The Real Record of Complaints Against Uber in DC

​A hobby horse of mine in recent months has been watching the debate here in Washington, DC about how and whether to regulate popular on-demand car service Uber. Although Uber costs much more than traditional taxis, it's been incredibly popular and poses a real threat to taxi services in many cities. The taxi lobby and its allies have often responded by attempting to introduce legislation that curbs the ability of Uber to compete for rides. Megan McArdle had a nice update over at the Daily Beast earlier this week with another somewhat flailing attempt by the DC taxi commission to halt Uber's march in the nation's capital.

Whether in DC or other cities, regulators and legislators have often invoked vague, unspecified service complaints against Uber as a rationale for regulating the company. McArdle quotes DC Taxi Commission head Ron Linton arguing that his office has received complaints from Uber users about not receiving paper receipts from drivers (the service instead sends you an email with a map trace of your ride and detailed cost calculation within minutes of stepping out of the sedan). 

Dubious of Linton's (and other's) claims that riders in DC were experiencing problems with Uber, I filed a Freedom of Information Request with the city government asking for a a brief listing of those complaints covering the period January 1 through July 31 2012. I specifically asked Linton's Taxi Commission for two things: 1) a list of complaints against Uber, with as many details as the Commission could provide with respect to the nature of those complaints, and; 2) a simple count of all other complaints filed by riders with the Commission against all other taxi services operating in the District. I wanted to know whether the rate of complaints against Uber was above, below, or on par with the average taxi service in Washington, DC.

Here's the reality of rider complaints filed against Uber in Washington, DC (quoting from the response to my FOIA request, which you can access here in full):

The D.C. Taxicab Commission has not received any public complaints against Uber Technologies nor against any other taxi and limousine services during the request timeframe. Please note that public complaints are mainly lodged against individual taxicab and/or limousine drivers, not against taxicab and/or limousine services. 

Hmm.  There are several potential implications stemming from this dearth of complaints.

1. Taxi and sedan services operating in the district are flawless. So why the need for additional regulation if literally no one, in an entire six-month period, is complaining about the services to the taxi commission?
2. Uber is no more prone to complaints than any other taxi or sedan service, again raising questions as to why greater regulation is necessary.
3. Where are the actual complaints that Linton and other critics are allegedly hearing?  If Linton's own commission has no record of complaints, then it strikes me as reasonable to expect that Linton (or others, such as DC city council members that have also invoked such "complaints" in calling for greater regulation over Uber) provide documentation or other details about the alleged service complaints before tossing them around liberally as proof of the need for an Uber crackdown.
4. Reporters and bloggers in other cities might find it interesting to file similar FOIA requests with their respective regulatory agencies (hint, hint).

Regardless of where you stand on the debate around whether consumers need greater protection from on-demand car services such as Uber, I suspect we would all agree that regulators and politicians should be basing their decisions on facts, not innuendo or hearsay.

Innovation (and Uber) Wins in Boston

“My friend the tech guru Tim O’Reilly has a great way to phrase the choice facing regulators, bureaucrats, and other policy makers in this situation: they can protect the future from the past, or protect the past from the future. As someone who likes innovation and progress, I usually advocate the former path, which in this case would mean simply letting Uber operate (after all, it only works with licensed, professional town car drivers). Incumbents almost always favor the latter.

Sadly, regulators often do, too, and seem predisposed to favor the past over the future.

There are several possible reasons for this. One is that they’re too close to the incumbents, and so inclined to share their views about competition. Another is that regulators, like other workers, like to justify their existences by being and appearing busy. And the way regulators do this is by, well, regulating stuff. A final possible reason is simply that power corrupts, and regulators get fond of throwing their weight around (my worst encounters with TSA agents at airports provide some support for this view).”

