New
Yorkers who can afford to avoid their dysfunctional subway system are
spoiled for choice these days. In addition to long-established taxis,
livery cabs, black cars and limousines, they can summon rides through
Uber, Lyft, Via, Juno and other app-based ride-hailing and ride-sharing
services. While this new surfeit of options has been a boon to people
trying to get around town, it has also helped lay waste to the livelihoods of taxi drivers
and turn New York’s already busy streets into glorified parking lots —
and leaders like Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Albany and
the City Council have yet to come up with an effective strategy to deal
with these problems.
Cities have a
long history of intervening to impose order on their streets. No large
metropolis can accommodate everyone who would like to drive or be
privately driven around — street space is a limited resource, especially
in the densest neighborhoods and at the busiest times of the day. In the 1930s,
during the Great Depression, New York created its taxi medallion system
because drivers looking for work flooded the streets, far outstripping
demand and driving down wages for drivers.
With the rise of Uber, Lyft
and the like, the city is again confronting a tragedy of the commons.
Many other thriving cities, including London and Paris,
are also struggling to figure out how to respond to these new business
models. A big part of the problem is that elected officials have not
updated regulations written for a bygone era in which each type of car
service tended to stay in its lane, so to speak — in New York, taxis
primarily plied the streets of Manhattan and the city’s airports,
liveries took care of residents of the other boroughs, and black cars
chauffeured the denizens of Wall Street. While the city has issued just
13,587 taxi medallions — a small fraction of the more than 60,000 cars
Uber commands — it gave freer rein to the liveries and black cars under
the assumption that these specialized services would never become
dominant.
Ride-hailing
apps have shattered those boundaries by signing up drivers with livery
or black-car licenses. These companies cast themselves as filling big
gaps in the transportation system, and it’s true that they have been
great for people in mass-transit-starved parts of the city. But their
growth has also led to many veteran taxi and black-car drivers seeing a
devastating decrease in take-home pay.
That’s largely because they are
completing fewer trips
than before. As a result, the value of the taxi medallions that drivers
must either buy from the city or rent from taxi companies has crashed
in recent years, going from a high of about $1.3 million in 2014
to less than $200,000 today. Over the past five months, four drivers
who were financially strained have killed themselves, and many others
have lost their medallions to foreclosure.
At
the same time, traffic has slowed to a crawl, to just 8.2 miles per
hour south of 60th Street in Manhattan in 2015, down from 9.4 miles per
hour in 2010, according to the city’s Department of Transportation.
It
makes little sense for the city to regulate the old and new guard of
for-hire cars differently when many New Yorkers use them interchangeably
— as do some drivers, who have been known to switch between traditional
cabs and app-based services. While it would be impractical for the city
to get rid of its existing regulations in one fell swoop, it could
phase in new regulations. A more thoughtful regime would ensure that all
drivers make a living wage by establishing a minimum fare for riders,
and a standardized share of that fare for drivers, regardless of what
kind of car they drive. Or as Brad Lander, a City Council member from
Brooklyn, has proposed, the city could require companies like Uber to
pay drivers a minimum wage.
Further, the city ought to standardize regulations like those requiring
that a certain number of cars be accessible to people with
disabilities.
The
city and state also need to create a smart congestion pricing plan to
reduce traffic while raising money for upgrades to the subway and bus
system, which would encourage fewer people to get into cabs and Ubers.
The Legislature recently added a surcharge on taxi trips
below 96th Street in Manhattan: 75 cents for pooled trips, $2.50 for
yellow taxis and $2.75 for black cars and Uber and Lyft rides. This
charge is flawed. It does not vary by the time of day, and lawmakers
failed to impose fees on private cars and trucks. A smart pricing scheme
would discourage use of all vehicles when traffic is at its worst and
encourage car travel and deliveries at off-peak times.
Over
time, the city should consider whether it owes something to drivers who
sunk their savings into taxi medallions. Many drivers went into debt to
buy these permits because the city promised them a monopoly on picking
up passengers, a promise it has not been able to keep. No doubt any
compensation plan would be controversial, and working out the details
would be tricky — the city, for example, should not compensate
investors, like Michael Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer-cum-fixer, who should have known that they were taking big risks by buying up dozens of medallions. Governments in Quebec and Australia have compensated or are proposing compensating taxi drivers for the lost value of such licenses.
The
city needs to make its transportation system fairer to paid drivers,
responsive to the needs of commuters and more environmentally
sustainable. If the mayor and other elected officials put their minds to
that task, they might also help set a model that cities around the
world could follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment