Monday, January 03, 2011

Entrepreneurs Everywhere

Writing in City Journal, Conor Friedersdorf raises some interesting points regarding technology and regulation:

The taxi is a good example. Famously subject to municipal regulation, most fleets underserve their cities. It’s easy to hail a ride in Manhattan because of its density and singular geography—and orders of magnitude harder in most other cities, especially outside the Northeast. Enter UberCab, a smartphone application for the Bay Area that uses GPS to locate cabs, match them to passengers in real time, and facilitate their transaction, even calculating distances, determining prices, and handling payments. Similar technology could make every city dweller with a car a part-time cabbie, picking up passengers whenever convenient—except that most cities prohibit such informal arrangements.

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