— Harvard Business Review

How Uber Helped Me Defeat the Airlines

I am an avid user of Uber, a rapidly-growing on-demand private car service that connects average folks like me with idle black car drivers at a fraction of the cost of a traditional private car hire. You launch the Uber app, get picked up within minutes, get dropped off wherever you want, and pay via a credit card stored with Uber, tip included. It's a cashless, affordable luxury experience that makes traditional taxis seem like an antiquated approach to the livery business. My friends and wife are sick of me talking about how great Uber is, and I was vocal in my support for the company in a dust up last month with the DC City Council and taxi industry. But last night in New York Uber helped to really save my skin. Here's how.

I live very close to Dulles Airport in the Washington, DC area and therefore often fly to New York for day trips. This make sense on paper -- it's theoretically faster than me driving 45 minutes to and from Union Station in downtown DC to take the train, even factoring in airport security -- but terribly unreliable. A few years ago I was forced to stay overnight in Manhattan trying to connect back from the West Coast to DC through JFK airport after late-day summer thunder storms shut down all New York airports; I nearly missed a close friend's wedding in South Carolina the next day. Last year I got home at 2:30 am after a canceled flight at JFK forced me to cab back to Manhattan, take a train back to DC, and then cab back out to Dulles to get my car.

Yesterday looked like a repeat. As I wrapped up a two hour meeting at 5:00 pm, I launched the Uber app to request a pick up for a car out to JFK to catch a 7:00 pm flight. I then thumbed through my email on my iPhone to kill the few minutes and was shocked to see a message from United Airlines mentioning that my flight had been canceled. No explanation and no indication as to whether I had or could be rebooked.

As I cussed and fumed, my Uber driver rolled up, so I jumped in and briefly explained that I wasn't sure whether I was headed to JFK or possibly Penn Station, thinking I would have to train it back to Washington. No problem, he said, take your time.

Then I fumbled around looking for a phone number to call United. The driver could tell I was having a hard time finding the number on my phone, so he just rattled it off for me from memory.

This bears repeating: he had memorized the United flight status number. When I expressed my amazement at this, he causally mentioned that he knew the flight status numbers for every airline, and had been driving a private car for nearly 25 years; why wouldn't he know them all?

The call to United yielded the predictable result: being put on hold endlessly with no resolution. My concern was growing: go to JFK or instead hop on a train? But I needed to make a decision immediately if I was going to get a train at a decent hour that still had seats. The rush hour Amtrak trains from NY to DC can be packed.

"Oh," said the driver, "here, use my laptop. I've got internet in the car too." And he handed me an 11" Macbook Air that connected immediately to high-speed 4G internet powered by a Mifi puck in the car.

This also bears repeating: my driver had a laptop and internet for me to use.

Thanks to the laptop, I quickly grabbed a seat on the next Accela train back to DC and was confirmed by the time we reached Madison Square Garden. I'd even charged my phone during the trip down from 59th street in the car's normal three-prong electric outlet, another small luxury for the weary business traveler.

My emergency trip back went off without a hitch, and when I got back to DC's Union Station I of course fired up Uber to take me back to Dulles to get my car. After a crazy day, it felt great to walk past the line of fifty-plus people waiting in the humidity for cabs at Union Station's notoriously long taxi line and hop straight into my waiting black Lincoln Town Car. Off we went, and I got home only about an hour later than I should have had the flight not been canceled.

Comparing Uber with traditional taxis is a flawed thesis, despite whatever the DC Council and taxi commission think. It's an entirely different class and type of service. Do taxi drivers have airline flight numbers memorized? Do they offer a laptop and internet access, or have an electric outlet for charing your phone? Do they even do basic things like accept credit cards? Do they pick you up on-demand? The answer is "no" to all. And that's why Uber rules.

Why I Support Uber

The DC council is set to impose new regulations on private on-demand car service Uber that would limit Uber's ability to offer a new, lower cost service in the District. The proposed rules are a pretty shameless attempt to protect incumbent taxi drivers in the District from additional competition. They are also an offensive and crude response to a situation that should instead be used to motivate greater innovation and reform from DC taxis, not 19th century style protectionism.

Here's why I support Uber, including its proposed new "Uberx" service.

