If the problem they are trying to solve is "drivers aren't making enough" then they should impose a minimum wage on drivers or force an actual employee relationship.
If the problem they are trying to solve is a bail out of the failed and corrupt taxi medallion system, then maybe this will succeed. The real issue here is the cab drivers who are hurting because they provide an inferior service to a clientele who now have better options. I avoid cabs for all but the shortest trips because of the large percentage of bad driving experiences. Some solutions to improve yellow cabs like having a simple feedback mechanism for drivers could go a long way to leveling the playing field between Uber and Taxi.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/don-big-bill-article-1.14... FROM ARTICLE "A review of all contributions to de Blasio raised by or made by taxi lawyers, owners and other associates in the 2013 campaign tallies $254,451, making them de Blasio’s biggest backers by far. Fleet owner Ron Sherman is the most powerful taxi leader, just as his father Donald was in the 1980s before he was convicted in a federal felony case, and he orchestrated the de Blasio deluge of support."
By 2014 it was over half a million dollars [1]. This bill's proponents on the City Council were similarly endowed.
[1] https://nypost.com/2014/05/17/taxi-industry-gave-de-blasio-o...
I remember on my first trip to NYC many years ago, I wanted to go to the airport during rush hour. No cab would stop and take me, because I looked like someone who wanted to go to the airport, which is out of their way. Apparently this is a known problem, so you're supposed to kind of hide your bag so they don't notice, then get in the cab, close the door, and THEN declare that you want to go to the airport, at which point they are legally obligated to take you. (Having used this option on subsequent trips... it consists of 45 minutes of whining.)
Meanwhile, with Uber you just press a button and they take you to the airport, bags and all.
This is why the taxi industry is dying; these little "hustles" add up and people don't trust yellow cabs anymore. Meanwhile, the app-based cars just take you where you want to go without the complaining. (I suppose they now have the ability to just not accept your trip if they don't feel like going there, which I think is fair. I don't want to listen to an adult whine about how annoying it is to go a particular place, I just want to go there.)
Right now, NYC faces a big problem. There is no viable method of transportation. There is too much traffic to drive anywhere quickly. The subways are overcrowded and broken. You can bike, but there probably won't be a citibike dock at your destination, and the bike lanes will be blocked with parked cars on the way there. It's kind of a nightmare that's going to become a crisis. Does limiting the number of Uber vehicles on the road fix any of this? Nope! But it's the only thing that's politically feasible, I guess. (We can't have congestion charging, because people in New Jersey and upstate will whine about having to pay to get to work. We can't expand the subway, because the MTA is controlled by the state and it only benefits NYC, so the governor and the legislature won't fund it. We can't enforce traffic laws to prevent people from parking in bike lanes because the NYPD is lazy and incompetent. So we're basically screwed. Eventually it will melt down completely, but we're doing an OK job of keeping the city on life support right now.)
Not necessarily. Ubers don't want to go to the airport for the same reason that cabs don't. I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport. Granted it doesn't happen as often as with cabs whose meter is conveniently not working once you mention the airport, but it does still happen.
Illegal parking in bike lanes is a huge problem though. This morning there were several vehicles parked in the bike lane across two consecutive blocks, so I had to ride in the travel lane the whole while. Some asshole unsafely passed me at speed by going into the bike lane, then swerving back into the travel lane at the next parked vehicle, then we got into a yelling match at the next light about when cyclists are allowed to depart the bike lane (hint: you don't have to use it when you're literally unable to because it's blocked).
Enforcement is an absolute joke, and sometimes it's even cop cars that are blocking bike lanes. Bike lanes that aren't physically protected from people parking in them are oftentimes not worth anything, and unfortunately, we don't have any cross-town bike lanes in Manhattan! (They're on the verge of opening the first one, but it's well out of the way of my commute.)
With the ranks of uber cars in the city growing as much as they have the downtown traffic has become insane and I'm for anything that would relieve that congestion. I've been living along the Prince/Spring corridor for ~10 years now and the change in bumper-to-bumper traffic, particularly on summer Fridays is outrageous.
