A new San Francisco city report details the devastating drop in on-demand rides for the disability community after the rise of Uber and Lyft. From a report: The financial blow to the taxi industry, the report alleges, was also a blow to the availability of on-demand trips for anyone who uses a wheelchair. The report also points a way forward for the multi-billion dollar ride-hail industry to roll out wheelchair accessible vehicles and inclusive transportation for people with disabilities more broadly. It's a bit of an uncharacteristic kumbaya moment between old-school taxicab regulators and the tech transportation darlings, but one San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director of Taxi and Accessible Services Kate Toran said is necessary to provide people with disabilities the service they need.

"We take a positive view because we're trying to increase service on the street," Toran told the San Francisco Examiner. "Really, the end goal is to make sure the rider gets the service, that's what we stay focused on." The report also comes on the heels of recent workshops to implement Senate Bill 1376, authored by State Senator Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), which implemented a 5-cent per-ride surcharge on ride-hails to set up a fund so Uber and Lyft could finally provide wheelchair accessible vehicles. The bill set up a process for the California Public Utilities Commission, to establish rules requiring ride-hails to provide rides to all Californians regardless of disabilities.

Russia's largest tech company is launching a delivery service that allows a customer to tell a restaurant what to cook, whether it's on the menu or not. From a report: Yandex NV will prepare meal kits with ingredients based on a customer's requested dish and send it to a nearby restaurant for cooking. Once the food is ready, Yandex couriers will handle delivery. Yandex has been rapidly expanding its delivery services. In 2017 it merged with Uber Technologies' Russian ride-hailing and food-ordering businesses. The new offering, which it calls a "cloud restaurant" service, mashes together Yandex.Eats, which delivers cooked food from restaurants, and Yandex.Chef, which already supplies meal kits for home cooking. For now, customers won't be able to create completely bespoke delicacies, but Yandex has created a list of hundreds of the most popular dishes among users of its food businesses, which will be priced typically for no more than 250 rubles ($3.86) per dish. The service will be initially available in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

German startup Lilium has unveiled a new "flying taxi" that can vertically take off and be the basis for an on-demand air service within six years. The Guardian reports: The electric jet-powered five-seater aircraft is designed to travel up to 300km, a journey that would take it an hour at top speed. While a smaller version of its novel plane flew in 2017, Lilium said that the maiden flight of a full-scale prototype earlier this month -- a brief, remote-controlled test hover in Munich -- was a "huge step." The firm, which has attracted more than $100 million in investment since its founding in 2015, has set a target of offering Uber-style, app-based air taxis in multiple cities by 2025.

The latest iteration, with room for a pilot and four passengers, will be the template for Lilium's mass production model. With sufficient economy of scale, Lilium believes fares would be around $70 per head for a cross-city hop from, for example, JFK airport to Manhattan. According to Lilium, the relatively simple design, beyond the 36 electric jet engines needed for vertical take-off and landing, make it more safe and affordable than other planes. Once in the air, the power needed in cruise is little more than that of an electric car, Lilium says. The fixed wing design gives a longer range than competitors with drone-based aircraft, which consume much more energy keeping airborne. Lilium will now seek certification for its new plane through rigorous flight testing, the next landmark being to move the jet seamlessly from vertical to horizontal flight.

Salon tech editor Keith A. Spencer just published a new article describing what happens when "venture capital-backed entrepreneurs jackhammer their way into a new industry, 'tech'-ify it in some way, undermine the competition and declare their new way superior once the old is bankrupted." - Being a taxi driver was once a much-vaunted job, so much so that a taxi medallion was perceived of as a ticket to the middle class. Then came Uber and Lyft, who flooded the market for private transit and undercut the taxi industry by de-skilling the industry and paying their workers far, far less....

- Building devices to quantize as much fitness data as possible wasn't an example of capitalism fulfilling consumer desire -- no one, save a few data scientists, ever said, "I want to turn my leisure activities and exercise regime into spreadsheets" -- but the tech industry has been very effective at making us desire just that....

