If the problem they are trying to solve is "too many vehicles" then we need a congestion tax. They should certainly not be limiting vehicles that are more likely to take multiple people with a Pool option.
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.
What if the problem is that you are mayor and got lots of campaign funding from the taxi lobby and now they want their pound of flesh?
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."
Honest question: what are the equivalent numbers for Uber's side of the battle? Looking at one side of the question without the other doesn't allow a balanced assessment of the situation.
> what are the equivalent numbers for Uber's side of the battle?
The bulk of Uber's ~$2 million/year of political spending in New York goes towards ad campaigns [1]. The taxi lobby bought the mayor and City Council; Uber created a grassroots backlash. This was the balance. Then Uber burned off its teflon coating.
Since Lyft never bothered with politics and Juno/Gett is so young, the balance broke and we got this mess.
Thanks for providing the numbers and your take on the situation.
I think we come away with quite different reactions to the same facts: I view it as telling that Uber spent roughly four times what the taxi lobby spent, but most of the conversational focus regarding spending targets the taxi lobby - one of many widespread biases in which some bits of the for-hire transportation debate get more frequently talked about and others usually overlooked.
The (legitimately real) rank and file support and skewed discussion focus which Uber's ad/lobbying money has bought them isn't my idea of grassroots backlash, even if it unwittingly enlists the grassroots in their PR campaign.
No doubt the taxi lobby is pushing their interests just like Uber pushes theirs. Neither set of industry lobbyists is truly looking out for the citizens.
But when the conversation they've shaped pairs "bought the mayor and City Council" for the less-spending party with "created a grassroots backlash" for the more-spending party, I can only marvel impressed and saddened at Uber PR's effectiveness.
In most cities, the local taxi lobby plus the citizens who oppose Uber/Lyft/Juno/Gett for normal public policy reasons are even more outclassed against a major VC-funded global would-be monopolist like Uber than NYC managed. I'm impressed at de Blasio and City Council for holding firm.
(As you can tell, I'm no fan of these companies for several reasons, but explaining those reasons substantively would be a huge tangent.)
> I view it as telling that Uber spent roughly four times what the taxi lobby spent
Uber spent four times as the taxi lobby spent on a single politician. I don't know what the taxi industry's total is. Given they shower tens of thousands of dollars on even state senators [1], I'd wager it's comparable to Uber's.
Who cares how much money they spend on public ads? On the other hand, it's easy to understand why people care about how much money is donated to the campaigns of the politicians that will make these decisions.
There's no legal problem with them spending as much on ads as they want, of course.
But if public opinion is mobilized as a weapon through very selective presentation of the issues in ads, in a disproportionate way that leaves the public with a skewed picture of the pros and cons, it has the same indirect effect of pressuring the politicians to act in the company's interests. The public can't react in their own interests if they don't have the right facts, so then polls will legitimately show what the company wants, by and large.
Roughly the same problem arises if they fund a heavy "lobby your elected officials" campaign, targeted only at their supporters, with no equivalent resources mobilizing those who disagree - and indeed they did this.
> that leaves the public with a skewed picture of the pros and cons,
Then the other side has to also fund public campaigns, instead of just lining the politician's pockets.
> it has the same indirect effect of pressuring the politicians to act in the company's interests.
Yeah but one thing is lobbying and a very different one is "I fund your campaign if you benefit me economically". That's a soft version of bribery. Can't put it in the same level as propaganda ads that change public opinion on a topic.
You are definitely coming off as biased which to me is strange. Maybe Uber isn’t a saint of a company, but thinking that bribery is somehow morally equivalent to advertising (whatever the multiple) is very odd.
What's the moral difference between political ads and donations to a political campaign which will presumably spend that money on ads (or other campaign related expenses)?
> What's the moral difference between political ads and donations to a political campaign which will presumably spend that money on ads (or other campaign related expenses)?
Public versus private view, public versus private benefit. Ads put me--the voter--in the equation. A campaign donation removes me from it.
I've never had any affiliation with any transportation company or lobby group on any side of the issue, nor have I bought or shorted any relevant stocks. I admitted my dislike of Uber and their peers very explicitly, but I'm only biased in the sense of having considered the issue and formed an opinion. As are we all, if we've thought about it enough.
Not sure where bribery entered the conversation. The person I was replying to said that Uber spent $2 million / year on legal expenditures to affect the debate in NY, mostly through advertising.
I have no reason to assume that this was any more bribery than PR campaigns and lobbying generally are, and indeed I presume it didn't go beyond that.
The mention of the taxi lobby having "bought" de Blasio and the City Council was from the comment I was replying to, which I quoted to marvel at the tone of the conversation which Uber has managed to shape so favorably.
And the public support which I said Uber has "bought" is, as I noted, "legitimately real" - they just fed skewed information to the public, which is not a bribe.
(They do give lots of loss-leader promotional incentives to make people use and like their service, but we usually categorize that as marketing and not bribery without elements that are absent here.)
I'm not in marketing or advertisement, but I seriously wonder if honest grassroots support can be "purchased" through ad spending.