However it's sliced, though there's a problem with the city being full of too many idling/circling cars. ~10 yellow cabs at 330k rides per day vs Uber's 60k cars at ~200k rides per day, as per the article. That means Yellow cabs are actually driving people somewhere most of the time they are on the road whereas Uber drivers are spending a lot of time idling and/or driving to or from a pickup/dropoff.
All of that said I've been looking everywhere for good supportable numbers on how Uber has been affecting Manhattan traffic and it has been impossible to get anything other than the total number of Ubers on the road which isn't very helpful.
But I agree with you that the congestion pricing would be a better idea.
Make more protected bike lanes so that vehicle congestion doesn't impact bike travel, and add a congestion tax on all vehicles so that people only drive into the busiest areas if it's really necessary, and will otherwise consider alternative forms of transportation. I don't just want a cap on rideshares; a privately owned vehicle takes up just as much space on the road as an Uber, so why only target the latter? And what's to say that if you target Ubers you won't just get a corresponding increase in private drivers to pick up the slack, with the end result being the same amount of congestion?
This is a bill for bail out medallion owners, not cab drivers. Most NYC taxi medallions are corporate owned.
It’s an anti-competition decision disguised as if city hall is doing something for the people.
Now Uber just has to lobby to have its cap raised or be allocated a greater portion, and steadily push others out.
This way Uber can get the transit monopoly it wants but without having to do the hard work of making the product profitable at a price point that drivers and riders actually value, which it currently papers over with VC funding and distraction stories about branching into other lines of business that are clearly not significant.
EDIT: congestion tax = more expensive mobility (incl taxis and ride sharing) = less affordability
It's similar to local sales taxes: the 1% aren't affected by the cost of basic items, but the 99% are.
As a driver and pedestrian, I can spot an uber car immediately without even seeing the sticker. I like to play this guessing game in my head, and 9 times out of 10 I see the uber sticker, "T L & C" license plate, and/or a single passenger in the back seat staring at their phone.
Here the limited resource is traffic bandwidth. Without congestion tolling, arbitrary regulations are the next best thing to helping to regulate usage.
This isn't the motivation for this regulation. If it was, the same City Councilman who proposed this cap wouldn't have shot down a minimum-wage proposal for cab drivers. Remember: most medallions aren't owned by cab drivers. And cab drivers don't donate.
Really, the life of nearly everyone (who's not a taxi driver, perhaps) improved a bit since Uber entered the city.
Even the fabled subway in its theoretical best has been dysfunctional in Brooklyn since the takedown of streetcars a hundred years ago (see how all the tracks are running towards Manhattan and very few across?).
And need anyone be reminded of the countless problems with the yellow cabs (good luck hailing one around Kings Highway!), green cabs (too little too late, same problems), car services (aka taxis you order by phone, which may or may not come to pick you up and may or may not go where you need to, and can tell you to, quote, f$#k off when they're late), etc?
Obligatorily, I have a lot of reservations towards whatever Uber is doing elsewhere - but the NYC situation looked unfixable before Uber came a long with a stick (or candy) large enough.
Except for bus riders and cyclists that deal with much more congestion. And transit riders that deal with services changes as a result of decreased transit ridership.
Not to mention behavior like drivers randomly stopping in places that weren't designed for stopped cars.
Seattle might have a word about that. Or two. The words that start with "bus" and end with "lane".
>And cyclists that deal with much more congestion.
Pretty please, really?
>And transit riders that deal with services changes as a result of decreased transit ridership.
Right, blame decreased ridership on Uber, instead of all the problems that make people use Uber instead.
You know when MTA ridership was at its peak? 1946[1]. It has actually been on an increase over the last decade[2], trailing behind population increase, though. Only over the last two years we've seen it drop a little.
Uber has been there before this dip. You know what hasn't been? People getting naked in trains stuck in tunnels without AC[3]. One could think it might have something to do with decrease in ridership.