- The thing is, baristas and cashiers aren't things that we are all dying to get rid of... Silicon Valley is only trying to put baristas and cashiers out of business because human labor costs money; the difference between a $4 coffee from a robot and a $4 coffee from a human is that there are no labor costs in the former purchase, something that makes Silicon Valley go googly-eyed with dollar signs. The tech industry's vision of the future is of a world with less human interaction, less conversation, less humanity; and more surveillance and more monetization of our buying habits. No one wants this, but it's being forced upon us.
The article is adapted from Spencer's recent book, A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy.

The article's title? "Silicon Valley makes everything worse: Four industries that Big Tech has ruined."

CBS News calls TikTok "the first major contender since Snapchat to possibly disrupt a market dominated by social media behemoth Facebook.

"The mere three-year-old startup even comes with a history of data-privacy controversies." Created by China start-up ByteDance in 2016, TikTok has already been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, surpassing both Facebook and Instagram in app installs last year, according to analytics site Sensor Tower.... It's also more than just a plucky tech start-up. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is the single largest start-up in the world, surpassing Uber in valuation with $78 billion. It has funding from some of the world's highest-profile investors, including Japanese conglomerate SoftBank (also an investor in Uber). However, TikTok has already come under fire from government regulators and parents for data-privacy concerns and what some critics call predatory practices on the app regarding children. And additional concerns were raised this week by data rights advocate David Carroll, an associate professor of media design whose 2017 lawsuit against Cambridge Analytica indirectly led to a January criminal conviction of the administrators of Cambridge Analytica in the UK. If the cataclysmic scandal taught us anything, it was that some of the secrets of the data trade wars are buried in the fine print no one reads. In preparation for when my kids begin asking about the hugely popular lip-sync app TikTok, I dug into its privacy policy and its recent revisions. If you joined TikTok before 2019, what I found should worry you... Having learned the crucial lesson of data sovereignty through my experiences with Facebook's favorite democracy-destabilizing personality quiz, I'm now hyper-sensitized to the question of where our personal data ends up... I did the thing that almost no one does: I read their privacy policy. I was alarmed to see this section, which in late 2018 stated that TikTok user data may be transferred to China.
This discovery leads him to one inevitable question. "Is TikTok a Chinese Cambridge Analytica data bomb waiting to explode?"

A new study published in the journal Science Advances suggests that, from 2010 to 2016, cars driving for the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft were making traffic worse in the San Francisco. The new findings echo those of another study of New York City. An anonymous reader shares a report from Science Magazine: A comparison of traffic speeds from 2010, before ride-sharing apps were widely used, with 2016 shows the time cars spent sitting in San Francisco traffic increased by 69%. To find out how much of that was caused by ride-sharing vehicles, researchers used [a computer model that simulated the speed of traffic with Uber and Lyft vehicles removed] to forecast what traffic might have been like in 2016 without Uber or Lyft.

To do this, the authors needed to know how many additional cars Lyft and Uber were putting on the streets. When the companies refused to share this information, researchers used a program that had thousands of "ghost users" ping the Uber and Lyft apps every 5 seconds for 6 weeks in 2016, revealing the locations of nearby drivers -- and how many were on the streets at any given time. The model closely predicted the real-life traffic seen in 2010 and, after plugging in the Uber and Lyft driver data, 2016. The researchers then used the model to envision 2016 traffic minus the cars driving for Uber and Lyft. Without those cars, the model estimated just a 22% increase in traffic delays from 2010-16, suggesting ride-sharing companies were responsible for more than half of San Francisco's real-world traffic increase. The remainder of San Francisco's traffic increase was accounted for by growth in population and employment, which grew by roughly 70,000 people and 150,000 jobs respectively.

After almost a decade of disruption, Uber is finally a public company. The company is the highest valued tech IPO since Facebook and Alibaba, and it's part of a wave of Silicon Valley "unicorns" to go public this year, including Airbnb, Zoom, and Slack. While today's debut represents a new chapter for the money-losing, scandal-prone Uber, it also likely signals the end of an era of cheap rides for millions of drivers and riders across the globe.