For example, I see HSBC's ads incessantly at airports about how they value customer service, but 5+ personal interactions with the bank proved otherwise and no amount of ad spending can get me to suddenly get on message boards and support HSBC. They could spend 10x for all I care and I still wouldnt use their bank...and certainly would never get on message boards to support their product.
What ride hailing apps did is make rides available to a giant sector of the population who didn't previously have any reasonable alternative. That makes me (both through my experience, and that of my mother) spend my valuable time on message boards arguing in favor of ride hailing apps.
A one line summary of my mom's very limited anecdote: for a frail elderly POC frequenting hospital trips in Manhattan and traveling back to Brooklyn -- there was life before Uber and life after Uber. For excited consumers, it has to do with the product, not ads.
Sure, that seems like a big win for her. I guess calling car service companies weren't an option, or there was no affordable reliable option nearby?
NYC has traditionally used that for the same purpose as Uber, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are underserved areas or racial discrimination by the dispatchers.
The biggest example of skewed information in PR (whether ads or official statements) is when they promote how much cheaper they are than the traditional alternatives. While it's often completely true, that's only the case because of their huge VC-funded warchest.
This is a major omission from many people's public policy opinion-forming: They're subsidizing rides and losing money in a way that local customer-funded competitors can't match, moving market share toward either a monopoly (as they'd prefer) or an oligopoly (including Lyft etc). Previously NYC taxi and car service companies were diverse small competitors.
Once they get enough of a collective stranglehold, or once VC funding gets sick of them waiting for self-driving cars to greatly reduce their cost of goods sold (drivers aren't cheap) in the rough and tumble real world, they'll raise prices and there will be either a captive audience or another rough societal readjustment period.
People might still think the speculative future pain is worth the tradeoff, but "cheaper" is a skewers truth without the context. The context lets them consider the full picture when forming their opinion.
But yeah, a frail elderly POC woman who needs a better way to go to the hospital has very different priorities than anyone thinking about long term economic and urban planning impacts, and I completely see why it's good for her. :) Glad her needs are better met now than they once were, even if through Uber.
@jkaplowitz thanks for the insights -- all this makes sense.
I should note that most of my drivers for Uber/Lyft were not cost-driven but feature-driven. Cost is a factor, of course, and note that my mom almost always uses the pool option to save money -- something Yellow cabs dont/cannot offer.
Drivers:
- Dispatch services work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but not the other way. You'd have to know the local dispatch service, they would need to know your mobile phone number (they usually dont ask) to coordinate with you, etc. The only dispatch services that seem to work well in Manhattan are black car services, which is way out of the conversation here -- she needs a ride home, not a Lincoln Towncar :-)
- Dispatch services DO work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan give you a blanket "be ready in 5min" regardless of demand and you end up waiting and waiting -- sometimes at the worst times. I've known people to call 2 or 3 dispatch services, take the first car, and leave the other drivers hanging (unethical...but it happens.)
- Dispatch services are hard to get ahold of when you really need them, often in bad weather etc.
- Dispatch services do price in the dead-head ride back, so there is a legitimate cost issue there on both supply and demand side. Uber/Lyft mostly solve the dead-head ride back issue, so legitimately lower cost by better utilization.
A personal issue when i travel for business:
- Dispatch services mysteriously dont keep receipts or have broken credit card machines (not sure why? to hid tax revenue?) -- so I am left with a ride for work (e.g., to airport) with no receipt and thus i have to pay work expenses out of pocket and they wont be reimbursed without a receipt.
- Dispath services mysteriously "dont have change" so you're paying $80 for a $62 ride
- I'm arriving at Delta Terminal late night in LGA and all the yellow cabs are at the other terminals. You wait and wait. There isnt a good way to "hail" them. I understand the Arro app tries to solve this, but that came years too late.
Knowing about the donations helps, but some have suggested we forego the idea of donations in the first place. It’s hard to see how it could be called a democracy when some people can donate millions to prop up a candidate. We can all watch and say “yep, they got a big donation”, but they’re still going to out find a candidate who represents the people against the moneyed interests. Perhaps not in all cases but the donations really slew the system.
I think the idea is that being able to track the flow of monies is supposed to lead to changes that nudge us in the direction of political donation reform.
Yup. I'm no fan of Uber but at least the service is consistent.
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.)
> Meanwhile, with Uber you just press a button and they take you to the airport, bags and all.
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.)
I tried to go from SFO to South Bay a while back around midnight and eventually took a cab after being cancelled by multiple Uber drivers. Some even called me, asked where I was going, then angrily said they don't go to South Bay and cancelled.
Heh, I've always had the opposite experience. They either want to go to the city or somewhere far South. Something close like Millbrae, South City or Burlingame? They cancel the ride.
I believe all of these stories; I just don't understand why people expect or believe taxi drivers and Uber drivers are fundamentally different people with different incentives.
The frustrating part about Uber is that I have to wait 10 minutes for each one before they refuse to take me somewhere. With a taxi I can just walk down the row of taxis at the airport. On the other hand, the only reason taxis can get that benefit is because they lobby so hard to kick the Ubers out to a parking lot 10 minutes away.