People want to take the trains. People don't want persistent delays, constantly increasing fares, service changes, shutdowns, being stuck in tunnels, unpredictability. You can blame Uber for many things, but hardly that.
[1]http://web.mta.info/nyct/110Anniversary/ridership.htm
[2]http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/
[3]https://jalopnik.com/regular-evening-commute-turns-into-nake...
the law of diminishing returns is in full effect here, regardless of what the engineers and SC want to tell themselves.
This is a good argument for treating all vehicles equally and reducing congestion with a tax, not by arbitrarily targeting Ubers but not single occupancy private cars. If you only target Ubers then a lot of that reduction will just be made up with more private cars being driven around to take up the slack in the congestion.
The only toll route I know of anywhere near London is the QE2 crossing, which is outside Greater London.
The CCZ (congestion charging zone) covers less than 5% of the Greater London area. There are plans to expand the CCZ, and tackle pollution via an ultra-low-emission-zone.
> "The Congestion Charge is an £11.50 daily charge for driving a vehicle within the charging zone between 07:00 and 18:00, Monday to Friday."
We have a mayor who's very anti-public transit so it will not happen anytime soon.
There is a limit where all these cars become a true public nuisance. It might be less than 100k.
Did you read the part where I said that most of the subway tracks in Brooklyn are going into Manhattan? Surprise, going to Manhattan is a breeze!
Now, have fun going from Kings Hwy to Bay Ridge (small challenge), or to Queens (ever tried getting to LGA by train? The Q line only started going to Astoria a few years ago!).
Your argument is a fallacy. You ignore the harm to those drivers who end up losing their jobs.
When you have so many drivers from the same company competing with each other for rides it brings wages down. I guess Uber doesn't care because they get their share either way and there are enough people who are desperate enough that they'll take low wages and long hours that they get.
Licenses for new drivers are stopped so the supply will dwindle, riders will get frustrated and stop heavy reliance on it.
More cars on the road hasn't helped me at all.
Core problem an Uber driving from A to pick someone up at B then dropping them off at C is much worse than that person driving from B to C. On top of that they tend to drive around without passengers to get to better locations.
Taxi are also a problem but the limited number of medallions limited their impact.
PS: On top of this lowering the cost of using a car adds even more trips.
As someone who has lived in New York for the past ten years, the entrance of Uber hasn't changed my life at all, other than some VCs subsidizing/coercing some lower income drivers into taking $10 off my fare when I go to the airport.
Public transportation, which you deride, usage utterly dwarfs taxis/ubers/etc (notice all of the large buildings _in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn_ where people work?). The MTA definitely has some issues, but calling it dysfunctional because it takes a little extra time to go from Astoria to Prospect Park is absurd.
I don't need to be reminded of the standard, clean, regulated experience I have every time I jump into a yellow or green cab. Boro taxis were introduced into the city _two years after_ Uber entered NYC. How can you possible hand wave them away with "too little too late"? And Uber has its fair share of drivers who have no idea where they're going (actually, definitely more, but I will say they're better about following GPS, which can be both good and bad).
They're taking about limited the number and providing a minimum wage, hardly life changing stuff.
Ehh, depends where in the city you are. When I was super broke I used to live in an out of the way part of Long Island City. 50% of cabs in Manhattan would just refuse to drive there, and once there, good luck finding a yellow or even green cab. The local car service was also pretty unreliable and slow. When Uber came along I suddenly had more options to get home, I was able to reliably get cars to the airport, etc. It was a huge and instant bump in my quality of life.
As someone who has lived in NYC for longer, I find your experience atypical. Do you take taxi/ride-hail trips outside of Manhattan? Are you a person of color? If either of those are true, your transportation experience has been fundamentally changed by the existence of Uber/Lyft.
