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. 

• 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)

I consider myself an accidental policy person. In other words: I didn’t set out to study and understand how our policy decisions impact the world we live in.  Rather, I came at it from the perspective of design and experience (both real world and virtual) and ended up backing into the policy implications, almost my accident. This was the case both in my early career when I worked in city planning and in my more recent career in technology. When I first started studying cities, my core interest was at the design level.  What makes one building “feel” better than another?  Why are some streets nice to walk along and others aren’t?  What makes one neighborhood feel comfortable, intimate and vibrant, and another cold, lifeless and isolating? My initial idea was: well, they are just designed better.  As if any one person (an architect, say) had the power and vision to create a place that felt a certain way and that fostered certain kinds of activities.  So I studied architecture and urban design. What I ultimately learned was: good design is an important part of the mix, but it’s hardly enough.  Given any physical place, what it “feels” like is as much a result of the policy, political and historical contexts as it is a result of the design itself.   And: it takes a whole lot of effort to align the various forces present in any project in such a way that something interesting and wonderful can happen.  Take any great place, and there is no doubt a history of high drama behind how it got hat way.  For instance, the streets of NYC are nicer to walk around these days because lots of people fought hard to make them that way

Yesterday I spent the day at Princeton with Steve Schultze and the rest of the team at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic of my talk was “Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0” — something I’ve been thinking and talking about over the past several months, but haven’t yet written a ton about.  That will change soon. In a nutshell: we are seeing an explosion of “peer networks” — networks of people, powered by the web, collaborating and consuming in new ways (think: Etsy, Airbnb, Skillshare, Kickstarter, etc.)  As these network-oriented communities touch more and more real-world sectors (housing, transportation, health, education) they are running into regulatory trouble, as many of them don’t fit into traditional categories (is Airbnb a Hotel? a phone book?  a real estate broker?  Is Skillshare a university?), often operate in legal gray areas, and often disrupt incumbents. I’ve been working with many of these companies, and with folks in academia and in the public sector, to get a better understanding of what this means (for our economies, our neighborhoods, etc) and how we might approach it.  There is tremendous opportunity here — as networks tend to produce solutions that are lower in cost and more scalable than traditional approaches — but there are also new kinds of risk, as the barriers to production and consumption decrease.  All of this presents really interesting public policy questions. Perhaps the most interesting idea that came out of the discussion is the notion scale.  When peer networks are just starting out — often in new sectors — they have relatively little overall impact on the economy or society.  But as they grow, their impact increases exponentially.  The idea of some sort of safe harbor for smaller, earlier networks, that would allow them the freedom to innovate and to explore new opportunities, is an interesting one.

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. 

• 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)

I consider myself an accidental policy person. In other words: I didn’t set out to study and understand how our policy decisions impact the world we live in.  Rather, I came at it from the perspective of design and experience (both real world and virtual) and ended up backing into the policy implications, almost my accident. This was the case both in my early career when I worked in city planning and in my more recent career in technology. When I first started studying cities, my core interest was at the design level.  What makes one building “feel” better than another?  Why are some streets nice to walk along and others aren’t?  What makes one neighborhood feel comfortable, intimate and vibrant, and another cold, lifeless and isolating? My initial idea was: well, they are just designed better.  As if any one person (an architect, say) had the power and vision to create a place that felt a certain way and that fostered certain kinds of activities.  So I studied architecture and urban design. What I ultimately learned was: good design is an important part of the mix, but it’s hardly enough.  Given any physical place, what it “feels” like is as much a result of the policy, political and historical contexts as it is a result of the design itself.   And: it takes a whole lot of effort to align the various forces present in any project in such a way that something interesting and wonderful can happen.  Take any great place, and there is no doubt a history of high drama behind how it got hat way.  For instance, the streets of NYC are nicer to walk around these days because lots of people fought hard to make them that way

Yesterday I spent the day at Princeton with Steve Schultze and the rest of the team at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic of my talk was “Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0” — something I’ve been thinking and talking about over the past several months, but haven’t yet written a ton about.  That will change soon. In a nutshell: we are seeing an explosion of “peer networks” — networks of people, powered by the web, collaborating and consuming in new ways (think: Etsy, Airbnb, Skillshare, Kickstarter, etc.)  As these network-oriented communities touch more and more real-world sectors (housing, transportation, health, education) they are running into regulatory trouble, as many of them don’t fit into traditional categories (is Airbnb a Hotel? a phone book?  a real estate broker?  Is Skillshare a university?), often operate in legal gray areas, and often disrupt incumbents. I’ve been working with many of these companies, and with folks in academia and in the public sector, to get a better understanding of what this means (for our economies, our neighborhoods, etc) and how we might approach it.  There is tremendous opportunity here — as networks tend to produce solutions that are lower in cost and more scalable than traditional approaches — but there are also new kinds of risk, as the barriers to production and consumption decrease.  All of this presents really interesting public policy questions. Perhaps the most interesting idea that came out of the discussion is the notion scale.  When peer networks are just starting out — often in new sectors — they have relatively little overall impact on the economy or society.  But as they grow, their impact increases exponentially.  The idea of some sort of safe harbor for smaller, earlier networks, that would allow them the freedom to innovate and to explore new opportunities, is an interesting one.