"I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport."
I'm not understanding this. If you're using the app correctly then the driver knows the destination before they even accept the ride. If you're setting an address near an airport in an attempt to be duplicitous I would be equally discouraged as a driver.
I'm in NYC, and I use taxis 99% of the time because of this phenomenon: Uber/Lyft drivers rapidly accept your ride, then cancel (or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating) as soon as they see it's a place they don't want to go.
It's so bad here that I just won't deal with Lyft and Uber unless they're throwing serious discounts my way, and I have time to burn.
The worst part is how much of your time it wastes. With a cab, whatever, another one is coming soon. But with rideshares, you could be waiting awhile on someone who'll cancel on you, thus wasting a lot more time. Even if twice as many taxis refuse to go there as rideshares, I'm still wasting more time on the rideshares, so it's worse.
Airport trips are relatively easy, as long as you're in normal operating hours. Drivers don't want to go places where it's hard to get a return trip. JFK has plenty of passengers both ways.
Seems consistent to me: Ubers don't want to places where they can't easily pick up a return trip; same as cabs. That's always been my assumption, anyway.
This is a result of poor logistics on the part of Uber and Lyft. There are a large number of Ubers and lyfts that will drop off and have to leave the airport without a passenger, meanwhile, you can call you car and be told it's a 10min wait as someone who isn't even on premises accepts the fare.
Sorry, I'm confused now. You stated above that JFK has passengers going both ways - so isn't this exactly the kind of fare an Uber would want to take on?
I've been taking Ubers from and to JFK, EWR, and LGA from Williamsburg and Chinatown for years never had a cancel on any of them.
I thought the driver couldn't see the destination until they started the ride after you get in. Although I've encountered drivers starting a ride as soon as they see me on the street (which I contested and got money back for).
My understanding is that with Lyft, the driver does not see the destination until they've reached (or come close to) your location.
And yes, I'm using the app correctly -- not sure why you're jumping to some conclusion that I must be being duplicitous. There's no convenient "nearby" drop-off points near airports here anyway.
I've never used Lyft so couldn't comment there. And you're jumping to a conclusion assuming I was jumping to a conclusion. I was just trying to make sense of how that could happen as you described.
As a social tip: If you accuse someone of potentially being duplicitous, you shouldn't be surprised when they don't react positively to it. And if you don't know a lot about something, your first guess shouldn't be that the person you're talking to must be lying about something.
You seem very sensitive about this, so once again I'll just mea culpa and say I never stood up and yelled j'accuse - your description of the problem just made little sense to me and I was trying to discuss how it might be possible.
Agree with all of this except the part about enforcing the traffic laws against cars parked in the bike lanes. The NYPD is most certainly lazy and incompetent (as well as corrupt), but the issue is the bike lanes themselves. Most of the city, especially the most congested parts, simple have no room for a bike lane. The vast majority of vehicles blocking the bike lanes are making pickups or deliveries. There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over (much less park). This fact was ignored by Bloomberg and his friends when they drew bike lanes all over the place on congested roads. It may be a noble goal to have plenty of space for bikers and pedestrians, but that isn't the way New York was designed, and its not feasible as long as the residents and the businesses depend on a steady stream of deliveries, pickups, garbage removal and other assorted vehicles associated with living in a city. Giving tickets to the UPS driver who has to deliver a package at a location is just going to cost him money, not deter him from pulling over - he has no choice.
Here's the thing though. Those bike lanes are clearly being used by lots of people, as are the travel lanes by lots of drivers. What isn't being utilized well is all of that free parking along the street -- most of those vehicles only move twice a week when they have to because of street sweeping.
So the simple solution is to eliminate all of the free parking and replace it with paid parking and loading zones. And raise the price high enough so that there's always spots free close enough to where you're going so that vehicles have a place to park themselves for short periods of time that's outside of the travel and bike lanes.
I live on 26th Street. We have a bike lane, a traffic lane, and two sides of street side parking. This is the case across a large faction of Manhattan, the avenues exempted. For Exhibit A in stupid parking lanes, I present Broadway.
I live and work in Manhattan and there's on-street parking everywhere. Most streets are easily wide enough for two travel lanes plus a bike lane, but instead have one or two rows of parked cars. It's quite common for streets to have two parking lanes, one travel lane, and no bike lanes.
Just pull up satellite imagery on Google Maps and it'll all be obvious.
Are you sure about this? Maybe this is true on avenues, but at least with the new york I know well (grew up in greenwich village), the streets are very narrow (one parking lane and one driving lane is already tricky), with avenues sometimes being wider.
The village, particularly west of 6th Ave, is one of the only parts of Manhattan I can think of where 1 traffic lane and 1 parking lane is the norm. Once you get above 14th St or east of 6th Ave, its pretty much 2 parking lanes, one travel lane, and sometimes a bike lane nestled between the parking and the traffic on the crosstown streets (and on your major crosstown streets like 14th, 23rd, etc... still two lanes of parking, and often two lanes of traffic, but almost never any kind of bike facilities)
I'm also talking about the area around washington square park. The majority of the streets only allow one side of parking at any given time (with opposite side of the street parking for cleaning), where the streets are one way. Should a truck be doing any unloading on these streets, virtually no one can get through (where that is often true in midtown as well on regular streets..
