Tag: government technology

Chicago’s Plan to Democratize Taxi Technology

Posted on by robbie

The “Uber effect” has reverberated throughout the world across a number of industries, creating marketplaces and leveling competition. But rather than conceding to Uber’s dominance in the taxi business, Chicago is taking the reigns in deciding who will lead the city in taxi and ride-sharing services.
The Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection will begin accepting bids from companies to design a universal app for city dwellers to use to hail a cab, the Chicago Tribune reports. The city is looking for an all-in-one app that can let users look for the nearest service, rather than using individual apps like Uber or Lyft or calling one of the city’s numerous taxi services.
The government-sponsored project is similar to the Department of Transportation partnering with Alta Bicycle Share to develop the city’s bike-sharing program, Divvy.

The city wants an app that “riders find it easy enough to use, and, most importantly, are protected,” and “wants to ensure that a competitive procurement process is followed and respected,” says Mika Stambaugh, spokeswoman for the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection. A proposal to create the app has been submitted to the City Council, as a part of a series of changes with the goal of increasing taxi driver income without changing the taxi fare infrastructure.

But the concern lies with the potential of a company like Uber winning the bid and ultimately taking control of the industry in Chicago. Uber, which began as an alternative to taxis by connecting off-duty black car drivers with riders, has now launched a series of services that has created backlash among the taxi industry.

“Government is essentially endorsing one app as the centralized dispatch,” says George Lutfallah, publisher of Chicago Dispatcher, a taxi trade publication. “My concern is that it limits choice, and that whoever wins the contract won’t have as strong of an incentive to serve the drivers and the customers.”

While the city does not maintain data on how many rides are through taxicabs, private black cars or limousines and ride-sharing operations, there are almost 7,000 licensed taxicabs and 15,327 taxicab and livery drivers throughout Chicago, according to the Tribune. Transportation experts estimate around 60 to 70 percent of the market belong to taxis, limousines making up around 20 percent and ride-sharing services taking up the remaining 10 percent.

But with the potential of the growing ride-sharing industry, those estimates could soon change. Which is why it’s important that the company selected to design the app is truly leveling the playing field.

MORE: The Start-Up That’s Recruiting 50,000 Military and Veteran Drivers

How a Childhood Skill Can Help Local Governments Save Money

Posted on by robbie

During this rise of successful startups like AirBnB and Uber, government agencies have become a barrier rather than a boon to the share economy.
But in an attempt to make peer-to-peer sharing more attractive to government officials, a Michigan-based startup is enlisting local municipalities to explore the concept for themselves. MuniRent, created by developer and entrepreneur Alan Mond, enables towns to rent equipment from one another at reduced rates. School districts, road commissions and counties are among some of the targeted groups encouraged to rent anything from tractors to textbooks.
“Our vision is to be the hub for collaborative government,” Mond told Fast Company.
MuniRent is aiming to coordinate the gap between large and small municipalities, according to MLive.com. Larger organizations buy equipment they may not regularly use while smaller operations may rent tools that sometimes can be costly. Since they’re government organizations, they’re not in competition with each other, Mond explains, which is why a share economy makes sense when it comes to towns.
“If you have two construction companies, one of them may not want to rent a crane to the other one. Governments are all trying to do sewer maintenance on reduced budgets. They’re not competing. They just happen to be in different jurisdictions,” Mond said.
The online platform lets users reserve equipment for a period of time, pay a fee — of which includes 20 percent rental cost for MuniRent — and coordinate a pickup and return date. Mond estimates municipalities within a 30-mile proximity can share.
MuniRent is one of five startups recently accepted to Code for America’s new civic technology accelerator. The incubator provided MuniRent with $25,000 to get started and mentors, as well as Code for America’s government resources.
While Mond is getting MuniRent off the ground in Michigan (two cities have already signed on), he expects to expand the program nationwide — perhaps soon in Oregon.
“The Oregon Department of Transportation has had me out and they want to use MuniRent to better organize their system,” Mond said. “As it stands, their catalogue doesn’t work in a way that is useful or efficient, and a lot of municipalities have trouble booking equipment.”
With dwindling funds and shrinking budgets, it’s important to see inter-municipal tools like MuniRent provide an innovative solution to government efficiency.
MORE: The 7 Smartest Uses of Technology in Government Today

How a Former Google Engineer Plans to Change the Government for Good

Posted on by robbie

Last fall, when the government stumbled launching the HealthCare.gov website last fall, Google engineer Mikey Dickerson stepped in to save the day.
Now, the White House is once again reaching out to Silicon Valley and carving out a permanent position for Dickerson, appointing him deputy chief information officer of the federal government and the administrator of the United States Digital Services Team.
Dickerson will helm a small team of digital experts aimed at repairing other government websites and computer systems, signaling a shift toward using technology to improve government efficiency. The goal is make these sites more accessible, user-friendly and as enjoyable as logging on to Facebook or Amazon, Dickerson told the New York Times.
Dickerson recalls walking into the storm that was the headquarters of of HealthCare.gov in Columbia, Md., in the winter of 2013.

“It was a very life-changing experience,” he says, adding his dismay over the lack of modern tools present to track data or better understand why the site was crashing.

“It’s easy just to order a bunch of machines and install them, and we’re doing all that stuff,” he says. “But you have to find exactly where is the choke point, and it’s a very compacted system.”

Dickerson likens his job to a traffic engineer, identifying where back-ups and bottlenecks exist. When the White House asked him to leave his job at Google for the new position, “there was really not any way I could say no to that,” he says.

In tandem with Dickerson’s hire, the White House also released a draft “playbook” to assist technology officers across federal agencies, using some of processes and tools enlisted in fixing the health care site last year.

The Digital Services Team plans to act as a sort of emergency responder to federal websites and systems temporarily stalled, but Dickerson also hopes to preemptively help agencies and anticipate potential problems on the horizon.

For now, the team will operate on a small scale, with only $3 million in the government’s technology budget. But the government has requested $13 million for next year and has plans to expand the team to as many as 25 people to help Dickerson revolutionize the next generation of government.

To us, that sounds like a goal that is certainly worth the cost.

MORE: Governmental Technology Difficulties Abound, Yet the Future Looks Bright