There’s an app for that, if you’ve got the disposable income. (Photo by Phae)Travis Kalanick, the founder and chief executive of the sedan-on-demand company Uber, uses as his Twitter avatar the cover of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s objectivist tome about collectivism running amok. And since his company has expanded across the United States, Kalanick has sometimes painted himself as the victim of burdensome, meddling governments, not unlike Rand’s characters.
He might be on to something.
At a recent conference in D.C. of the International Association of Transportation Regulators, a group of taxi and limousine regulators from around the world, representatives of several cities—including Washington—proposed guidelines that seem to take direct aim at Uber’s practices. The committee that drafted the guidelines included taxi commissioners in 15 cities across the United States, Canada and Australia, including Ron Linton, who runs the D.C. Taxicab Commission.
The New York Times reports that one suggested regulation would effectively kill Uber’s business practice by banning livery sedans from calculating fares using GPS devices. Uber-affiliated drivers are outfitted with smartphones that measure time and distance in tallying a customer’s fare.
Other guidelines would seem to cut out even more of Uber’s standard practices, as well as those employed a rapidly growing lineup of companies that hail sedans and taxis with the push of a few smartphone buttons:
Another rule would forbid any driver from accepting an electronic hail through a smartphone while driving. And one says limousines may not accept a request for a ride that is made less than 30 minutes in advance, which would impede Uber’s primary business model of connecting luxury car drivers with passengers immediately.
Despite Uber’s contentious first year in D.C.—and other run-ins with regulatory bodies in Cambridge, Mass., New York and its home base of San Francisco, where it is facing a $20,000 fine—it is making inroads toward being fully street-legal. While the company currently enjoys a temporary exemption from the DCTC’s oversight, a D.C. Council bill being voted on tomorrow would clarify Uber’s status by not including any restrictions on how it measures its fares. The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), passed its initial reading last month.
Not that Uber isn’t still openly flouting the regulators when it gets the chance. Kalanick was at the conference at the Four Seasons Hotel last month, The Times reports, though his participation also included an open bar in a room across the hall from the regulators’ meeting space.