And I'm sorry, but any favorable comparison of the cleanliness of an NYC yellow cab to an NYC Uber is laughable. The cleanest, best-smelling NYC yellow cab I've taken was worse than the dirtiest NYC Uber I've ever taken.
Nothing but actual experience, hello from Brooklyn.
>The entrance of Uber hasn't changed my life at all, other than [...] when I go to the airport.
Good for you, and I can actually know I can go to the airport.
>Public transportation, which you deride,
Who, me? I love public transportation. Especially when it works. Have fun using the MTA getting from Brooklyn to Queens, though.
>but calling it dysfunctional because it takes a little extra time to go from Astoria to Prospect Park is absurd.
A little?
Getting to LGA from, say, Kings Highway in Brooklyn is a 2+ hour trip using trains and buses, going through Manhattan and crossing the water twice.
Getting to JFK is 2+ hours using subway, LIRR, and Airtrain.
Taxi? 45 minutes.
That's one practical example for you, but we can sit down with the map one day and talk actual trip times for people living outside Manhattan.
>I don't need to be reminded of the standard, clean, regulated experience I have every time I jump into a yellow or green cab
Hahahaha. These cabs only got GPS and card readers like, what, five years ago? I still remember getting into a yellow cab with a driver who circled around the block asking for directions - and charging me for it.
>Boro taxis were introduced into the city _two years after_ Uber entered NYC. How can you possible hand wave them away with "too little too late"
That's why I called it too little too late. First, because it was too late. Two years too late, thanks for pointing that out. Secondly, because it's still too little; I very rarely see green cabs (but tons of Ubers).
>They're taking about limited the number and providing a minimum wage, hardly life changing stuff.
This sentence, to me, seems, how should I say it - ah, hyperbolic and disingenuous; thank you.
You and I have had vastly different experiences in cabs.
The cabs are disgusting. I can't understand the driver and he takes the long way around to squeeze more money out of me.
Huh, haven't been in one where the driver wasn't on the phone in ages. Two weeks ago, my black friend was refused pick-up. Brooklyn-based friends are regularly refused transport. At least the credit card machine broken trick stopped a few years ago.
I'm all for limiting rid share vehicles and better wages for drivers, but they need to dump a shit ton of time and money into the rail system, both the subway and intercity. Fix Penn Station, and get the tracks up to spec! That should be the #1 priority for city transport infrastructure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
(The city froze their rates until they were no longer able to improve services, then the city took them over.)
Interested to hear what the other cities are. Chicago? San Fran?
I don't understand what your complaint is. Not every L train ride crosses the river (I'll concede at least half probably do, though). MTA is also adding supplemental bus and train service. Do you think they should instead allow ride share to fill the gap? If so, I have doubts the city's geometry (particularly on the Manhattan end) would permit enough cars on the streets to support 300k additional trips, especially since they are likely concentrated around morning/evening rush hours.
It's less of a complaint, but rather my belief that the water ferry system currently transports so few passengers that I do not believe it will absorb much of the excess spillover.
I don't know if more rideshare permits are the optimal solution, but I won't pass legislation that limits licenses a half a year away from a major public transportation shutdown. I have my doubts it would support 300k trips as well, but if it can support 25k through rideshare services or carpool services like Via, it at least helps solve the problem.
Claiming to limit Uber license to alleviate congestion is a bullshit argument unless you can show that they make up a significant percentage of traffic.
Also, to be clear, I'm not an Uber apologist; they can go fuck themselves as quickly as they move and break things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/nyregion/yellow-cab-long-...
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/1/17/14296892/yellow-taxi-nyc-ube...
"...there are 13,587 yellow cabs on New York City streets. The total number of black cars: 60,000, more than 46,000 of which are connected with Uber, though they may be hooked up to other services as well."
"To the credit of taxis, that’s still more than the number of daily trips taken by app-hailed cars—but not by much. Combined, those cars took a total of 311,305 trips in October 2016. Yellow cabs are on a downward trajectory; app-hailed cars are on an upswing.
