Photo by andertho

The sedan-by-smartphone company Uber is making the most of its newfound legality in D.C. with the introduction today of service that will permit users to reserve standard-issue taxicabs.

With Uber Taxi, the company is contracting with cabs around the District to tap into the mobile dispatch market currently occupied by programs like TaxiMagic and Hailo. It also puts Uber in a direct business partnership with a class of service it once shunned, considering its past marketing of its sedan service as an upscale alternative to regular taxis.

With the D.C. Council’s passage last year of new livery regulations that also clarified the legality of using a mobile application to hail a cab, Uber was permitted to add its taxi product. But unlike its sedan service, which charges users according to a proprietary formula and is sometimes subject to “surge pricing” during times of peak demand, Uber says there won’t be any ambiguity about what its taxi partners charge: whatever the D.C. Taxicab Commission-issued meter reads at the end of the trip, plus a 20 percent tip.

For now, the company says its taxi service in D.C. is still an “experiment,” and is limited only to cabs licensed in the District, not Maryland or Virginia. But standard cabs are a growing segment of Uber, which als contracts with taxi fleets in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Toronto. It is also in the process of re-introducing Uber Taxi in New York, where the Taxi and Limousine Commission recently reversed its opposition to Uber partnering with yellow cabs.

Rachel Holt, Uber’s general manager for D.C., does not specify exactly how many taxis here are part of Uber’s network, only that “hundreds” have signed up with more being added according to demand. Uber’s announcement also reads that “many cabs don’t fit Uber standards,” which Holt writes in an email refers to reliability and cleanliness. Like it does with the sedan service, Uber will prompt its taxi customers to rate their drivers.