But in addition to the lobbying and protests, taxis—according to the rules of the market—should be expected to respond by trying to make their service more attractive to consumers.

In the face of new competition, the first thing an industry would likely see is a decrease in prices. In this case, however, taxi fares tend to be regulated—so prices change slowly and an individual driver has little control over them. It’s also expected that new competition will cause existing firms to increase quality. Over time, taxi companies might improve service by modernizing their fleets and introducing new technologies. And, in fact, some cities have introduced apps to hail taxis.

But the quality of a taxi ride depends on much more than just the fare and the condition of the vehicle. As my angry D.C. cabbie demonstrated, taxi drivers have some control over the quality of the ride. This raises an important question: Are taxi drivers themselves trying to improve quality in the face of competition?

Last fall, a writer for DNAinfo in Chicago quoted a driver who said that cabbies were “trying to behave themselves,” and noted a decrease in the number of taxi complaints. But quotes are anecdotal, and the number of complaints will fall as the number of taxi trips fall, regardless of competition. In order to determine empirically whether taxi drivers are responding to competition from the likes of Uber and Lyft, I set out to assemble a dataset that would help answer it. In a new paper based on data from New York City, Chicago, and Google search trends, I present evidence that cab drivers do seem to have started offering better service.

Like Uber and Lyft themselves, my analysis is possible thanks to data sources and tools that did not exist—or, at least, were not inexpensively available—just a few years ago. New York maintains a publicly available database of taxi complaints online going back to 2010, and cities are putting statistics online through various “open data” projects, making other large datasets available upon request. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission provided me with data on every taxi ride between 2009 and 2014 and the city of Chicago gave me a similar set of complaint data. For New York City, I was able to look at data for more than one billion rides.

The data showed that in New York, complaints per trip to the Taxi and Limousine Commission have decreased as Uber has grown—even controlling for factors unrelated to Uber such as weather.

Number of Complaints Submitted to the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission

Scott Wallsten

That decrease in the relative level of complaints is consistent with improvements in taxi quality, but it might also be due to dissatisfied customers switching to Uber rather than bothering to file complaints. But data from Chicago, where Uber also entered the market in 2011, suggest that at least some of the decrease in complaints is related to drivers making an effort to improve the quality of the ride.

Unlike New York, Chicago collects data not just on complaints, but on the nature of the complaint. As the total number of complaints has fallen since 2012, as one would expect given the falling number of taxi rides, so have the types of complaints that one would expect if drivers were making an effort to offer better customer service. In particular, complaints about messy cabs and talking on cell phones fell as a share of total complaints in Chicago. Complaints about cab climate and “broken” credit-card readers, which can be controlled by drivers and the companies that maintain the cabs, also decreased as a share of the total. (The spike in complaints in 2012 can be chalked up to a new rule requiring taxis to display a bumper sticker that read “How’s my driving? Compliments or Concerns, Call 311.”)