I'm seeing a sea of green as much as I am a sea of red. "Parking is virtually non-existent" is so far from the truth I don't even know where to begin with that. You're literally looking at the map and complaining that not every single square foot of Manhattan can be used for parking. Guess what, land in the densest city in the country has better uses than parking cars. And yet in many neighborhoods almost every single block has twice the parking space than it does driving space (go look at East Village on that map). I think you're complaining about Midtown Manhattan, but what alternative solution could you possibly want? It's a simple matter of physics. The space just isn't there. There's no room to add parking; there's not even any room for people to drive or walk on the sidewalk.
The issue we are discussing is bike lanes. My whole point is the space just isn't there, and issuing tickets to trucks making deliveries in the vast areas that don't have parking isn't going to make it any better.
Take another look. Everywhere that is not green means that trucks, garbage trucks, UPS vans, and every other delivery service has to pull over and block a potential bike lane to make a delivery. That would be true even if every green area was open, and nobody else was parked anywhere. There is a reason that parking garages charge what they do in Manhattan, and its not because there is parking available on the street. ITT are people who have clearly never driven in the city, let alone made deliveries.
Most on-street parking isn't paid, so almost everywhere that's green on that map isn't available for delivery services anyway; it's going to be taken by personal vehicles that move twice a week for street-sweeping. Add more on-street parking and you'll just have more people with personal vehicles using it; it won't make it available for deliveries.
The best way to make delivery drop-off points available is to get rid of all the free parking and make it all paid, and keep raising prices on a block-by-block basis until there's typically spots free on any given block. It'll be a minor marginal cost for someone making a delivery to pay, say, $5/30 minutes (this will probably actually be cheaper if it means they can find a nearby spot, thus saving time driving around and time shuttling things from a farther spot). But $5/30 minutes works out to $240/day, which will easily discourage long-term parkers who shouldn't be using the scarce resource of on-street parking in busy areas anyway.
In less busy (i.e. purely residential) areas, it might make sense to move to a permit model, with permits costing several hundred dollars per month. There'd of course be parking meters mixed in with all that for people who are driving to the area and don't have permits.
There is a doable solution, and that would be implementing a system where all major throughways have BRT with proper right of ways (and not the kind where other cars can just enter the bus lane). Yes this will lead to more congested streets for those who choose to drive their own cars, but to remove the current gridlock that exists due to the failing subway, this is the only real solution (where it could also easily be extended well beyond where the subways and existing buses go now.
>it’s difficult for me to determine if your comment refers to some context I’m unfamiliar with.
The city has only lifted the ban on electric bikes a few months ago[1], but still bans electric scooters[2][3] because screw you, that's why. (They have reasons now, just like they've had reasons for banning e-bikes for over a decade after the technology provided a really viable mode of transportation at a reasonable price point).
NYC traffic mitigation solutions are generally backwards or working from bad information.
Allowing electric bicycles and push scooters solves the last mile problem for many people.
The argument the city has made is that electric bicycles are too dangerous and will cause injury to pedestrians. This is a bad faith argument, because it's already illegal to cycle on the sidewalk, and if the city actually cared about non driver safety, it would push to enforce bicycle lane safety. It also failed to provide sufficient, to me, evidence that electric bicycles and push scooters pose a threat to pedestrians.
If better transit options existed, including last mile (push scooter) and ~3mile solutions (electric rentable bicycles), perhaps people wouldn't Uber as much.
Unfortch Bloomberg tried congestion pricing and it got strangled in the cot. That would be my preference too. Simple, market-based, fair, etc. . . .
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.
Your data on the number of daily rides seems quite outdated. It was 400k/day for Uber, 112k for Lyft, and 300k for taxis
in the latest article I saw (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/nyregion/uber-taxi-driver...) and I don't see your numbers in this article. You'd at least need to know the average trip length and the work time per driver to make any comparisons as to who's more efficient.
But I agree with you that the congestion pricing would be a better idea.
So we have 10k medallion holders and ~60k uber drivers giving the same number of rides per day. No, there's not enough there to give a rigorous analysis but that is a vast difference in the amount of rides offered per car.
Maybe most of those Uber rides are in the boroughs and that accounts for the difference in ratio, but I'd be very surprised if that was the whole story.
Uber cars aren't on the road most of the time. Yellow cabs are. Those taxi medallions are expensive and they operate with shifts of drivers, the goal being to keep the taxi running 24/7, except when it needs maintenance.
It's pretty typical for any given cab to have three different drivers running in 12 hour shifts. That way you keep it on the road all 168 hours of every week. An Uber just requires a relatively inexpesive TLC license plate, not a taxi medallion, so it's typically only driven by one driver, say an average of 40 hours per week.
That's a strong claim when the news is about "so many taxis sitting idle in parking lots and garages that they have become known as “taxi graveyards.” ". Is there any actual data on active time for each cab?
