“You Uber?”

The cop’s gruff tone was not curious but accusatory. He looked both pissed and eager to take care of business, his squad car’s gumball lights a-spinnin’.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Pull into that spot and turn off your car!” he barked.

I stayed, outwardly a mellow fellow. I was in suburban North Chicago at the Great Lakes Naval Station, as summoned by Uber app. I was there to pick up three uniformed guys at the same spot I’d been the night before, dropping off another navy man.

But this time the city of North Chicago was ready. Apparently, the city had a new law requiring Uber drivers to get $450 permits before they could drive.

Awkwardly, my three passengers were in the car with me. Now one of them gestured to a handful of cabbies parked on the other side of the pickup area.

“Those guys over there pointed you out,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I said, striking a tone of nonchalance.

It wasn’t easy. Up until that moment, I’d had only sympathy for traditional cabdrivers, even though I was an Uber.

That’s because I’ve also been a cabbie; I leased a cab during my student days 35 years ago. Its owner made the rules: I could drive 4 AM to 4 PM (only one rush hour) six days a week, for which I paid him $20 a day. Gas was on me. In those days, I wished for my own cab, to drive whenever I wanted without having to buy a medallion or pay someone else rent.

Uber finally made that possible. No overhead for leasing a cab means there’s no driving too little to “make up your nut,” as we used to say. The advantages don’t end there. While a cabbie, I was robbed at gunpoint, but with Uber everything is done by preregistered credit card, so its drivers don’t need to carry cash.

There are other pluses too. But whether they add up enough to make it worth it depends on your expectations—and whether they’re low enough.

Uber knows (or seems to believe) that every time an Uber driver drops out there are ten more to take his place, happy with the way things are because it’s all they’ve ever known. People are lining up to drive Uber, and cabbies are panicking.

United Taxidrivers Community Council has called for a citywide taxi strike Thursday to protest Mayor Emanuel’s plan to allow Uber and other rideshare services to pick up at the last bastions of sacred cabbie ground: the airports and McCormick Place. The advocacy group says that cabs have already lost 30 to 40 percent of their business to rideshare. Of course they hate Uber.

Ironically, so do plenty of Ubers.

Chicago ranks low in Uber earnings potential compared to other U.S. cities. One recent survey by the Benenson Strategy Group found that Chicago Uber drivers pulled in around $16 an hour, while New Yorkers made almost $30. That only added fuel to the inferno lit when Uber announced that new drivers would be coughing up 25 percent of their gross fares to Uber—a 5 percent increase—on top of the $1.30 per ride in taxes and other fees the company already collects. Veterans remember when Uber took less and the take-home was, according to them, much better. But few drivers coming on since Uber increased its cut will even be aware of the change.

North Chicago’s ordinance was another change we Ubers didn’t know about.

Back at the naval station, more squad cars pulled into the lot—six, seven, and an eighth before they were adequately prepared to move me into a squad car to be transported to the police station. I was lucky; I had enough cash (via the courthouse ATM) to retrieve my car and get home by evening. But it was not a good day as earnings go. And that’s not saying much.

Many potential drivers are lured by Uber’s ads. In one absurd standout, a jovial Uber driver remarks how, if he wants to make $200 in a day, that’s what he does. Or $500 in a day? “Sure,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s all up to you!”

That is pure fantasy, and if cabbies want to be effective in their fight against rideshare, they should counterattack with a few realities.

I’m far from a great Uber driver, but not terrible. Here’s how I did: In just over six weeks, I drove a total of 21 days. My longest day was 11 hours, my shortest two hours. I bought 20 tanks of gas at $2.50 a gallon, costing me approximately $800. (This is huge: it helps to have a hybrid instead of a car that gets, as mine does, 25 miles per gallon.) I washed the car each week, including light detailing, for a total of $120.

So my total gross from driving was $2,089.88, from which Uber took $531.81. (That will be more for a driver starting now with the new 25 percent cut). My take: $1,558.07. Subtracting for gas and washes, that leaves a depressing $638.07 net profit.

Hourly, that’s only $5.83.

I figured that out while sitting in the North Chicago police station as my car and I were processed after my Sunday-morning bust. That, by the way, cost me $760.

Uber did reimburse me for that charge, since North Chicago has made a habit of creating anti-Uber ordinances but, oops, “forgetting” to let the public know.

