A New York City council member has proposed an app that would let residents “e-hail” city cabs.
If you can’t beat them, join them.
Regulators in Chicago
have approved a plan to create one or more applications that would allow
users to hail taxis from any operators in the city, using a smartphone.
In New York, a City Council member proposed a similar app on Monday
that would let residents “e-hail” any of the 20,000 cabs that circulate
in the city on a daily basis.
It is a new tack for officials in the two cities, a reaction to the surging use of hail-a-ride apps like Uber and Lyft.
Regulators in New York
have not yet voted on the bill on the e-hail app, which was first
proposed by Benjamin Kallos, a councilman who represents the Upper East
Side and Roosevelt Island.
In Chicago, the plan
to create such apps is part of the so-called Taxi Driver Fairness
Reforms package, a plan backed by a taxi union and City Council members
that would update regulations around taxi cab lease rates and violations
like traffic tickets, among others. The city is expected to solicit
third-party application developers to build the official app or set of
apps. The City Council gave no further details on its selection
criteria, nor did it give information on how the initiative would be
financed.
“These reforms
represent what is necessary to further modernize this growing industry,”
Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, said in a statement. William Morris
Endeavor, the talent agency where Mr. Emanuel’s brother Ari is co-chief,
is an investor in Uber.
In just five years,
Uber and Lyft, start-ups based in San Francisco, have shook up the taxi
and limousine industry, offering a more tech-savvy approach to
ride-sharing. After downloading the companies’ apps, customers can
summon cars to pick them up based on GPS location data tracked by their
iPhones or Android phones without having to whistle or call for a cab on
the street.
Many taxi and
limousine unions argue that the start-ups have pushed their way into
hundreds of cities around the world without stopping to abide by local
rules and regulations. Lawmakers in many cities have pushed back against
Uber and Lyft, calling for more comprehensive legislation and stricter policies on how the companies screen their drivers.
Other start-ups have
tried to marry existing transportation infrastructure with new
technology. Flywheel, for instance, allows users to e-hail local
taxicabs in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles using a smartphone
app. Hailo, another app-based start-up, offers a similar service.
Uber and Lyft,
however, far outweigh these alternatives in popularity and funding; Uber
has raised about $2.7 billion in venture capital to date, while Lyft
has raised more than $300 million. This year, Hailo pulled its business
out of North America to focus entirely on Europe; at the time, Hailo’s
chief executive cited the “astronomical” cost of marketing the service
in the United States and the popularity of Uber as his company’s reasons
for leaving the country.
