Via DCTC.

Ron Linton, the former chairman of the D.C. Taxicab Commission passed away last night at Suburban Hospital. He was 86 years old.

Linton, who stepped down from his position at the beginning of this year, was first appointed as D.C. Taxicab Commissioner under Vince Gray’s mayoral tenure in 2011. Since then he’s been working hard to modernize the District’s taxicab industry, which has certainly seen its fair share of criticism for outdated regulations.

It wasn’t until October of 2013 that all D.C. taxicabs had credit card readers installed, and that in and of itself was quite a tenuous process to complete, with a majority of District cabs missing their deadline to install readers on more than one occasion.

In the wake of ride-hailing apps like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar, Linton led a much-publicized, often heated charge against the companies, who threatened to make District cabs and the DCTC obsolete.

But Linton’s modernization efforts weren’t always met with kindness from District cab drivers. At a Commission meeting in November of 2013, hundreds of cab drivers packed the room, often yelling and angrily complaining to Linton, that time over a mandate requiring them to install dome lights in their cabs.

Aside from the D.C. Taxicab Commission, Linton has a long record of public service in the D.C. area. He was Chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board of Directors from 1992 to 1994. From 1996 to 2000 he served a four-year term on the board of the D.C. Water & Sewer Authority, two of which he was the chairman. At one point, Linton even served as an ANC Commissioner in his neighborhood.

One of Linton’s last big accomplishments before he retired was giving residents with disabilities and no means of transportation an alternative to MetroAccess rides. Working with WMATA, the CAPS-DC program, which Linton worked diligently on, introduced handicap-accessible cabs acquired from WMATA to the fleet.

Even after he stepped down in January, Linton’s commitment to the District’s taxi business was still strong. Loose Lips reports that, in March, he “asked the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability if he could help taxi cab companies create an app-based co-op without the District’s breaking conflict of interest rules.