The Times breaks down the brand-specific numbers: in a twist surprising to no one, Uber, which started operating in NYC in 2011, is still king of the ride-hailing apps, providing on average of 226,046 rides per day in October 2016. Lyft came in a distant second, with 35,908 rides, according to city data, while Via had 21,698 rides; Juno had 20,426 rides; and Gett, which launched in the city in 2014, came in last with 7,227 rides."
Some of the statistics are dated in a fast-changing industry.
If Uber+Taxi make up a small percentage of traffic, then limiting them to fix congestion seems like a stupid idea.
> The number of new vehicles on the road has surged since the last time a cap was up for debate, growing from 63,000 in 2015 to over 100,000 today. These new vehicles have added an unprecedented number of new miles driven in New York City, according to a recent analysis by traffic analyst Bruce Schaller. Trip volumes have tripled in the last year and a half, and 600 million driving miles were added citywide. In addition, Schaller found evidence that ridership was shifting from public transportation to ride-hailing apps.
I had to take a yellow cab the other day from a dispatcher at JFK. I normally take Uber all the time. We were going literally 20 min away to Queens.
I tell him we're going to Queens. He literally screams, "Queens?!" and storms out of the car to the dispatcher. He comes back in 2 minutes and starts driving, muttering to himself for 10 minutes after I give him the address, whining like a little bitch that he didn't get to go to Manhattan.
Fuck yellow cabs.
But the green cab solution is half baked. It really frustrates me as an Upper Manhattan resident that I cannot take a green cab back uptown to my home. I have often seen them lower in Manhattan and they are required to drive back empty while I try to find a yellow cab.
"[Caption] Drivers of for-hire vehicles on Wednesday demonstrated in support of a cap on ride-hail vehicles outside City Hall."
Then the signs in the picture above the caption are all focused on the pay floor...
"VOTE yes to create a pay floor for FHV drivers"
The pay floor and the ride-sharing cap are very separate issues, but it seems like the city pulled a fast one by pairing their legislation.
With the L train shutting down for a year+, this could be disastrous for getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
The exact mechanisms are different, but the direction they are pushing is basically the same so that if one doesn't work the other should.
De Blasio seems to really like adding regulations to industries that were largely responses to NYC (and similar large cities') regulation that strangled the previous version of that industry, leaving competition excessively expensive, inefficient and unpleasant.
Maybe there are some things he could do to make taxi's more competitive with Uber?
- Develop a cross-service hailing app including taxis?
- Regulate to prevent annoying TV screen ads
- Streamline payment process
I feel like this is a step towards Uber being regulated into becoming a clone of the poor taxi services it was rebelling against: unmaintained interiors, no customer service, unreliable hailing.
The only regulation I want to see on Uber is statutory penalties if "time to arrival" wait times consistently exceed the provided estimates. I use Uber much less now because I several times I've gotten an estimate of "3 minutes" and waited over 15. This is false advertisement.
> Many experts believe congestion pricing is the best way for New York City to fix congestion and secure the funds needed to fix the subway. Mr. Johnson supports the idea, but Mr. de Blasio has opposed it. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who controls the subway, has said he will push for congestion pricing...
Why does de Blasio oppose it? It seems like another reasonable approach to tackling congestion -- heck, it's the public version of building private toll roads -- with the added bonus of providing funds to improve public transportation.
Sure, that's not the only effect it will have, it will also cost money for bankers that drive in from Westchester and park underneath their midtown offices. But, as you can imagine, it won't change their behavior much -- by definition the only people that it will affect are people who can't easily afford it.
If you look at it in a different way, congestion pricing takes a public good that everyone paid to create, the roads and streets of the central business district, and reserves them so they can only be used by drivers with lots of money. There are problems with that approach.
Of course there's another side to the argument, obviously. But I feel like many people don't realize this issue cuts in two directions, rather than just being an obvious "good idea".