"San Francisco voters this November will be asked to approve a corporate tax increase on stock-based compensation from 0.38% to 1.5%," reports Axios. Since the rate hike would be retroactive to May 7, it would apply to Uber's recent $8 billion IPO. From a report: San Francisco Board of Supervisor Gordon Mar said six supervisors are supporting the ordinance -- the minimum number needed to get the measure on the Nov. 5 ballot. The full board is expected to vote on the plan within the next two months. At least two-thirds of voters would need to support the proposal for it to pass. Mar's proposal calls for raising the stock-based compensation tax from 0.38 percent to 1.5 percent. That increase would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the city. The tax is levied on San Francisco companies when employees who receive stock as part of their compensation decide to cash in those shares on the public markets or on secondary markets.

But Mar's proposed ordinance concerns the Bay Area Council, which advocates for businesses. "There's no version of this poorly conceived scheme that would get our support," said Rufus Jeffris, a spokesman for the Bay Area Council. "And if the BOS approves putting this misguided proposal on the ballot, we believe voters will communicate the same message." The Bay Area Council is concerned that the higher tax would discourage investment, innovation and jobs in the region.

Electric scooters are becoming just as common in many cities as Lyft and Uber cars. While they may be a step in the right direction to improve transportation options, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a surge in emergency room visits due to e-scooter accidents. From a report: The CDC has found that head injuries topped the list of accident-related incidents involving e-scooters at 45%. The study determined that many e-scooter injuries could have been prevented if riders wore helmets and were more careful around cars, according to summary of the study released on Wednesday. "A high proportion of e-scooter related injuries involved potentially preventable risk factors, such as lack of helmet use, or motor vehicle interaction," a preliminary summary of the study said.

"Uber took down the taxi industry and now it wants a piece of public transit," reports CNN, in an article shared by dryriver: For years, as it aggressively entered new markets, Uber has maintained that it is a complement and ally of public transit. But that messaging changed earlier this month, when Uber released its S-1 ahead of its upcoming initial public offering. In the regulatory filing, Uber said its growth depends on better competing with public transportation, which it identifies as a $1 trillion market it can grab a share of over the long-term. Uber, which lost $1.8 billion in 2018, said it offers incentives to drivers to scale up its network to attract riders away from personal vehicles and public transportation.

Transportation experts say that if Uber grabs a big chunk of its target market -- 4.4 trillion passenger miles on public transportation in the 63 countries in which it operates -- cities would grind to a halt, as there would literally be no space to move on streets....

Uber's rival Lyft didn't describe public transportation as a competitor in its S-1. But while the corporate mission may be different, in practice there's little difference, experts say.
"Try to imagine the island of Manhattan, and everyone taking the subway being in a rideshare. It just doesn't function...." said Christof Spieler, who teaches transportation at Rice University and wrote the book Trains, Buses, People. "It's a world in which large cities essentially break down."

And transportation consultant Jarrett Walker tells CNN that while it may make business sense for Uber and Lyft to pursue this strategy, "it may also be a strategy that's destroying the world."

Uber drivers in seven US cities are planning protests to highlight what they claim are poor working conditions and low wages at the ride-hailing firm. The drivers say they are paid below minimum wage levels required by some states and barely above national rates. From a report: The richest and most highly anticipated IPO of the year is just around the corner. But a group of drivers dissatisfied with shrinking pay, no benefits, a lack of transparency, and little voice within the company are hoping to turn that singular IPO moment in their own favor by organizing a seven-city strike around the country including at Uber headquarters for 12 hours on May 8 leading up to Uber's initial public offering.

A reader shares a report from TechCrunch: Tesla expects to launch the first robotaxis as part of broader vision for an autonomous ride-sharing network in 2020, CEO Elon Musk said during the company's Autonomy Day. "I feel very confident predicting that there will be autonomous robotaxis from Tesla next year -- not in all jurisdictions because we won't have regulatory approval everywhere" Musk said without detailing what regulations he was referring to. He added that he is confident the company will have regulatory approval somewhere next year. Tesla will enable owners to add their properly equipped vehicles to its own ride-sharing app, which will have a similar business model to Uber or Airbnb. Tesla will take 25 percent to 30 percent of the revenue from those rides, Musk said. In places where there aren't enough people to share their cars, Tesla would provide a dedicated fleet of robotaxis. Musk also said at the event that all new Tesla vehicles are now produced with its custom full self-driving computer chip. The remaining step for Tesla's full self-driving mode to work is the software, "which Musk says will be 'feature complete' and at a reliability level that we could consider that no one needs to pay attention, by the middle of next year," reports TechCrunch.