Still, I’m not optimistic about my Uber future. It is hard to imagine the money improving, considering the company’s aggressive—and clearly successful—efforts to recruit new drivers, combined with Uber’s willingness to squeeze drivers by taking bigger and bigger slices of their earnings pie. Uber offers cash rewards to drivers when they recruit other drivers, but it’s a mixed blessing. You might get a couple hundred bucks (at the moment anyway—this amount has decreased over time), but then there’s another driver out there competing with you.

The other morning I stood at Wacker and Washington, as I made my way from Union Station to my “real” job as director of the Cook County court system’s divorce mediation programs. I’ve developed a habit of counting how many Ubers go by, as identified by the big black “U” in the window, and how many have passengers. I do the same with cabs.

On that day, it was nine total. Four were taxis, two with fares. Five were Ubers, three with fares. Winner: Uber.

It’s not exactly a scientific study, but it’s not an unusual ratio for that corner at that hour on a weekday. If anything, it has tilted a bit more to Uber’s advantage since summer, and it is hard to imagine the pendulum swinging back. The market isn’t speaking, it’s screaming.

Whether Uber wins, or a similar rideshare service such as Lyft rises to the top, or another new and innovative model comes along that trumps them all, it’s hard to imagine the taxi industry surviving in its present form.

But the war is far from over, and the battles will be raging for a while.

With or without me.

Chicago drivers trying to get their car emissions checked are facing long lines as the two remaining Chicago testing facilities prepare to shut down.

And that means drivers will soon have to travel to the suburbs if they want to pass the state’s emissions test.

After Nov. 1, the emissions facility at 1850 W. Webster Ave. and another at 6959 W. Forest Preserve Drive Dunning will be closed. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency plans to also close facilities in suburban Tinley Park and Elk Grove Village.

The changes will require North Side drivers to travel to the testing facility near McCormick Boulevard and Touhy Avenue in Skokie.

State law requires a testing facility to be located no more than 12 miles from a registered Illinois vehicle, according to agency officials, a rule the state says it will adhere to.

A spokeswoman for the state EPA said the closings are part of a new contract that will “streamline” the way the state monitors emissions from older cars and save taxpayers $8 million. The existing emission centers will add capacity in an effort to make the process less time-consuming for drivers, the state says.

North Siders and other Chicagoans who loved the proximity of the Bucktown facility are not happy about the closure.

“Chicago is a big city and it was convenient for people to come here since the facility is near the expressway,” Portage Park resident Gabriel Jauridez said Monday. “I guess no one considered that part. I’ve always come to this one.”

Kristen Klus, a Roscoe Village resident, says she will miss how convenient the Webster Avenue facility was to her home.

“I’m off on Mondays and the place was only a five-minute drive for me,” Klus said. “Driving out to Skokie would take at least an hour.”

Residents hoping to cash in on a World Series at Wrigley Field are selling their residential parking passes online, but if they’re caught it will cost them.

A Craigslist post that was put up on Tuesday morning offered six parking permits for Wrigleyville. They’re going for $200 for all six or $60 individually, and the seller said the parking is just “blocks away” from the park.

“Parking will be super expensive now,” the poster wrote on Craigslist.

The only issue? It’s illegal to resell residential daily parking permits, and fines range from $200-$500, according to the city’s municipal code.

Pat Corcoran, a spokesman for the City Clerk’s Office, said the office has ticketed people who resell permits and it can revoke people’s ability to buy permits from the city. He couldn’t comment on if anyone has been ticketed for reselling permits during this Cubs postseason, but he said people have been ticketed during past Cubs postseasons.

“We check Craigslist, we do occasionally do stings in conjunction with the Police Department,” Corcoran said.

But once those permits go from a reseller to a customer, there’s little the office can do, Corcoran said. Officials could use numbers on the permits to track if the right people are using them, but that wouldn’t be a good use of time, Corcoran said.

The Craigslist post on Tuesday afternoon had been “flagged for removal.”

The range of potential outcomes is enormous. In the best-case scenario, private car ownership gives way to shared fleets of autonomous cars, freeing up vast amounts of land that used to be devoted to vehicle storage.

Then there’s the scenario promoted by Tesla, in which everyone owns their personal autonomous vehicle. The consequences would be frightening, says Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic:

Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, has laid out an intuitive way of understanding this issue using a binary “heaven or hell” construction (note: I’ve interviewed her in the past on how autonomous cars will impact the transit system). According to this formulation, we could have “heaven” if we had fleets of shared, electric, driverless cars powered by renewable energy, plus a redistributive economy that ensures that people who once had jobs in the transportation sector have access to a minimum income. On the other hand, we could have “hell” if everyone owns his or her own driverless car that does our errands, parks our cars, and circles the neighborhood waiting for us to need it again.

