The Well Worn Path from Penny-Wise to Pound-Foolish

Recent headlines in my local newspaper reminded me of how ironic one of the challenges was during the four-decade career I concluded more than five years ago.

The way the headline writers convey it, our City Council is divided about whether to endorse health insurance from a locally based corporation or send tax dollars off to a company in Connecticut.

Reading more closely, it is nothing more than jawboning to get a better deal, but whatever the reason, it is sending an unfortunate message to local businesses as well as universities here sure to undermine economic development.

Part of my job in visitor-centric economic and cultural development was one where mission accomplished was ever elusive.

it was challenging enough to remind both public and private sector players that a primary outcome for community destination marketing, a demand-side form of economic development, is to fuel the local business climate and the local tax base.

A corollary often lost even on economic developers on the “supply-side” is that it can be optimized only when local businesses and organizations strategically give preference to using or making purchases from other local businesses.

This has always been economic development 101.

But the reason so many in every sector don’t get it is because of a notion called siloed thinking which structurally permeates even the smallest of organizations.

I’ll use local government as an example but it is applicable to organizations as large as Duke University here, one of the state’s largest employers and even businesses that owe tax credits to their success.

Siloing especially infects the way organizations are structured.

This condition results in revenue streams being severed from how an organization conducts purchasing.

During my career, we trained in how to do economic impact analysis, in part, to help local festivals make a case to local government officials for funding but also to help deflect some in the private sector who always seem bent on “big game hunting” to bring in outside mainstream events instead, diluting sense of place.

But rarely if ever do local government officials or organizations anywhere tie their own procurement to local economic impact.

For example, any decision to ditch a locally based insurer for an out of state competitor should factor in the local property taxes paid by the local corporation, along with induced impact from its locally based payroll.

Also included should be the work-side spending of its commuter payroll, spending with local vendors and of course, the company’s local philanthropy.  Any decision to penny pinch should be informed by an economic impact analysis.

During the near decade I was in Anchorage during the 1980s, both the municipality (merged city and county) and State government would give a percentage preference to local vendors during bids, even if it meant a broker until local capacity could evolve.

During the 1990s, the ImPlan input-output model was made accessible with metrics calibrated for each county in the country.  It is the one we deployed in Durham during my former life, both through consultants and for local stakeholders through trained staff.

Rather than a percentage preference such as Anchorage had long used, it makes it possible to run an economic impact analysis to inform decisions including direct, indirect and induced effects as well as “leakage.”

Still, many organization continue to make “penny-wise and pound-foolish” decisions because siloing prevents them from being strategic when it comes to the local economy.

Unfortunately, it is endemic today across all sector.

It is why I still find myself explaining the importance of “buy local” to economic developers, sense of place to boomer developers and recently the importance of using Tar Heel artists to a state arts official.

Especially ironic is when I have to defend selective and sustainably tree cutting over clear cutting to consulting foresters, because the most accurate economic impact models in use today were first developed for the United States Forest Service.

So how did I get so smart? (smile)

I learned my former craft in the early 1970s from a generation of community destination marketing mentors who reached back before WWII.

I then watched as peers came unmoored from how economic development works, to the point that some even humorously tried to justifying imperial over-reach by arguing that it didn’t matter if the visitor spending they drew occurred in the business climate and tax base they were paid to promote.

Really?

I also saw peers over on the “supply-side” of economic development (recruiting relocating businesses) such as chamber of commerce types forgo the importance of using local vendors and local employees as metrics, to rationalize being able to poach members from other communities.

Siloing makes all of us appear stupid.

In the late 1970s, as the organizations I led as startups grew into adolescence and beyond, I began to study a new discipline of organizational structure designed to overcome the tendency of organizations and teams of individuals to silo.

If they haven’t been thrown out, there will be books I devoured on the topic of organizing like a matrix rather than a hierarchy still on the library shelves of the three DMOs I led over the decades since then until retiring at the end of 2009.

It was a theory put into practice by GE when it developed a new type of plant in Durham to assemble jet engines, just as I arrived here, structured around “teams” rather than the customary assembly line which opened in 1993.

But it was a much more difficult concept to execute in a community destination marketing organization, let alone a city, county or other large employer.  Inertia continued to rule

However, a new book I just read may be a breakthrough.

In Team of Teams, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell, a former Navy Seal who also teamed up to form CrossLead, made the idea of a matrix much more practical and achievable for any type or size of organization.

They also provide a history of how organizations, on purpose, came to be siloed and examples of organizations who have overcome it only to have a new generation of leaders take them back to be siloed.

Team of Teams reminds us that on May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, less than four months after inauguration, announced to Congress that Americans would land on the moon before the end of the decade, our space program was a disaster.

That all turned around and this was successfully achieved less than eight years later on July 20, 1969  because George Mueller reorganized NASA into a matrix.  But during the 1970s and 1980s, NASA re-siloed, resulting in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

Despite being well managed and contributing to community accolades, local governments in Durham are and have been heavily siloed for a long time.

An example other than procurement decisions being detached from from revenue streams is the sad state of urban forests.

The strategic approach to urban canopy in planning is undermined by cuts to code enforcement and isolation from urban foresters in general services where they are purposely made non-strategic.

Each of these functions is estranged from public works where trees are as more of a nuisance.

Thus Durham places little priority on green infrastructure and still has no strategic urban forest assessment or management plan of any kind, let alone one that is community-wide like the ones other leading cities began to create and implement nearly three decades ago.

In the meantime, Durham has been losing a net 18,000 trees a year not counting tens of thousands more lost to wasteful clear cutting.  All of this is estranged from local government sustainability and storm water treatment objective elsewhere.

Frustrated?  Eye-rolling?  Overly sensitive?  You aren’t alone as are many who work in local government including some of the brightest and most dedicated people I know.

Problems similar to this are endemic across the county in every sector of the economy.

But local governments can and should set an example because they are in the best place to do so strategically.  There is no better place to begin than by reading Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World.

Symbolic For The Living

Later this month, as they do every few years, a group of volunteers in Durham, North Carolina, including some city and county officials, will invest some time and “elbow grease” to tidy the historic Geer Cemetery.

It is an all-black burial ground was established in 1877, twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed “separate-but-equal” laws in the South, known as Jim Crow laws. In many states, that even included segregation after death.

Geer had fallen into such disrepair, that four years after that 1896 decision, the 10-month-old Durham Sun opined in an effort to get the city to restore this hallowed place.

But 115 years after that editorial, the City of Durham still finds excuses as to why that can’t happen.

Rather than racism, I suspect it has much more to do with bureaucratic inertia enabled by a reticence found commonly which is that asking questions is associated with criticism and “rocking the boat” with retribution.

This cultural affliction is very difficult to root out and inhibits private as well as public entities.  In my observation, it is most often the culprit holding organizations back from being more innovative.

This will be the fourth or fifth time in my 26 years of residence that volunteers have filled the city void.  Geer Cemetery is only a few blocks from my first house here on Shawnee Street in the Old North Durham neighborhood.

I grew to know the old cemetery during morning walks there with our dog at the time, named Jack.

On an April morning walk less than a year after my arrival, I saw members of the former Durham Service Corps (DSC) working to rehabilitate the old cemetery, a project documented in the report Reclaiming Yesterday.

Volunteers set to do the same thing next month are well advised to click on this link and read the report.

Resurrected, the DSC would be a more strategic, comprehensive and sustainable approach to both the issue of youth employment as well as maintenance of commons such as Geer Cemetery.

There are many benefits to engaging volunteers including a sense of community, physical activity and camaraderie, as well as bringing greater awareness to issues.

But a disconnect occurred about thirty years ago when governments at all levels, including those in Durham, seemed to forget that matching grants such as the one meant to pilot DCS as well as volunteerism are not mean to replace caretaking but to supplement it.

