Photo by Samer Farha

D.C. Taxicab Commissioner Ron Linton hasn’t been the most popular guy in town in recent years. Riders dislike him because he raised fares, drivers scorn him because he hasn’t raised fares enough and has moved to get old cabs off the street, and adherents of luxury livery service Uber all but hate him for trying to regulate.

In an interesting interview with the Post’s Mike DeBonis, though, Linton admits that Uber’s business model of app-based can hires may well be the norm in a few years. “Street hailing is a dying element. I don’t think five years from now you’ll find very many people standing out on a street trying to hail a cab. The app process of electronic reservations will make it so easy to punch in where they are and have a cab respond to it,” he said.

Linton also said that Uber won’t be alone for long in the app-based hailing business. “People are looking at Uber like somebody found the Holy Grail. The fact is, Uber has been the fastest one to unveil the next step, an electronic reservation system. But we already have several firms that are in here doing electronic dispatch. Uber is not the only one. We’ve had three other firms that have come in to talk to us that are getting ready,” he said. (In June we spoke to one of them, Limos.com.)

A few other interesting outtakes from the interview: Linton defends his regulation of Uber, saying that it’s not the business that’s the problem, but rather the drivers; the city’s new smart meters could come as early as this month, though a few protests from firms whose bids to supply them were rejected might delay installation; Linton is neutral on whether or not all of the city’s cabs should be painted the same color, but says that if they’re painted to look like the Circulator buses (it has been proposed), residents will start calling the Circulator to dispatch cabs.