Tesla seems to be resolving this issue for us.

In the video the company released announcing its new technology, a man enters a car outside of his bucolic suburban home, from which it whisks him away — without him touching the steering wheel –to the (also suburban) Tesla factory. Once there, he gets out of the car, at which point it goes off to find a parking space, where it will presumably sit all day until he’s ready to go back home.

One promotional video is hardly enough to make an assessment about the future, but the imagery Tesla is projecting, which is of an anti-urban, individualized nature, certainly aligns closely with Chase’s “hell” scenario. After all, multiplied across the millions of people living in a metropolitan area, Tesla’s independently owned self-driving cars would simply replicate much of the existing transportation system, except this time, unlike for current drivers, they’ll have no incentive to minimize driving time — since automated cars can go driving off, circling the block or finding some distant parking space, without inconveniencing the driver.

Freemark says we shouldn’t accept that. Public policy should shape the driverless car future:

It isn’t a random coincidence that people commute in very different ways in New York and Dallas. We do not have to accept the “hell” scenario of Tesla’s creation — but working to produce “heaven” requires more than resting our hopes on the economic benefits of sharing vehicles versus owning our own. Advancing positive change for our cities means recognizing the trouble with simply accepting whatever is most appealing on the market, or whatever the market leaders are promoting.

In the course of my work developing Transport Databook (which, if you haven’t checked it out yet, is a resource for up-to-date transportation data), I pulled together information on changes in transportation mode shares in U.S. cities over time. I was sadly unsurprised to find that the share of people commuting by car in the country’s ten biggest cities is little changed from what it was in 1970. The level of car reliance is a fact of life, one might say. Given public interest in autonomous vehicles, cities should give up on bus lanes, abandon pedestrianized streets — just give people what they want.

Yet examining similar data for Paris and London suggests that, in fact, policy can matter. In those wealthy cities, the level of automobile travel has declined quite substantially since the early 1990s. That decline is not an accident. It is the product of clear-headed policies that implemented a vision of the city where travel by walk, bike, and transit is prioritized; the recent pedestrianization of the Seine highwayand the plans for new cross-Thames pedestrian bridges, for example, reinforce those policies.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Mobility Lab reports that Arlington, Virginia, is beginning the process of reforming its residential parking policies. Systemic Failure says that changes to the boarding platforms for California High Speed Rail will effectively cut capacity in half. And Seattle Transit Blog fact checks the recent Seattle Times non-endorsement of the $54 billion light rail expansion plan on the November ballot.

“Shared spaces” are streets where driving is allowed but walking and biking take priority. They are designed without curbs, signage, and other typical markers that separate cars from people on foot. The design cues are subtler. Everyone mixes together in the same space, and drivers travel slowly enough that they can make eye contact with pedestrians.

Can you have an “accidental” shared space — a street with curbs where people are still comfortable walking in the road? Richard Masoner at Network blog Cyclelicious says Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz functions as a shared space on weekends even though it wasn’t planned as one:

Most of those driving — even tourists with out-of-state license plates — take care to watch for people meandering into the street from arbitrary locations.

This kind of slow traffic naturally improves safety for people on bikes. I’ve talked to people who strongly dislike riding with traffic, but feel perfectly fine biking through downtown.

I’m not smart enough to know if it’s culture, design, or what that influences people to drive more carefully here. My crazy hypothesis: we have several people with a tolerance for high risk behavior who are willing to violate social norms and jump into traffic willy nilly.

I can’t recommend this as public policy — even in Santa Cruz, such individuals who dash across busy intersections against a red light are hit by cars — but I think we have a critical mass of people like this who embolden others to claim and own our public spaces.

If pedestrians feel comfortable taking over the street, it sounds like planners and the community did something right.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Greater Greater Washington lambasts the half-baked plan for cutting late night DC Metro service. The City Fix reports on new financing techniques that could help support walkable urban development. And 1000 Friends of Wisconsin shares stories from a recent transportation equity summit about how the state’s lousy support for transit affects people’s lives.

A local advocacy group is suing Uber, saying the ride-hailing service is “unusable” for people who use motorized wheelchairs.

The suit, filed by Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago, claims that Uber doesn’t have nearly enough wheelchair-accessible cars in Chicago.

For wheelchair-bound customers, Ubers offers a service called UberWAV, but customers who signed on to the suit said the cars are rarely available.