It isn’t that simple when it comes to cemeteries.

When it comes to a true census of cemeteries, it is volunteers including genealogists across the country who work hard to track cemeteries including hundreds in Durham County alone, mapped and maintained on the web by Allen Dew who partners with the Durham-Orange society.

Only a couple fall under the stewardship of the City of Durham.

Keep in mind that even progressive counties such as Durham didn’t begin the practice of issuing death certificates until 1908, a practice not required across North Carolina until 1913, a decade after that chide in the Durham Sun newspaper.

Some cemeteries here are incorporated with places of worship but most are small family plots including those I see seemingly protected in the right-of-ways along roadsides as I ride my Harley.

I grew fond of cemeteries beginning when I was age three as I would tag along with my parents up the hill behind the horse barn to a small cemetery carved out of our ancestral ranch to maintain the graves of many of my ancestors.

I even remember that it was while visiting the small historic cemetery next to a former Jesuit Seminary on a bluff high above Spokane, Washington one Saturday in 1973 that my daughter and only child decided it was time to be born, resulting in a mad dash down the mountain to the hospital.

Volunteers today also staff a website entitled “Find A Grave,” carefully curating cemeteries and individual gravesites on the web.  The nation-wide effort was founded in 1995 in Salt Lake City by Jim Tipton before being absorbed a few years ago into Ancestry.com.

The gravestone shown here in Holliday is that of one of my great-great grandfathers but it isn’t the original one.  One of that community’s first settlers, he was buried there in 1900 but by the late 1980s the old cemetery was in need of rehabilitation including replacement of headstones.

My maternal grandfather rescued the original marker and delivered it on a trip near the end of his life to my sister in Enumclaw, Washington, where as shown in the image in this blog, it rests in her garden.

Cities first began creating public cemeteries in 1831 and they soon they became viewed as the nation’s first public parks.  In fact, seeing how popular they were inspired cities two decades later to begin creating open and forested spaces dedicated as parks.

Just as WWII broke out in Europe, the Durham County health department closed Geer Cemetery in 1939 because it had become over crowded, although a burial or two was still held there until 1944.

It would be another decade before the U.S. Supreme Court would put an end to segregation, although segregationist candidates would continue to openly run and be elected in states such as North Carolina up through the 1990s.

Standing as a reminder of intolerance and our country’s ongoing struggle to overcome bigotry, historic Geer Cemetery deserves more of our recognition and respect including the city and county.

Modifying “Gnats” As A Strategy

In the early 1990’s, I don’t think Durham’s local governments realized they were being strategic when they provided nearly all of the funding for a new non-profit organization to do advocacy for downtown revitalization.

Typically governments across the country do this initially either as a “dole-out” to “make some constituents happy” or because it seems like an inexpensive way to shed a responsibility.

Either way, it turned out to be genius.  Essentially, the organization turned out, at its best, to be a sort of ombudsman to work deep within those bureaucracies both as a collaborator with public servants but also to connect dots between agency silos.

Any large organization, public or private, could benefit from a few “gnats” such as that.

I know it wasn’t a strategic move in Durham because the formula hasn’t been replicated in other areas even once.

In fact, when I pointed out how it had worked to one administrator, she tried to replicated it with Keep Durham Beautiful but clearly as a way to shed responsibility for community upkeep on the theory that businesses and residents could be panhandled to do it instead.

To apply a popular rhetorical device, “How’s that workin’ for ya?” .

KDB was instead embedded within the bureaucracies but given a hybrid non-profit with which to work along with a tiny fraction of what had been given just for downtown advocacy, greatly inhibiting its effectiveness.

But essentially this has still served its more valuable role as a “gnat” to “connect or reconnect the dots” between agencies regarding the huge dividend local governments can reap by fulfilling overarching responsibilities for curb appeal.

There are advantages to each approach.

But having seen both close up now, I am persuaded that the former makes it less likely that such “gnat” will be weighted down with internal agency culture.

Even so, it still doesn’t appear that local governments here have caught on that funding “gnats” could be scaled up as a broader strategy but then again being strategic or innovative often goes unrewarded in public service these days.

Ironically, before there is any “eye-rolling,” most stupid public sector decisions originate when instead of creating economic value on their own, some private sector “bottom feeders seek to leverage value through manipulation of public policy as a substitute.

Or when small groups of vocal constituents sense handouts could result.

Remember, the “Baby Bell” that reconstituted AT&T after its breakup did so by overwhelming the Texas legislature and a soon-to-be US President by literally deploying a lobbyist for each member of that body.

Thus we now see even our jointly-owned airport shamelessly out panhandling local governments to subsidize fights that don’t make sense otherwise to businesses.

Where do you think they got that bright idea?  Proponents of convention centers and stadiums such as subsidy-ravenous event planners and promoters?

Of course, even if Durham had been strategic with downtown advocacy and community appearance, the “gnat” model only works as long as public, rather than special interests are foremost and those spearheading change are insulated from closed-door strong-arming and retribution.

That given, an area ripe for extension of the “gnat” model as strategy is in the area of land use and specifically, the character of the “built” environment that can make or break the distinct sense of a particular place, that is, if like Durham, it still has one.

This certainly isn’t a role for which commercial boosters would fit, or anyone afraid to walk away from a project.

But Durham local governments do have a non-profit with the mission, sensibilities and now expertise to fulfill this role and one with which they already have a relationship, however modest.

They would be well advised to greatly expand the role of Preservation Durham in the mold of how it has done with Downtown Durham Inc.  The organization both by sensibility and by expertise is in a unique position.

It already serves to survey and identify landmarks but it could do so much more, much as DDI did for revitalization, but in this case to work with planners, general services, open space and many other agencies.

The dividend would be to shape public and private structures early in the process where modifications aren’t costly in ways that ensure the structures belong in both scale and design and links and benefits to their surroundings and to the “built” aspect of Durham’s sense of place.

This wouldn’t be a much fun for those who enjoy public policy “car wrecks” and controversy, but it is something Durham’s local governments need, not a shedding of responsibility but another useful and collaborative “gnat.”

Converting tactics into strategies, let alone overarching strategies is not always the best way to shape strategy, but often innovation occurs unexpectedly when something works for a reason other than intended.

Think “post-it notes”, “stainless steel,” “x-rays,” “Velcro,” even “potato chips” and “matches.”

Durham local governments stumbled on its own “post-it” innovation and now, in my opinion, it is well advised to strategically replicate it.

Reconnecting the Dots

A neighbor of mine lives along one of Durham’s most beautiful parklands but fails to see the irony whenever he complains that the city should focus less on greenways and more on funding hard services such as police.

He would be well advised to read a book, published earlier this year by a friend of mine, entitled Conservation Communities: Creating Value with Nature, Open Space, and Agriculture.

In part it details the type of development now underway in Durham by a young entrepreneur I met just I was retiring called Wetrock Farm.  Since we met he graduated from Duke and completed an MBA at the University of Miami before returning to the Bull City.

Durham is a single-city county by the same name, the fourth largest city in North Carolina and located in the 17th smallest county by land area.

Making this a tight fit is that the northern third of the county has been set aside in watershed.  Restricted this forms a sort of natural urban growth boundary but also guarantees that this part of Durham’s sense of place will remain rural and open.

Wetrock will exist in what Durham has set aside as “conservation subdivisions” (see article 6.2.4 in District Intensity Standards,) a best practice as I will describe later in this essay that belies a paradoxical failure to connect the dots overall.

These are areas designed to provide clustering of houses and structures in a way that preserves wetlands, streams, woodlands, wildlife habitat, historic and archeological sites as well as “authenticity” and sense of place.

