Update: Uber Is Back on the Road

Well, that was fast. The day after the Division of Standards told Uber, the car service for the 99 percent, to stop it, they reversed course, clearing the way for Uber to keep doing its thing. Which is to say, putting taxis out of business. Uber works via a GPS-enabled app that uses your location to match you up with a driver that’s not otherwise engaged at the moment. This instead of sitting in a repurposed police cruiser with no shocks.

A few months after Uber was introduced here, smartphone toting yuppies people really seem to like it. Why take a cab and listen to the inevitable “my credit card machine is broken” shtick when you can ride in a dark town car with darkened windows like the celebrity that you know you are?

The Division of Standard’s initial complaint was that the GPS device that Uber cars use to measure the distance, and thus the pay, were not certified as accurate. Since enforcing those types of standards is their whole entire game, they were understandably flummoxed by this new-fangled GPS counter thingy. Maybe they were also confused by this thing called the Internet, because it seems like they were a call or a Google search away from discovering that, yes, such GPS measuring devices are being evaluated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Update: Deleted the last line about equating evaluating with approving.