The given 60k figure is probably registered drivers, not active drivers in the last week.
Also, uber drivers don't work 5 days a week, for example some only work on the week end or on peak hours, it can be additional income rather than a full time job.
It explains the majority of the difference. It's simply not a remotely apple-to-apples comparison to compare yellow cab medallions, which are on the streets constantly, to rideshare license plates, which are not. The difference could even be more than 4X as another commenter points out, as many rideshare drivers are part-time.
I'm curious as to what story you think is being told? To me it's clear that the following things are true:
* Thera are 6x the number of uber drivers on the road.
* A significant portion of those are new traffic
* Substantially fewer rides are given per uber/ride for hire car
There's (much) more traffic and I have a hard time seeing what has changed in the city over the last ten years to make traffic so horrid other than Uber/hire cars. Maybe the decay of the subways? Still, ridership numbers aren't down and population hasn't grown much. If you've got any ideas I'd love to hear 'em.
Listen, I love not dealing with Yellow Cabs. They're a pack of assholes and Uber is far more convenient but you're bending over backward to justify a marginal magnitude difference in rides per car.
FWIW I think a hard cap on the number of hire cars is stupid but we are stuck with De Blasio and even Bloomberg couldn't get congestion pricing passed. Capping new ubers at 100k (the current total) is not really that onerous all considered. It's not like it's gonna make it 2010 again.
I would love a congestion tax. I take a bike to work, but there's no good cross-town protected bike lanes, so I hit so a lot of damn vehicle traffic that severely slows down my commute. I frequently have to go slow to wend my way through narrow gaps of parked cars and cars stuck in traffic, and sometimes get stuck completely with double parking or construction.
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?
True protected bike lanes with signaling priority that you see in cities like Seattle would be near impossible to implement in manhattan given that on all the wider crosstown streets downtown, there are major bus routes running along them that need a curb to pick people up at (although I'd also be happy just banning non commercial vehicles from lower manhattan in general where we implemented park and rides at all the closest subway/path stops).
Unfortunately I'm not joking -- a lot of the protected bike lanes we've gotten recently have been along stretches where cyclists (sometimesore than one) have died. That's what it takes to override the nimbyists in the local Community Boards.
But for a less morbid suggestion, you should join Transportation Alternatives (and its mailing lists!) and go to the Community Board meetings they send notices about where bike lanes will be debated. Every voice in favor helps. I've spoken at a bunch of em.
I read it differently. This legislation is good for Uber, because it lays the groundwork for severe regulatory capture where Uber can use the cap to prevent competitors from having any chance to gain critical customer bases.
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.
There aren't many poor people commuting into Manhattan every day using a car. You'd be spending way more on fuel and parking than the monthly MTA ticket costs.
Well, if you're an FHV driver, MTA won't cut it, since you can't take it on the train with you, and you need it to do your job. On the upside, given the nature of the work, you shouldn't have to worry too much about parking costs.
Good. Anyone driving a car should be paying enough money to cover what they use, something they clearly aren't doing. Drivers get too much of a free ride.
Uber drivers are also really bad drivers, compared to the norm. They don't know the streets as well, they make abrupt stops in the middle of the street (cabs at least pull over if possible), they drive just weird and it's annoying.
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.
I think there's a 4th factor which is under looked by your comment and it's that the way in which ride sharing is taking away revenue from the MTA. While this is likely caused by the system constantly being under construction and having delays, removing idling cars from the road would very likely also help with reducing bus traffic (although it's pathetic that NYC hasn't implemented BRT on all major corridors such as they are going to do on 14th street.
There are something like 8k restaurants in New York. Imagine if a restaurant lobby was able to limit new restaurants. This is basically what the taxi industry is doing.
It would be more like they were limiting the new buildings that could be zoned for restaurants. Since land is a finite resource, the number of restaurants that NYC can even contain is limited.
Here the limited resource is traffic bandwidth. Without congestion tolling, arbitrary regulations are the next best thing to helping to regulate usage.
The real issue is that cab drivers are committing suicide because of their debts. Simple market analysis ignores the real human toll these technological changes are making. Yes, better service should be rewarded. But those hurting should get some relief. (I personally don't care too much about medallion-owning companies/groups.)
> cab drivers are committing suicide because of their debts
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.
Reflief shouldn't be protecting their broken business model and the corrupt medallion system. This isn't a problem technology is causing, its loan sharks locking taxi drivers into debt with the insane prices of a medallion. I'd rather see the medallion system removed, debt relief provided to the drivers and a more fair congestion tax or similar to control the number of cars.
That issue is present with everyone else also, not just cab drivers. I don't see why they should be singled out for relief. If we want to provide a safety net for people obviated by technology, that has nothing to do with Uber or Lyft.
One difference between taxis and "everyone else" is that with everyone else, the business that does in their business is usually legal.
Uber and Lyft were largely operating illegally when they started in most cities. They ignored expensive licensing requirements. They ignored safety regulations. They ignored insurance requirements. They ignored price controls on fares. They ignored requirements to accommodate disabled people.
