightly regulated pre-arranged rides in livery cars. Why do we have that? My suspicion is that there are good reasons why that rule was originally created — but that we now have a Regulation 2.0 opportunity — to satisfy those public interests using tools and techniques not available when the original rules were written. So, why do we have this divide? I can think of:
Passenger safety - since you are hailing on the street, you need to know that you can trust the driver and car. Therefore yellow cabs are subject to greater regulation — when you call a car service you are vetting the company in advance.
I am so inspired by Kid President. If you haven’t seen the video, go watch it now, and get your pep talk on. So… with kid on our shoulder, let’s think about how to make NYC more awesome. From a tech policy perspective :) A few weeks ago the (already awesome) NY Tech Meetuplaunched a call for conversation about how to make NYC a better place — for the tech community specifically, and for the broader community more generally. The set of goals they kicked off the conversation with were:
Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business, regardless of location, access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.
Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy and world.
Zander
and the topic of conversation (naturally) turned to canal skating in Ottawa. You see, in Ottawa during the wintertime, the city’s canals freeze over and they turn into temporary frozen streets. As you can see above, Ottawans turn to using them for their daily activities, like taking their kids to school. Imagine taking your kids to school on ice skates! I was saying that I thought this was so cool, and Zander accused me of “being a hipster who just likes things that are different”. While I do like things that are different and interesting, this is not an ironic interest in canadian urban ice skating. What I love so much about this is that it’s doing a fun activity in a totally natural and non-contrived context. For example:
Hockey in a skating rink: contrived. Hockey on a pond: awesome. Skating to work: unbelievable.
“Going for a bike ride”: lame. Riding your bike to run errands and get around town: awesome.
Taking a boat ride: ok. Riding a boat to get somewhere (like the Fire Island water taxi, or the “buses” in Venice): amazing. Driving your own boat to get to work: rockstar (and that doesn’t at all require a fancy boat).
I am sure there are lots of others that I’m not thinking of right now. If I were a gun owner, I’d probably feel the same way about shooting on a gun range vs. hunting in the wild (or packing heat).
There is something about doing an activity in the normal course of your day, and in its natural environment, that makes it so much better. And there is something about completely fabricated environments that can feel so lame or even sad (and also high pressure because of the dedicated focus). I suppose I can tie this back to my preference for mixed-use urban environments, vs. more separated, dedicated-use contrived ones. It’s possible to say that finding and doing such things has been a lifelong interest for me — though I’ve never really articulated it directly. Maybe it’s some kind of yearning for authenticity, maybe it’s about freedom vs. constraints & control. Anyway, I think I am onto something here and will be on the lookout for other examples. // photo from bugbog.com
Discrimination — yellow taxis must accept all passengers and must take passengers to any destination within the five boros.
Driver safety - it might be unsafe for drivers to be interacting with dispatch equipment (on a smart phone, on a radio, on some other kind of console).
Street safety - this is maybe a lesser concern, but roaming cabs make the city safer to walk around. They are another form of “eyes on the street”
Maybe there are others, but that’s a first pass. To take them in order:
Passenger safety: This seems like an argument for why black cars can’t take street hails, not vice versa.
Discrimination: clearly an important topic. So: does discrimination happen now? Anyone who takes a taxi in NYC would say yes — either on the will-this-taxi-pick-me-up angle, or the will-this-taxi-take-me-where-i-want-to-go angle. It’s true that taxi drivers can choose not to accept e-hails, and they could conceivably discriminate based on the first-name of the hailer (which is also happening already, just by appearance, not name). I’d argue that destination discrimination will decrease with e-hail as drivers will have to commit to the ride before they know the destination (and NYC could enforce this limitation).
Driver safety: taxi drivers interact with in-car tech in nearly every city already. In this case, accepting or rejecting a hail would be limited to a single button press if the car is in motion. Non-issue.
Street safety: I think this one is interesting, and it relates to the second question which is whether an e-hail is more like a street hail or more like a prearranged pickup.
If anything, the distinction that black cars shouldn’t be able to accept street hails seems to be more relevant, primarily for #1 above. But I also suspect that that could be solved with a regulation 2.0 approach as well. So, on the second question: is an e-hail more like a street hail or more like a prearranged pickup? This is less of a “public interest” question, and more of a “does this break the law as currently written” question. You could kind of argue it both ways, because clearly e-hail is a form of pre-arrangement. But so is street-hailing. Between the time the driver sees me and I get in, we are arranging the ride. With e-hail the driver doesn’t see me with his eyes, but with his phone. Since e-hails in NYC would only work within a half-mile radius of the caller, and they only work in real-time, it is actually quite a limited form of pre-arrangement and may actually be more similar to a street hail. i.e., I can’t reserve a car for a future time at a distant location. If anything, I might argue that the e-hail revolution (including Uber which primarily focuses on black cars, not taxis) should help the livery industry as much as the taxi industry, as it vastly increases the surface area through which they can connect with customers. Web 2.0 and regulation 2.0 techniques for building trust generally work in favor of groups that traditionally haven’t been as trusted (and consequently may have been regulated out of business). I’ll end with a money quote from TLC commissioner David Yassky: “This suit seeks to keep the taxi industry and New Yorkers in the dark ages,” he said. “Next thing, they’ll be suing restaurants to go back to wood-burning stoves. Our rules allow for e-hail now, and the only question is, do we embrace these new services and ensure that consumer protections are in place, or listen to obstructionists and watch e-hail apps proliferate without any regulatory input.” My hope in thinking about Regulation 2.0 is that we can use the tools we now have available (primarily: tons of real-time data) to allow for more innovation and room to experiment, since we now have ways of understanding the impacts of these changes much more quickly and in much more detail. (disclosure: Hailo, one of the e-hail companies in question, is an investment of USV, where I work)
Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.
Support the appointment of a Deputy Mayor for Technology Innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.
Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.
Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful new 21st century economy: selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.
Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.
(note: I had a hard time bolding the last one :-) These ideas are a starting point, and it’s been interesting to see how people have reacted to it so far — re-prioritizing (through voting) the list above and adding new ideas. What I like about the NYTM’s list is that it’s not just about making NYC a place that’s inviting for companies to locate to (through things like tax breaks, etc), but about making NYC a leader as an open, connected, wired city. It’s about using tech policy as a starting point to bring opportunities afforded by the internet and networks of people to the city as a whole.
"What if there really were two paths… I want be in the one that leads to awesome." -#kidpresident — Brandon Hatmaker (@brandonhatmaker) February 3, 2013
So, in the words of Kid, let’s get on the path to Awesome. In NYC and everywhere.