Between September 2011 and August 2015, Uber provided just 14 rides to motorized wheelchair users who require special cars, according to Access Living. Uber provided over 1.9 million rides in Chicago in June of 2015, the suit alleges.

“Transportation access has always been a central issue of civil rights for people with disabilities,” Steven P. Blonder, lawyer for Access Living, said in a statement. “As a growing player in our transportation system, Uber is responsible for delivering its part of that link.”

An Uber representative sent a statement Thursday, saying “We take this issue seriously and are committed to increasing mobility and freedom for all riders and drivers, including those members of our communities who are disabled. There is always more to be done and we will continue working hard to expand access to affordable, reliable transportation options for all Chicagoans.”

The City Council passed an ordinance that further regulated ride-hailing services, but an amendment to require equal wheelchair-accessible cars was scrapped, the group said.

A meeting with Uber reps following the passage of the ordinance did not end with the company agreeing to add more cars to its UberWAV fleet, Living Access said.

Marca Bristo, Access Living CEO, said the group had to file suit.

“People with disabilities have fought for generations to gain rights to equal services, ranging from mainline transit to taxis,” Bristo said in a statement. “The suit continues that struggle to enable individuals with disabilities to participate as full members of society.”

Justin Cooper, a Lakeview resident who uses a wheelchair, said in a statement that UberWAV is not reliable enough for him to use.

“My wheelchair cannot transfer into a regular Uber vehicle, and even if I were lucky enough to find a wheelchair-accessible vehicle operating, I would have to wait for that vehicle to cross the city to reach me. No one would use Uber if the entire service worked this way,” Cooper said.

A federal appeals court on Friday ruled that Uber drivers and traditional taxis can continue to operate under different sets of rules in Chicago, throwing out a lawsuit by cab companies who say ride-hailing services are driving them out of business.

The difference in the business models between cab companies and the services — including Uber and Lyft — is great enough that they don’t have to follow the same requirements, wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner for a three-judge panel of the U.S. 7th Circuit Court. “Here’s an analogy,” the judge wrote, “Most cities and towns require dogs but not cats to be licensed.”

The ruling validates a 2014 City Council ordinance that let Uber and Lyft operate in the city without taxi medallions or other standards set for cab companies.

Treating Uber drivers like cabbies would effectively protect the taxi business from competition fueled by new technology, Posner wrote.

The ruling reverses U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, who earlier his year ruled that a lawsuit filed by the cab industry could move forward.

“Indeed, when new technologies, or new business methods, appear, a common result is the decline or even the disappearance of the old,” Posner wrote. “Were the old deemed to have a constitutional right to preclude the entry of the new into the markets of the old, economic progress might grind to a halt.

“Instead of taxis we might have horse and buggies; instead of the telephone, the telegraph; instead of computers, slide rules. Obsolescence would equal entitlement.”

Edward Feldman, attorney for cab industry group Illinois Transportation Trade Association, said Friday he disappointed with the ruling and that the group is considering a further appeal.

“We don’t find those analogies persuasive,” Feldman said.

City spokesman Bill McCaffrey lauded Posner’s “sharply worded” opinion.

“We are extremely pleased with the court’s ruling, which confirms what we have maintained from the outset: the taxi industry’s legal challenges to the City’s ride share ordinance are completely baseless,” McCaffrey said.

The newest rooftop bar coming Downtown is Raised, a third-floor hotel haunt overlooking the Chicago River.

The bar will open May 13 at the Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel at 1 W. Wacker Drive, or the southwest corner of State and Wacker.

Once unused meeting space, the new bar is going for a “conservatory” look with lots of reclaimed wood. It will sell wine on tap, among other things.

The bar’s name isn’t just a nod to its rooftop, but also being raised in Chicago, raising a glass and the raising of nearby bridges, said Colleen Quinlan, a restaurant sales rep at the hotel.

Raised is the latest in a herd of new rooftops getting built on Downtown hotels and office buildings. But unlike many of its peers, Raised is lower to the street, giving guests a closer look at Wacker Drive and the river just beyond. The menu has yet to be determined, but the hotel said it will focus on small plates.

The bar’s inside will seat 107 and the outdoor deck will seat 103, the hotel said. Once open, Raised will be open from 4 p.m. to midnight outdoors and approximately 2 a.m. inside Monday through Saturday. The restaurant also plans to serve Sunday brunch.

The rooftop bar is part of a $32 million renovation of the hotel including new rooms and lobby. The bar will also feature “Urban Blue,” a room for 70 that can be reserved for weddings and other events.