Taxi companies who were obeying all these rules (which all imposed costs on the taxi companies that Uber and Lyft did not have) had a reasonable expectation, perhaps even a right, to expect the city would force Uber and Lyft to follow those rules too, or would shut them down. But the cities didn't, so I think a good case can be made that the cities owe the taxi drivers a bailout.
Uber and Lyft operated 100% legally in NYC from their inception. The NYC ride-sharing market is not like other US cities, which allow peer-to-peer ridesharing. All rideshare drivers in NYC are licensed by the TLC, and Uber and Lyft are licensed TLC operators.
Uber and Lyft beat NYC taxis fair and square - they used the existing TLC regulations (with the overhead required) and won out because of being a better product.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Why not help some people on the way to helping a wider group? I do agree that we need wider-ranging policies for people displaced by technological change. It would help people find work and society make use of their talents.
Immigrants from Romania, the couple had bought their New York City taxi medallion nearly three decades ago. Lately, it had been difficult to find fares. Her husband worked 12-hour shifts, but brought home less money. He was worried about the plunging value of their once-lucrative medallion and frustrated about Uber’s takeover of the industry.
On a cold day in March, Mr. Ochisor hanged himself in his garage in Queens. His family blames the growing hopelessness he felt over his fortunes as a taxi driver.
The problem is not ride sharing, its the fact that being a taxi driver in NYC is viewed as an investment rather than a job. That you have to purchase a medallion for insane sums of usually borrowed money.
It's a broken system. Could you imagine if you had to put up $1.3 million to be a factory worker? Money that you're still on the hook for if the factory ends up closing due to lack of demand? Charging people for the privilege of working, and somehow its Uber's fault for not protecting this corrupt and manipulative system.
If the medallion was bought 30 years ago as said, it was surely acquired for closer to $3 than to $1 million. He could sell it for a large profit, despite the downtrend in the recent years.
Yeah, a real tear-jerker. So, let's fix this. How do you propose to write a law that defines exactly when responsibility for suicide attaches?
In this case, Mr. Ochisor's customers were so desperate for an alternative to his three-decade-old business that they turned to a startup company that works by (literally) dodging taxi regulators. Is that really Uber's fault? The regulators'? The customers? Just how far do we want to take this whole idea of being reponsible for our competitors' mental health, or that of our vendors?
Immigrants have a hard enough time as it is getting access to this country. They can spend a decade or more going to the trouble of raising funds (not just burning free VC money), getting sponsorship/visas, emigrating, assimilating, and dropping serious capital to secure just an abstract right to operate a business, only to see their efforts trampled by a competitor that outscales and outperforms them by (your own admission!) cheating the same system.
What recourse did he have? To this day government response to Uber's incursions has been mostly toothless.
I'm no friend of the taxi lobby but the guy was just trying to do right by his family up until he killed himself. While I don't see how Uber could realistically be held responsible for this guy's suicide, their undercutting his business certainly contributed to it, and you're being needlessly callous.
It speaks more to your disposition than anything else that being troubled by other’s suicides is “emotional manipulation.”
And I don’t have “beefs” with fictional boogie man cooked up by Uber, however bought in you are to that narrative. I certainly don’t remember “taxi cartels” stealing and passing around the medical records of rape victims, but that was probably a conspiracy by their “click-hungry sympathizers in the media.”
And here come the whataboutisms. You'll notice that in the post above, I explicitly called out Uber for actively circumventing the local taxi laws. I'm not apologizing for Uber, believe me, just pointing out that I'm not the one pulling the emotional-manipulation strings. The journalists (and the HN posters) who are citing someone's suicide to back up their position favoring one debatably-ethical actor over another are the ones who are doing that.
Uber is not responsible for pushing people to suicide at the end of a 30-year taxi-driving career. If you disagree, I respectfully suggest there are other sites where such opinions are more in line with the underlying ethos.
Companies are huge economic actors. They can have very large effects on people's livelihoods. If people feel hopeless, they may commit suicide. Here, we have a very direct link between app-hailing and the reduction in taxi driver incomes. There's no denying that a major factor in these people's suicides were these apps.
Alternative title: "NYC Taxi mafia strikes back, gives Uber 12 months to come up with a large enough bribe".
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.
>Really, the life of nearly everyone improved a bit since Uber entered the city.
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.
>Except for bus riders [..] that deal with much more congestion.
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.
For starters, NYC cycling infrastructure (especially, say, in Brooklyn, which I'm more familiar with) is a joke to the extent where bike lanes hardly matter, and probably should be avoided altogether because of dooring.
Really, the advice to cyclists is to stay out of bike lanes[1].
Then, congestion and cars blocking the bike lanes are not directly correlated. It's not like drivers could take the bike lane to avoid traffic.
But anyway, I just don't see the situation for cyclists change in any way due to traffic in NYC. City politics regarding bike paths play a way larger role.
