Even Uber Critics Have to Hate De Blasio's Latest Regulation Push

A sad parable for our times: I don’t trust Uber, the global ride-hailing giant, with the scarily detailed data that it collects on all its customers. But after watching a nearly four-hour hearing last week on how Mayor de Blasio proposes to regulate Uber and its competitors, I don’t trust the government with much of this data, either.

Uber poses a genuine challenge to the city. Thanks to its optimistic investors, the company has lost $5 billion over the past two years trying to get the world’s urban dwellers hooked on riding around in pleasant black cars.

Thanksgiving week, New York’s yellow cabs and black-car companies clocked nearly 4.7 million rides, 271,000 more than the previous year. Of those, Uber did 1.5 million trips, up from 865,000 the previous year.

Surging traffic, plus tens of thousands of inexperienced new drivers competing with each other for fares, has spurred the city to update some rules.

But as last week’s hearing on one proposed rule demonstrated, the city insists on making just one simple thing way more complicated than it needs to be.

The rule has to do with “driver fatigue”: the risk that your driver works so much that he falls asleep and kills you.

It should be addressed, but the way the city wants to go about it is . . . odd. Regulators wants to prohibit taxi and black-car drivers from carrying passengers for more than 10 hours a day, or 60 hours a week.

But, as several speakers pointed out, drivers spend a lot of time not ferrying passengers: just looking for passengers, or commuting to their first fare. Regulators say they’ve accounted for this, because the 10-hour rule on passengers would allow drivers to work for as many as 16 hours.

But this creates another problem. A spokesperson for car-sharing company Via pointed out that it penalizes companies that are particularly efficient at finding fares. For them, 10 hours of passenger time requires less cruising around.

More worrisome, though, is the roundabout way in which regulators want to track trip time. Drivers already send regulators their pick-up locations. But now, regulators want drivers to send them data on specific drop-off locations, too, so they can then calculate how long a particular trip took.

Regulators note that yellow-cab drivers already do this, but there’s a difference. Taxi drivers tend to pick riders up from one crowded area and drop them off at another: Penn Station to the World Trade Center, for example.

Uber, Lyft and Carmel drivers, by contrast, take more people to individual locations. As an Uber rep pointed out, if you live in a single-family home on Staten Island or in Bay Ridge, where you live is a pretty good personal identifier.

No, the city won’t release this information to the public — but it will have it.

There’s a far more straightforward way of doing this: asking workers to track all the time they spend driving on the job, via GPS, whether they have a passenger or not.

Car companies could then send broad GPS information to regulators. They could report drop-off locations by block, or in less-dense areas, so regulators could still track trip times for enforcement reasons, like fare-gauging.

Regulators say they need more specific drop-off data for another reason: to respond to complaints about drivers who speed or run red lights.

But trying to figure out how a driver got from point A to point B hours after the fact is a bizarrely indirect way of policing bad drivers. It would be far more efficient for the city and state to put up more red-light and speed cameras.

At any rate, having broad drop-off data would help narrow down the pool of bad drivers after a complaint, while avoiding the privacy concerns.

These are all symptoms of a bigger malady, though: Tech companies like Uber already know everything about their customers, including where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Most of the time, this isn’t interesting — but sometimes it is, and that’s when you don’t want anyone to know.

But it doesn’t fix this pre-existing risk to give the data to more people — especially when there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal.

This piece originally appeared at the New York Post

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post