• As a free and sentient being, I choose to pay extra for what I consider to be a higher-quality service (Uber cars vs. the ordinary dump of a taxi in the District). Why does the DC council think it has a mandate to decide what's more or less valuable in my eyes? Why can't we let the market decide?
• I can ride around cashless and credit cardless with Uber. While dozens of cities around the world (I travel frequently) are moving towards credit card payments in taxis, in DC it's a rarity to find the brave taxi driver slinging a Square payment system. DC taxis are simply behind the times and need to modernize, like, now.
• Visiting New York City for the day and riding in the NYC taxis is a stark reminder of just how pathetic the service is in DC. The more Uber can help push DC taxis to innovate, the better for taxpayers, tourists, local businesses....everyone.
• My last Uber driver had an autograph from Sarah Palin in his passport. How cool is that?!

Look, the bottom line is that the taxi moguls fear competition as any monopolistic incumbent would. I get that; they will lose revenue here. But the public wins, and so does DC's reputation. Why would the council oppose that?

A Working Definition of "Open Government"

I've been spending a non-trivial amount of time lately watching and pondering the explosive uptake of the term "open government." This probably isn't too surprising given Global Integrity's involvement in the nascent Open Government Partnership (OGP). As excited as I've been to witness the growth of OGP, the continued progress of the open data movement, and the emerging norms around citizen participation in government internationally, I've also been worrying that the longer we allow "open government" to mean any and everything to anyone, the risk increases that the term melts into a hollow nothingness of rhetoric. My most immediate concern, which I've been chronicling of late over on this Tumblr, has been the conflation of "open data" with "open government," an issue well-explored by Harlan Yu and David Robinson in this paper. I've also been publicly concerned about the apparent emphasis put on open data -- seemingly at the expense of other open government-related priorities -- by the current UK government, which is slated to take over the co-chairmanship of OGP shortly. (An excellent unpacking of those concerns can be found in this letter from leading UK NGOs to the government.)

But for all my griping, I've yet to put my money where my mouth is and offer up my own definition of what "open government" means. It's time to fix that.

What follows is, at best, a rough working definition of open government that I hope spurs debate and conversation. This is certainly not 100% correct, all-encompassing, or definitive. Nor is it rocket science: this tracks fairly closely with others' thinking, and I suspect it's not too far outside of anyone's mainstream definition (including the Open Government Declaration of September 2011).

At its core, "open government" to me means three things:

1. Information Transparency: that the public understands the workings of their government;
2. Public engagement: that the public can influence the workings of their government by engaging in governmental policy processes and service delivery programs; and
3. Accountability: that the public can hold the government to account for its policy and service delivery performance.

Into those three buckets we can then deposit many of the "open government" initiatives, programs, and interventions that are often invoked on their own as "open government." What's most important here, to me, is that none of these initiatives or interventions in and of themselves constitute "open government" alone. Rather, only when combined with the others do we truly see the potential for "open government" in its most powerful and holistic form.

Bucket 1 (Information Transparency): freedom of information initiatives; open data and Big [Public] Data efforts, including open data portals; procurement, budget, and policy transparency (e.g. voting records, meeting minutes, political finance transparency).

Bucket 2 (Public Engagement): e-government services; open311 and service delivery feedback loops; stakeholder fora and participatory processes (e.g. participatory budgeting, town hall meetings, both online and offline); electoral processes.

Bucket 3 (Accountability): anti-corruption mechanisms (e.g. auditing, ombudsmen); conflicts of interest and influence peddling safeguards.

It goes without saying that the world does not fit neatly into this clean paradigm. Electoral processes are as much a form of accountability as a form of engagement, and the distinction between information transparency and engagement blurs quickly when we talk about something like open311. But hopefully the general construct holds some water.

As for technology? I view technology agnostically in the context of "open government." Some of the above interventions don't work without technology -- think open data, open311, or e-government services. Others work quite well without websites or apps. Technology can certainly be a powerful force multiplier in the context of open government, and it can take interventions to scale rapidly. But technology is neither open government itself nor required for open government to necessarily take hold, in my view.

Rather than dive any deeper into this, I'll stop here to allow for others to correct, add to, or tear this apart. How would you define open government?