One-quarter of its business happens in just five cities; 15 percent of bookings happen on airport trips. From a report: About 24 percent of Uber's bookings -- all the money that customers pay through the app and in cash, including driver earnings -- occur in just five cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Sao Paulo. For a company that operates in more than 700 cities, including quite a few giants -- Mexico City, Tokyo, Paris, Lagos, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Mumbai, to name a few -- that concentration gives Uber a surprising vulnerability at the local level. And they know it.

This vulnerability casts a new light on, for example, Uber's 2015 humiliation of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, when the company fought off the City Council's proposed vehicle cap. That was a warning to other politicians, and a show of power, but it was also a vital business move. The company's filing also mentions, as a cautionary tale, what happened afterward: Just three years later, the City Council approved minimum rates for drivers and a cap on the number of new ride-hail vehicles. The company also mentions its regulatory challenges in London and San Francisco.

In what may be his final year of technology predictions, columnist Robert X. Cringely argues "I can't say that we're going to see anything beyond more beta tests of self-driving cars in 2019... We simply aren't ready and probably won't be for years to come...."

"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me." It will eventually happen. Once half the fleet has been replaced with cars that could be self-drivers if we allowed them to be, then there will be a huge financial incentive to get the other half off the street. This will be especially the case if climate change is still accelerating. I'm guessing that most cars from 2020-on could be self-driving with only a software upgrade, which is why Elon Musk is predicting Tesla will have full autonomy by the end of 2019. But notice that Elon isn't predicting Tesla will be allowed to have its cars drive themselves everywhere...

So why is the world talking so much about self-driving cars and full autonomy? Some of it is Tesla hype, some of it is marketing as the car companies try to get us to buy cars that will eventually be self-driving, but probably not until their second owners. And the other reason why we're talking so much about self-driving cars is because Uber is planning to go public later this year...an IPO that will go smoother if the driving public thinks autonomous cars are something that we'll be seeing soon. Uber has a labor problem. If it can spin a story that surly and expensive human drivers are soon to be replaced with electrons, that will be very reassuring to Wall Street. But as I explained, it also isn't true.

The world isn't yet ready -- something Uber and Tesla and all the others will suddenly admit in about a year (post-IPO).
Cringely also argues that the problem isn't just the "millions of drivers who are still controlling their vehicles the old fashion way, which is often in a barely competent fashion..."

"We keep our cars longer because they don't rust and we can't afford to replace them so often. The result is that while we could expect a complete turnover in car technology every decade, now it takes closer to two decades."

Uber used a secret spyware program, codenamed Surfcam, to steal drivers from an Australian competitor with the aim of putting that company out of business. The startup was backed by high-profile investors including billionaire James Packer and hedge fund manager Alex Turnbull. ABC News reports: GoCatch was a major competitor to Uber when the U.S. company launched in Australia in 2012. At the time, both companies were offering a new way to book taxis and hire cars using a smartphone app. Surfcam was developed in Uber Australia's head office in Sydney in 2015. A former senior Uber employee has told Four Corners that the idea behind the use of the Surfcam spyware was to starve GoCatch of drivers.

"Surfcam when used in Australia was able to put fledgling Australian competitors onto the ropes," the former employee with direct knowledge of the program said on the condition of anonymity. "Surfcam allowed Uber Australia to see in real time all of the competitor cars online and to scrape data such as the driver's name, car registration, and so on." It allowed Uber to directly approach the GoCatch drivers and lure them to work for Uber. "GoCatch would lose customers due to poaching of its drivers draining their supply. With fewer and fewer drivers, GoCatch would eventually fold," the former Uber employee said. GoCatch's co-founder and chief executive, Andrew Campbell, said Uber's tactics damaged the company. He said: "The fact that Uber used hacking technologies to steal our data and our drivers is appalling. It had a massive impact on our business. It sets a really dangerous precedent for the Australian economy and Australian businesses as well. It tells every multinational company to come to Australia and follow the same practice. As an Australian small business, a technology start-up business based in Australia that's improving efficiency and service levels in the taxi industry, to have a company come to Australia and get away with that type of behavior is ... it's disgusting."

