Photo by Dan Macy

When the D.C. Taxicab Commission approved regulations earlier this month authorizing the installation of credit card readers throughout the city’s taxi fleet, it did so after a public comment period that included inputs from all sorts of stakeholders, including the companies that offer smartphone applications that hail taxis and already charge by credit cards.

Most of those companies, such as Hailo, accepted the new regulations after agreeing that their business models would not be affected by the rules, which require cabs to install meters that are integrated with payment service providers that accept credit cards. But the standards, which go into effect June 1, are not sitting well with Uber.

Last week, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder and chief executive, told The Washington Post and DCist that the new regulations would force the company’s affiliated cabbies to pick a single payment provider, thus pushing Uber out of the market. In statements to reporters and on the company’s website, Kalanick said that he thinks Uber Taxi will have to cut its service in D.C. come next week.

And, consistent with its history of mobilizing its wired customer base, Uber called on its users to contact Mayor Vince Gray’s office with similar complaints.

But D.C. officials say Uber is kvetching over nothing. According to emails obtained by DCist, the DCTC Chairman Ron Linton is planning on adding language to the credit card regulations tomorrow that would “grandfather in” digital dispatch services such as Uber from entering into contracts with the payment service providers approved to install the new “smart meters” that taxis will feature as the regulations come into effect. The only requirement that would be applied to Uber and its competitors would be that the companies store their ride data.

“Ron believes he’s come up with a solution that will achieve all of these goals—digital dispatch services such as Uber would be able to process their own payments and retain their transaction fees and the necessity of DDSs entering into contracts with PSPs would be eliminated—with a different mechanism to ensure consumers are protected,” Barry Kreiswirth, the senior counsel in the Office of the City Administrator, wrote in a May 14 email to Jon Bouker, a partner at Arent Fox LLP who represents Uber.

The message apparently did not hold with Kalanick, who stirred up his tirade last Friday that prompted frustrated sighs from top brass in Gray’s office. “The Uber zombie hordes are at it again,” Chris Murphy, the mayor’s chief of staff, told Bouker in an email shortly after the Post and DCist published Kalanick’s grievances. “Needless to say it is not remotely constructive.”

Bouker was caught off-guard. “This is the first I have seen this,” he replied to Murphy. (Bouker did not return requests for comment.)

But Uber is holding fast to its position. “The proposed ‘solution’ is not a solution at all,” a source close to Uber says, adding that integrating stand-alone payment processing units with a product like Uber’s is unheard of in the taxi business. The Uber source also says that the company’s local counsel met with the Taxicab Commission three times before the regulations were adopted, meetings that the company apparently considers unsuccessful. Uber, as noted in public comments it submitted before the regulations were adopted, does not process its payments in-house, instead using a third-party service.

And, as evinced by the content of Uber’s website, Kalanick says Uber Taxi will disappear in a bit over a week. The company has also launched a petition on Change.org, with over 10,000 signatures so far.

City officials, however, say it’s all a lot of noise.

“I think Travis fancies himself this great libertarian martyr,” Gray’s spokesman Pedro Ribeiro says. “Nothing bad is going to happen to Uber. It would require a very minor tweak on their party. They don’t have to turn over any data to us, they have to hold it. And even that is up for debate.”

Ribeiro says that officials in Gray’s office and that of City Administrator Allen Lew have been rather laudatory toward Uber’s product, if not its chief executive’s behavior. “We think they provide a good service and something District customers want,” Ribeiro says. “As long as people are happy and safe, we want to work with them.”

Linton, the head of the Taxicab Commission, is even more exasperated. “We’re ready to resolve this right now,” he says in a phone interview. “It smacks of someone crying wolf.”

He says that none of Uber’s competitors in the digital taxi dispatch industry—Hailo, Taxi Magic, and a handful of other companies—are raising a stink. The Taxicab Commission does not directly regulate those companies; the burden for installing credit card payment systems falls on the cabs and their operators. As Linton tells it, most of the companies that hail cabs with a smartphone app are not going anywhere on June 1. Uber is the only outlier, even though Linton says he is trying to be as explicit as possible about what he says are the new regulations’ negligible impact on Uber’s business model.

“I have no idea why they are taking that position,” he says. “What we are going to do is put some language in that makes it crystal clear that it makes it the responsibility of the car owner.”

Linton adds that Uber’s customers do not need to share in Kalanick’s freak-out. “No individual who is a user of the Uber system will see any single thing different for them when they use Uber after June 1,” he says. “Absolutely nothing changes. You have your app, you send for service, you get in, you go where you want to go, and your credit card is deducted.”

But even though Linton says the threat is “specious,” Uber still says it is bracing to cease its taxi-hailing service on June 1.

“As the D.C. Council made clear in its unanimous vote last year for path-breaking, pro-consumer and pro-innovation legislation, the people of D.C. want modern transportation choices,” Rachel Holt, the general manager of Uber’s operations in Washington, says in company statement. “While we are dismayed that the DCTC has chosen to ignore the letter and spirit of the law, we are committed to working with the Mayor, the Council, and the DCTC to find a solution that keeps Uber running in the nation’s capital.”