Specifically, Wetrock Farm will develop 230 acres into 141 home sites with 2/3rds of the land preserved as forest.  It will also incorporate trails and a working farm with 140 acres permanently protected by a conservation easement.

All of this will be just 10 miles from amenities such as Duke University and the City Center District, 12 miles from North Carolina Central University and only 14 miles from Research Triangle Park just on the other side of Downtown.

Too bad this rationale wasn’t applied to every neighborhoods here as they began to take shape a hundred years ago.  In fact, even business districts such as downtowns.

The book Conservation Communities uses real estate research to quantify the dividends communities reap from developments such as Wetrock Farm:

• Environmentally sensitive areas are protected along with water quality and urban forest canopy.
• Property owners reap a dividend in the form of higher property values.
• Local governments reaps a dividend in increased property taxes used to fund overall community services such as public safety.

Up through the 1970s and into the 1980s local government officials across the nation used to do a much better job of breaking dividends such as this down for residents and connecting the dots for folks like my neighbor.

Then it seems they suddenly stopped connecting the dots for themselves as well as witnessed somewhere in the first decade of my now-concluded career.

It is also how the insanity of “front end” subsidies, oh I mean incentives were born, another word for “legalized” panhandling.

In Durham for example they began very slowly hollowing out funds for basic community upkeep which in turn soon began to degrade curb appeal, which dampened property values, which slowed tax revenue, which resulted in more hollowing until a vicious cycle took root.

Of course, the intent was to restore upkeep before anyone noticed but gradually it became the new norm and then one day local governments began to whine that basic maintenance and upkeep of appearances was somehow an unfair burden.

Of course, this wasn’t a strategic decision.

If I hadn’t been a witness, it was easily gleaned from books such as The United States of Ambition that moves such as this take shape when politicians began to sense that “keeping people happy” by doling out these funds instead was far more rewarding and fun than upkeep.

But this has contributed to creation of a feedback loop where residents are frustrated and resistant to paying taxes (in reality only a tiny but vocal minority) so officials try to appease them by holding the line.

This, in turn, forced the year-to-year absorption of increases to the costs of living such as goods and services which means budgets for maintenance and upkeep get “rabbit-holed” into a downward spiral, which undermines resident confidence.

It is how communities that are otherwise seemingly vibrant and “cool” on the surface, begin to slowly and imperceptibly degrade at the margins before falling again into a cycle of decay.

Now instead of running local government like a business with 5% of budgets set aside for maintenance and upkeep along roadsides, streams and other commons, local officials are more likely to feel put-upon by this responsibility.

Soon they resort to panhandling businesses and volunteers to get by never realizing the resentment this creates because residents and businesses then silently fume because upkeep is something they feel they already shoulder in property taxers.

It has been this way in Durham for nearly three decades.  Even the increasingly depleted news media seems to have bought into this feedback loop rather than shining a light on its absurdity.

As a good friend who is a university executive mumbled under his breath, on a walk one day, when I noted a few years that had been the exception, “it won’t be enough to reverse that dysfunction has become the default.”

But this paradigm is not one in which Durham is unique.

To paraphrase the legendary “outlaw” of my time, Waylon Jennings, a fellow stoic who wrote in 1978 just before this all began, “We’ve always been crazy but its keep us from going insane.”

It seems so thoroughly embedded in the psyche of futility common among nearly all public administration professionals now that they probably never knew it was any other way.

Sadly, so many of those elected to shift the paradigm seem converted instead within a few weeks of being sworn in.

It may be left to Millennials and social entrepreneurs like the young developer of Wetrock to reconnect the dots and return us to true sanity.

In the meantime, I swear to do everything I can to never be an enabler.

Inattention Where It Most Matters

I read the news and I vote.  But frankly like a lot of people, I always end up on voting day finding myself standing there unprepared to make a choice for some offices.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to a solution.  In North Carolina, a non-partisan group, the North Carolina Center for Voter Education has teamed with UNC-TV to provide a website called the 2014 N.C. Voter Guide.

You plug in your address and the website takes you through your ballot, office by office, candidate by candidate with a summary of their background and positions.

At each step you can choose if you like to mark a preference and then at the end you can print out a completed ballot to take with you inside the voting booth.

It is also a place you can go to check your registration, find a polling place and see any new changes to voting requirements.

It is a lot easier to use than other past guides provided by news outlets which turned into something more like homework.

But I also wish there was a way when we vote, to reconsider candidates for whom we voted in the last election who have turned out to be a disappointment, even if just to send them a signal.

I’ve worked very closely, especially with state and local elected officials in my former life.

Sure, a few have been slimy, corrupt and passive aggressively smug in the realization that they won’t be detected behind the image they craft for public and media consumption.

But as a whole, locally elected officials are incredibly hard-working and honorable.

However, there have always been some, who once in office, seem to morph into someone else.  They go undetected even in personal interviews only to become the antitheses, once in office, of what you were led to believe when voting for them.

Maybe it is a case of what political science researchers call the “ego rent” some individuals begin to collect once elected to office.

Bored with executing the mundane policy preferences of constituents, pursuit of “ego rent” is why some start playing political games, making decisions based on incomplete or imbalanced feedback and ultimately fronting for special interests rather than voters.

But unfortunately, elections don’t come with a rescission period like there is for other decisions.

Local and state services represent about 40% of overall government spending and yet state decisions are often driven by officials for which only a few North Carolinians are given a choices.

For example, the horrific changes made a few years ago to clear cut public forestland along roadsides in favor of billboard blight was driven by just 19,381 voters, representing only one of the state’s 100 counties.

That is one of the inherent flaws in representative vs. popular democracy, the former now nearly obsolete.

But there is also growing evidence that as voters, we are far less likely to hold state and local officials accountable, even though they have far more influence over quality of life and the quality of the places we love.

There is also far too little news coverage in local elections.  Most is the superficial “he said, she said” type.  Taking editorial stances does not suffice for in-depth coverage and fact-checking.

For decades too, researchers have measured the bias toward national election coverage noting that in part, it is because it is easier and cheaper to cover.

Adverting simultaneous side-by-side fact-checking is no substitute, especially at the local level, where even cable channels do not reflect voting jurisdictions.

According to analysis by Borrell Associates, politicians and political organizations now spend $37 per eligible voter to sway opinion with media advertising, soon to be $51 in 2016, up 21% from the record setting 2012 Presidential election.

Are we really feeling more informed?  Or are the lies just getting more entertaining?  It is ironic that in the guise of so-called free speech this form is largely exempt from “truth in advertising” requirements.

At the local level, we also don’t have non-partisan, though often ideological, think-tanks making sense of budgets and rarely, okay never, are news outlets inclined or resourced sufficiently to go back through local decisions to analyze and report if the results were ever as claimed.

Voters also have no guarantee that the candidates are invested in the places they seek to represent, since many so-called local offices such as some levels of judges and prosecutors aren’t even required to be residents of the places they serve.

Partisan gerrymandering of districts over the last two decades have also estranged voters from those who are their only hope of representation in the legislature.

It is no wonder so many elections have such little turnout.  I feel patriotic when I vote but many now just don’t see the point.

Websites such as the one I noted at the beginning help.  But the systems needs an overhaul and not just the less than veiled partisan elimination of early voting days and I.D. complications.

Government and public policy has never been more complicated nor the news media less empowered to unwrap it than it is today.

It isn’t much enough to know that the closer government is to the people, the more trust we have in it today.  Even at the local and state level, it is about where it was during the Watergate Era and that isn’t saying much.

A friend of mind once rationalized the flat, dispassionate lack of defense of public policy by rationalizing that voters have a lot of ways to find that out.

Oh really?  Maybe that’s where reform needs to begin.

By making budgets and regulations easier to decipher, by requiring audits and reports on every outcome promised, by making democracy responsive.