A senior Uber source has confirmed the existence of Surfcam, saying it was developed by a staff member in the Sydney head office who modified off-the-shelf data scraping software. "They said the Sydney employee did it under his own authority, and that once Uber discovered this, they requested he stop," the report says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from public news station KNPR about how close weare flying taxi services: The dream of flying cars is as at least as old as the automobile itself. Bell, which makes attack helicopters for the U.S. Navy, is working on this new project with another high-profile partner, Uber. The prototype, the Bell Nexus, was unveiled earlier this year. Boeing and Airbus also have prototypes of these flying cars in the works. Uber has become the face of the aerial mobility movement as it has the most public campaign touting its work so far. Elon Musk says he'll get us to Mars. Uber says it'll get a millennial from San Francisco to San Jose in 15 minutes flat (instead of the two-hour slog in morning traffic). And its timeline for this flying taxi that does not yet exist is 2023...

NASA is another Uber partner. While Jaiwon Shin, NASA's associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, thinks Uber is being a little bullish -- he'd put the timeline further out, to the mid-2020s -- Shin says it's close. "Convergence of many different technologies are maturing to the level that now aviation can benefit to put these things together," he said. The batteries that power electric cars can evolve further, to power flight. Companies can stockpile and pool data, and build artificial intelligence to take over air traffic control, managing the thousands of drones and taxis in the air.

And Uber, his partner, is really well-connected. While fighting the legacy taxi industry, Uber made so many government and lobbyist contacts, that that Rolodex can help grease the wheels -- or wings.
"While no flying taxi exists yet, Uber has dared to estimate the 'near-term' cost of that San Francisco to San Jose trip: $43," the article reports -- suggesting that could create a new division in society.

"With flying cars, the haves can escape to the air and leave the have-nots forgotten in their potholes."

Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, "and found that the app had changed the name of her community..." It's just as well no one contacted Google, because Google wasn't the company that renamed the Fruit Belt to Medical Park. When residents investigated, they found the misnomer repeated on several major apps and websites including HERE, Bing, Uber, Zillow, Grubhub, TripAdvisor, and Redfin... Monica Stephens, a geographer at the University at Buffalo who studies digital maps and misinformation, immediately suspected the geographic clearinghouse Pitney Bowes. Founded in 1920 as a maker of postage meters -- the machines that stamp mail with proof it's been sent -- Pitney Bowes expanded into neighborhood data in 2016 when it bought the leading U.S. provider, Maponics. In its 15-year run, Maponics had supplied neighborhood data to companies from Airbnb to Twitter to the Houston Chronicle. And it had also just acquired a longtime competitor, Urban Mapping, which has previously supplied Facebook, Microsoft, MapQuest, Yahoo, and Apple. Though Pitney Bowes is far from a household name, the $3.4 billion data broker is "a huge company at this point," says Stephens, with enough influence to inadvertently rename a neighborhood across hundreds of sites...

In the early 2000s, Urban Mapping offered new college grads $15 to $25 per hour to comb local blogs, home listings, city plans, and brochures for possible neighborhood names and locations. Maponics, meanwhile, used nascent technologies such as computer vision and natural language processing to pull neighborhoods from images and blocks of text, one former executive with the company said... I visited the Buffalo Central Library to find the source of the error... Sure enough, one of the librarians located a single planning office map that used the "Medical Park" label. It was a 1999 report on poverty and housing conditions -- long since relegated to a dusty shelf stacked with old binders and file folders... Somehow, likely in the early 2000s, this map made its way into what is now the Pitney Bowes data set -- and from there, was hoovered into Google Maps and out onto the wider internet. Buffalo published another map in 2017, with the Fruit Belt clearly marked, and broadcast on the city's open data portal. For whatever reason, Pitney Bowes and its customers never picked that map up.
This is not the first time Google Maps has seemed to spontaneously rename a neighborhood. But for Fruit Belt the reporter's query eventually prompted corrections to the maps on Redfin, TripAdvisor, Zillow, Grubhub, and Google Maps. But the article argues that when it comes to how city names are represented online, "the process is too opaque to scrutinize in public. And that ambiguity foments a sense of powerlessness."