Cyclists? There are 450k daily bike trips/day vs. 170k in 2005 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/nyregion/new-yorkers-bike...). There are new Citi Bikes and new bike lanes. The cyclists seem to be least affected by the congestion, especially if you take into account how most of them ride.
i live in nyc and im glad this is happening. we have a traffic congestion problem here - i dont want more ubers, lyfts or yellow cabs on the street, i want less. i wish nyc would copy london and actually tax people for enter every bridge, tunnel etc in rush hours to stop it.
the law of diminishing returns is in full effect here, regardless of what the engineers and SC want to tell themselves.
I live in NYC too, and I want fewer vehicles on the street full stop. I don't particularly care what kind of vehicle they are though; if I'm not in it, a private vehicle is taking exactly the same space on the road as an Uber or a taxi is, and has exactly the same utility to me: none.
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.
> i wish nyc would copy london and actually tax people for enter every bridge, tunnel etc in rush hours to stop it.
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."
>>> The CCZ (congestion charging zone) covers less than 5% of the Greater London area.
The "Greater London" is an abusive name to designate the whole region around London, with little relation to the actual city. It should not be used for any comparison.
For comparison, London and Paris are about the same size. Paris is 105 km2 while (The Greater) London is 1500 km2.
I want to see a high congestion tax placed in Seattle as well. Delivery, buses, and city residents exempt...possibly vehicles with multi passengers. We're starting to get NYC traffic. I bus every morning and it takes longer to get off the exit and into the city than it does for the entire rest of the ride. I look at who's driving into the city every day, and it's 95%+ single occupant vehicles, which is unacceptable.
We have a mayor who's very anti-public transit so it will not happen anytime soon.
You want even congestion pricing, or at least congestion pricing on delivery and professional drivers too. This incentives efficient car services, because 1 car carrying 4 (or 20) people can split the cost amongst those 20 people without much of a sweat. A UPS car making 100 deliveries can split the cost for pennies per package.
At some point people might stop bothering with car ownership. That would open up a number of interesting possibilities. Imagine removing all parking on some (not all) streets during the day, thus doubling or tripling their bandwidth, and also increasing the number of cars that can be operated at the same time. I'm not saying that's the answer, but that there are lots of things that could be tried here.
I'm hoping that once self driving cars become common, we can remove parking spaces and replace them with protected bike lanes. A while back I bought an electric bike to ride around Boston, but I quickly returned it because I didn't want to end up as a splatter on the side of the road. Self-driving cars can't come soon enough.
>This post is full of schlock. I live in brooklyn and commute to manhattan via subway everyday. It's reliable and good.
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!).
The flipside is this may actually be good for NYC Uber drivers. Generally I feel like they have to sweat and toil to make a living, more so than Uber drivers in other cities. This may give them some relief as supply stays constant.
That's the argument for limiting the number of taxi medallions low. And what of the drivers who now don't have that job?? Sure, you might [artificially] increase the income of the drivers that remain, but by lowering the income of the drivers that are ejected from the system. Yes, they can find themselves other jobs, but presumably if there are other jobs they could do for more money, then they already would be taking those and leaving driving behind.
Your argument is a fallacy. You ignore the harm to those drivers who end up losing their jobs.
What I don't understand is why these kind of "ride sharing" services don't do more to protect their drivers (I almost said "employees"). Salesmen in the same company who work on commission generally parcel out different communities (or at least clients) they are responsible for so they don't compete with each other. Fast food franchises from the same chain don't set up next to each other.
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.
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. The legislation also allows the city to set a minimum pay rate for drivers.
The supply absolutely will go down because there will be some drivers over the next year who exit the system anyways, but no new drivers because the city says so.
Your comment did not say that that was what you were objecting to, nor did the text you quoted address how riders will or will not get frustrated et cetera.
Uber made NYC significantly worse. So, for anyone that drives they are a huge downgrade to life in the city.
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.
There is a lot of ridiculous hyperbole and disingenuousness in this post so it's a little hard to take seriously.
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.
> As someone who has lived in New York for the past ten years, the entrance of Uber hasn't changed my life at all
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 New York for the past ten years, the entrance of Uber hasn't changed my life at all
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.
>There is a lot of ridiculous hyperbole and disingenuousness in this post
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.
I understand and respect the fact that this may be your opinion colored by your own experiences, but as a long time New Yorker I have to admit I giggled a bit when I read your fairy tale statement re: yellow cabs.
> the standard, clean, regulated experience I have every time I jump into a yellow or green cab
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.
> Every single one of those things is illegal, and can be reported
Yet they're still common. I've reported them, and occasionally there's a fine, but at a certain point the cost of constantly reporting outweighs the benefit. It doesn't help that the TLC is a political position with the same financial conflicts of interests as the City Councilman who presented this bill [1].
NYC is closing down the L train next year for a year at the very least. So far, the city has proposed more water taxis as the primary solution to handle rerouting the 300k daily riders. Right now, the water taxi ridership is 1370 people per day. Secondarily, the city has indicated it might make some of the bridges carpool or ride-share only. Either way, all signs point to the shutdown heading towards a painful if not disastrous scenario. Hopefully, voters will point to this type of cronyism and corruption next mayoral election.
This is sad. NYC is one of the few (like 2, maybe 3) America cities with an actual usable rail system and it's rotted into disrepair.
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.