No Sympathy for Taxis

Across the globe, the taxi or vehicle for hire business was in steep decline by 1989 when Durham, North Carolina where I still live asked me to launch my fifth and last destination marketing start up.

As I was beginning my fourth destination marketing start-up a decade earlier, the dispatch-owner centric model that had reigned for decades (showcased in the sitcom Taxi) was already showing signs of implosion.

I had worked a taxi for a few months during college when this system was in its hey day.  Regulators had little to do then but help set fares.

But by the end of the 1980s, the taxi industry was descending into chaos.  The cars began to age and in most cities when you could find one, cabs were often pretty  grimy and smelly.

Soon cell phone technology meant you had to call each driver individually, which was a nightmare, and the few that would take credit cards griped about it incessantly.

Gradually, what had been a service culture gave way to an entitlement chip-on-their-shoulder culture.

Some cities like Durham implemented studies that resulted in updated ordinances, but in many cases they were undermined or micromanaged by elected officials.  Inspectors grew lazy and inconsistent.

I don’t feel the least bit sorry now that taxis are feeling heat from alternatives such as Lyft,Uber and Uberx.

As I’ll explain below, this is only the beginning of a revolution.

With these technologies, drivers and vehicles are pre-qualified and insured, and drivers who are closest to a requested pick-up bid on the fares.  Through an app on their smart phones, passengers request a driver, instantly see the reviews of prior riders, and with a click on their smartphone, pay via their debit or credit card including whatever tip they choose.

Some taxis complain because these low overhead, low capital cost alternatives lack traditional inspections but other ways of ensuring this outperform the vast majority of traditional inspectors many of whom have grow unenergetic.

Taxis owners brought this on themselves.  Instead of complaining, they need to either band together to adopt similar customer-friendly technologies or seek a tie-in with Lyft and Uber.

Local officials share the blame for being enablers of a dying and dysfunctional model rather than pushing drivers to adopt new practices and technologies faster.

This often happens when local governments forget who their real stakeholders are, such as resident and visitor passengers and the businesses whose patrons the taxies are meant to serve, especially restaurants, grocery stores and hotels.

Instead of pushing for continuing and never-ending improvement of service outcomes, comprehensive and speedy early adoption of new technologies such as credit cards and very strict codes of dress and vehicle maintenance, as well as requiring strict age limits of vehicles (many end run ordinances to use cars that are 15 years old,) officials have kept a dying business culture on life support.

There has always been a bit of whining in the cab culture but none should be tolerated regarding these new alternatives.  Any tweaks to incorporate them should be rapidly incorporated by local governments.

Rather than seeing this as a threat, taxi owners and drivers should use this as a wake up call.

It makes sense for passenger for hire vehicles to be regulated but local governments also need to see these new alternatives as a wake up call and shake the cobwebs from enablers.

This includes airports, especially those in polycentric service areas who did away with cabs sorted by destination community because it was inconvenient for them and a way to make money.

There is no longer any excuse for arriving visitors to learn that their ride to their final destination is also the first for the driver.  Airports serve as catchment areas of dozens of different communities and it is time to put the “local” back in cab services.

These new technologies make that easy.

For those of us irritated at disruption, this movement toward a sharing economy is not a one-off.  It is symbolic of disruptions now revolutionizing the entire economy.  In a two or three decades the commercial world as we know it will still exist but only as a remnant.

The revolution in taxis or vehicles for hire is just the beginning.  In five to ten years, we will order driverless cars to pick us up wherever we are and take us to our destinations.

While we go about our errands or work appointments or enjoy a visit somewhere, the driverless vehicle will then return to home port for recharging or go on to another assignment.

When we need another, we’ll summon it via smartphone.

In the not too distant future, we may not buy cars except as a hobby.  Instead of ownership we will rely on having access at a fraction of the cost including fuel and the miles of roadway used.

It isn’t too late but the new day for taxis is just beginning to dawn foretelling bright, sunshiny days ahead.