Pitney Bowes doesn't even have a method for submitting corrections. Yet, "In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Google defended its use of third-party neighborhood sources. 'Overall, this provides a comprehensive and up-to-date map,' the spokesperson said, 'but when we're made aware of errors, we work quickly to fix them.'"

Spotify today filed a complaint with EU antitrust regulators against Apple, saying the iPhone maker unfairly limits rivals to its own Apple Music streaming service. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek writes in a blog post: In recent years, Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience -- essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers. After trying unsuccessfully to resolve the issues directly with Apple, we're now requesting that the EC take action to ensure fair competition. Apple operates a platform that, for over a billion people around the world, is the gateway to the internet. Apple is both the owner of the iOS platform and the App Store -- and a competitor to services like Spotify. In theory, this is fine. But in Apple's case, they continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn.

To illustrate what I mean, let me share a few examples. Apple requires that Spotify and other digital services pay a 30% tax on purchases made through Apple's payment system, including upgrading from our Free to our Premium service. If we pay this tax, it would force us to artificially inflate the price of our Premium membership well above the price of Apple Music. And to keep our price competitive for our customers, that isn't something we can do. As an alternative, if we choose not to use Apple's payment system, forgoing the charge, Apple then applies a series of technical and experience-limiting restrictions on Spotify.

For example, they limit our communication with our customers -- including our outreach beyond the app. In some cases, we aren't even allowed to send emails to our customers who use Apple. Apple also routinely blocks our experience-enhancing upgrades. Over time, this has included locking Spotify and other competitors out of Apple services such as Siri, HomePod, and Apple Watch. We aren't seeking special treatment. We simply want the same treatment as numerous other apps on the App Store, like Uber or Deliveroo, who aren't subject to the Apple tax and therefore don't have the same restrictions.

nj_peeps shares an excerpt from a report via Wired: [Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley says the company is working on a new game.] Think Candyland, but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game's virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods. There's a Midtown Bar, a Downtown Movie Theatre, Brooklyn Coffeeshop, Uptown Park, and so on. As in Candyland, you move your game piece forward by drawing cards. But in Crowley's version, the cards are the habits and locations of real people whose data has been turned into literal pawns in the game. Foursquare knows where their phones are in real time, because it powers many widely used apps, from Twitter and Uber to TripAdvisor and AccuWeather. These people aren't playing Crowley's game, but their real-world movements animate it: If one of them goes into a bar in midtown, for example, the person playing the game would get a Midtown Bar card.

Ask someone about Foursquare and they'll probably think of the once-hyped social media company, known for gamifying mobile check-ins and giving recommendations. But the Foursquare of today is a location-data giant. During an interview with NBC in November, the company's CEO, Jeff Glueck, said that only Facebook and Google rival Foursquare in terms of location-data precision. You might think you don't use Foursquare, but chances are you do. Foursquare's technology powers the geofilters in Snapchat, tagged tweets on Twitter; it's in Uber, Apple Maps, Airbnb, WeChat, and Samsung phones, to name a few.

Uber is not criminally liable in a March 2018 crash in Tempe, Arizona, in which one of the company's self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian, prosecutors said on Tuesday. "The Yavapai County Attorney said in a letter made public that there was 'no basis for criminal liability' for Uber, but that the back-up driver, Rafaela Vasquez, should be referred to the Tempe police for additional investigation," reports Reuters. From the report: Vasquez, the Uber back-up driver, could face charges of vehicular manslaughter, according to a police report in June. Vasquez has not previously commented and could not immediately be reached on Tuesday. Based on a video taken inside the car, records collected from online entertainment streaming service Hulu and other evidence, police said last year that Vasquez was looking down and streaming an episode of the television show "The Voice" on a phone until about the time of the crash. The driver looked up a half-second before hitting Elaine Herzberg, 49, who died from her injuries. Police called the incident "entirely avoidable."

Yavapai County Attorney's Office, which examined the case at the request of Maricopa County where the accident occurred, did not explain the reasoning for not finding criminal liability against Uber. Yavapai sent the case back to Maricopa, calling for further expert analysis of the video to determine what the driver should have seen that night. The National Transportation Safety Board and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are still investigating.