Everyone gets a benefit from the public roads even if they don't use them directly: they feed the high-value trips that make the businesses there possible. But there's still not enough road-capacity for everyone without value-destroying congestion: a massive toll paid by everyone in delays. So, more money should be raised to improve roads and alternatives. And, that money should be raised in a way that shifts those who are most-adaptable into alternatives, in proportion to the congestion they'd cause. Only congestion fees do that.
1. There's no reason we couldn't provide exceptions for the kinds of vans and trucks that blue-collar workers need to drive into the city to make their livings.
2. There's no reason we couldn't offer income-based exceptions to people who absolutely cannot ride transit for this or that reason.
As in all proposals to ration some scarce resource, it's important to understand that we already ration it, even if it's not explicit. Today, we do it by literally clogging the streets so much that nobody else can get through. (And now we've added this new way, too.) Surely nobody thinks that's the smartest way to ration.
A cap on Ubers/Lyfts + minimum pay will likely increase the price of Ubers/Lyfts. Rich people will be able to afford the new prices, but poor people will not.
At least until it's implemented, anyhow. Once people see congestion drastically reduced, it becomes more popular: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/12/06/for-politicians-conge...
It also pretty obviously favors the rich, which is not a big vote-getter.
In many ways, a congested city works like a income-adjusted congestion tax, where you pay with your time. Since the time of rich people is more valuable, the burden seems "fair". The only problem is that the time is wasted, no tax is collected.
Maybe we should accept that political reality and setup income adjusted congestion taxes, putting the revenue to work to ease congestion for everybody.
Another option is to disburse a limited, equal number of "tradable driving hours" to each citizen regardless of income. You now have a market that eficiently allocates the limited public resource, allowing poor or thrifty citizens to earn tax credits, while allowing rich drivers to pay a fixed rate for each driving hour exceeding their allocation.
It's good politics, bad economics - but still much better than wasting millions of man hours each day.
As the subway crumbles, ride-share and taxis are the only practical way most people can get around. The cab-limiting "medallion" system led to infamous corruption (Michael Cohen, a name you might have heard from the news, owns an entire fleet of them); most New Yorkers thus consider ride-share to be a godsend. I don't see how capping ride share will result in anything but making Ubers as terrible as yellow cabs.
btw, if ride-share is capped at current levels, that means that traffic would merely not-get-any-worse than it already is. This will do nothing to reduce traffic; congestion pricing would accomplish something.
> The de Blasio administration has steadfastly maintained that it can’t get behind a congestion pricing plan because it unfairly burdens low-income New Yorkers traveling into Manhattan from the outer boroughs. On Friday, the Mayor seemed to soften on his prior opposition.
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/19/16910546/nyc-congestion-pric...
But I can't actually find a quote of him saying that; everything I can find just says he thinks it's not fair, but doesn't specify why: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/nyregion/de-blasio-conges...
I don't know what de Blasio's plans are after his mayoral term is up, but this ticks all the right political boxes for him.
Advocating for congestion pricing would mean no more Taxi campaign contributions, Uber the company is unpopular, and he would piss off those who benefit from toll free roads; as a politician that would actually take courage, so why do it?
Clearly, a cap on ride hailing licenses can only mean that the already licensed drivers stand to gain a similar amount by pimping their license to various competing services until they get the best deal. It's simple economics, assuming taxis and Ubers are comparable to the average consumer.
I know cab drivers are behind this.
Uber pool has saved me so much money.
When is next election for NYC mayor
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/02/ride-sharing-actua...
We have to find a way to have better more effective cities built for people that utilize walking, biking, and transit. The less cars the better: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/fight-cli...
We have to find a way to stop the laziness/traffic/transit abandonment that spreads with ride sharing. http://devonzuegel.com/post/we-should-be-building-cities-for...
"The City Council approved a package of bills that will halt new licenses for Uber and other ride-hail vehicles for a year while the city studies the booming industry."
While yes, this does impact Uber, it also impacts Lyft, etc.
or graft...
How much would a ride-hailing license cost to buy from an existing operator right now in NYC.
