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The New Yorker takes a serious look at the future of Los Angeles taxicabs through the eyes of Eric Spiegelman, a lawyer who may be familiar to longtime LA Observed readers as a writer, blogger and time-lapse creator about Los Angeles. He also produces the web series Old Jews Telling Jokes. But now he is the president of the Garcetti administration's Board of Taxicab Commissioners, and the architect behind a plan to reform LA taxis to act more like Uber and other ride-sharing services. Spiegelman is a believer that the LA car culture as we know it is on the verge of ending, and that for many people — including, soon, himself — the personal car is losing its economic edge over catching rides. Taxis and ride-sharing services are a crucial part of the vision of a reduced-car future, and for that to actually work taxis have to start being available via smartphone app and make other updates to the model. From the New Yorker story by Maria Bustillos:
According to the terms of the proposed draft order, every taxi in Los Angeles would have to become accessible via a mobile application similar to the ones used by Uber and Lyft. These applications will require certification by the Taxi Commission, which can then specify things like pricing maximums and limits on hours worked in a single shift, and can perhaps even set up a rating and complaint system for passengers….
The impetus is particularly strong in Los Angeles, which has long been about the worst big city in the United States in which to hail a conventional cab. Taxi drivers here don’t generally drive around looking for passengers—it would be inefficient, given the city’s sprawl and traffic congestion—so it is nearly always necessary to phone a dispatcher...And then, once you’ve made it through the hold music and booked a ride, you might easily wait, perhaps forever, as the driver either gets lost or forgets all about you and your soon-to-be-forfeited dinner reservation. (I exaggerate—but not by much.)[skip]
Given these frustrations, Angelenos welcomed Lyft and Uber with open arms. Taxi Commission documents show that in the first quarter of 2014, right after UberX, the company’s low-cost service, began operating in Los Angeles, conventional taxi rides dropped by about twenty per cent. Using the new services, wait times suddenly shrank to minutes; you could pay and even tip with a few swipes on your phone.
“Uber’s value to Los Angeles is different from Uber’s value to any other city in the country,” Spiegelman said. The city has the worst traffic in the U.S., despite efforts to reduce the number of private cars on the road by encouraging the use of car pools, taxis, public transit, walking, anything. “This is the one city where you have the goals of the civic body running in lockstep with the goals of private entities,” he said.
The Spiegelman plan comes before the taxi commission on Thursday. By the way, he says in the story that he tried to get rid of some of the strange city regulations that cover taxis, such as the requirement that cabbies wear black pants and socks, and 30 other rules. “I thought the taxi companies would like it,” he said, “but they went nuts.” That's apparently because the companies carry the drivers as independent contractors, and can't apply behavioral rules as if the drivers were more costly employees. So the taxi companies get the city to enforce the standards for them.