There is lots of corruption and bureaucracy and lawsuit-avoidance driven construction. Right now the cost of constructing subway stations in NYC is the highest in the world.
Did you know that the NYC subway system was originally built and operated by two private companies that competed with each other? Guess how that came to no longer be the case.
(The city froze their rates until they were no longer able to improve services, then the city took them over.)
And for comparison, in the greater Tokyo area there are like 10 different competing train companies (although of the largest 3, one was privatized out of the government, one is privatized but government-owned, and one is government-run) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Tokyo_transit
The second avenue line was a "major investment". It was also probably [many] decades after any private company might have done it.
When one have lived for decades with the same nationalized system, one can't imagine what the alternative might be like. But we know from other industries. E.g., telecoms. The UK nationalized its telephone industry in 1912(!). The rest of the world basically followed suit (the U.S. didn't, but we gave AT&T a monopoly that tended to limit innovation in the same sort of way), then in the 90s the whole world privatized and/or deregulated telecoms and... wow, what a boom resulted! And yet very few people who are aware of that case will even think of applying the same approach to other typically-nationalized industries.
It's always interesting to see what gets nationalized. It seems to be the biggest, most notable, locally culturally valued industry that the relevant politicians have the power to nationalize. National governments tend nationalize big things, like telecoms, utilities, steel manufacturing, etc.
In the U.S. the Federal government has not had the ability / constitutional power to do this (see the Steel Cases from 1947), the States have and have had the constitutional power, but by dint of having so many of them in competition with each other, they've mostly been unable to use it, which leaves: the cities. In the U.S. every city has a "nationalized" public transit system.
But in many parts of the world things like city buses are entirely private sector industries (e.g., in Buenos Aires, which has an incredibly vast private bus network). That might be surprising, since in Argentina just about everything of note has been nationalized at times. It makes sense though: Argentina has a strong central government, and weak local governments, so the central government nationalizes things of national importance, and the local governments not so much.
==And yet very few people who are aware of that case will even think of applying the same approach to other typically-nationalized industries.==
Airlines were also deregulated and it hasn't really led to a "boom". Lots of bankruptcies and massive consolidation has made for a pretty poor flying experience.
==That might be surprising, since in Argentina just about everything of note has been nationalized at times. It makes sense though: Argentina has a strong central government, and weak local governments, so the central government nationalizes things of national importance, and the local governments not so much.==
Is this true? According to Reuters, the government of Buenos Aires raised bus prices in January 2018 [1].
"Bus, train and subway fares in the Buenos Aires area will rise this year, the Argentine government said on Wednesday, despite fears that the increases will stoke already high inflation.
Fare increases on buses and trains will start in February, Transportation Minister Guillermo Dietrich told reporters, with an initial average rise of around 35 percent."
EDIT: It makes sense to have the same fare for all bus lines in the same city.
EDIT: There has most certainly been a boom in air travel[0]! In Europe air travel is incredibly cheap, and much cheaper than comparable itineraries in the U.S. Now, air travel is generally harder to consume than, say, mobile phone service -- one needs no excuse to use mobile data, but to travel requires planning, time, and more money (especially for lodging), so it's not surprising to me if air travel has grown more slowly than telecoms (though I've not checked, but it's a fair assumption).
I'm not saying one model (national companies) is always better than the other (private ventures). But I was trying to show that it's mostly a management issue, the MTA seems to be terribly mismanaged, while its French counterpart is not that bad. Even though it has its own challenges.
In the U.S. city public transit is always mismanaged then. Buses come on a schedule, yes, but way too infrequently. The subways run, yes, but improvements and innovation take decades longer than they used to under private management. I don't know if in Europe private ownership of these things would do better, but in the U.S. public ownership has been pretty bad, and private ownership used to be pretty good.
I don't disagree with you but the reason for this shutdown is a much-needed reconstruction of the tunnel under the East River (it was damaged during Hurricane Sandy) along with station upgrades at all the Manhattan stops. This is investment in the city's rail infrastructure. Sure, it will suck for 2019-2020 but come 2025 New Yorkers will be glad it happened.
That's what they said about the big dig. Now that it's all said and done it's still the go to example of a boondoggle public works project that turned into a money fountain for anyone who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in government. (In the project's defense, it did increase throughput and alleviate some traffic problems on surface streets which was the goal.) The north/south station rail connector that was supposed to be thrown in never even happened which the city has been kicking itself over for years.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Of course when they do hatch you'll wish you had twice as many eggs to start with. Boston sure wishes it has the inner belt along with all the various rail projects it's forgone over the years.
Born and raised in Manhattan back when normal people could actually live there. I don't see how the NYC subway system could be other than a complete wreck given their insistence on running a 24/7 service. Shut down the system from midnight to 5am with a corresponding increase in bus service during that time.
In Manhattan they're mostly running a 4-track system, so they can easily shut down half the tracks for maintenance while maintaining 24/7 service. I think they've got other problems.
For alternative examples: BART is not 24/7, and possibly sucks even more than MTA. CTA's 2 main lines are 24/7, but it's nearly 100% a 2-track system, and its biggest problem (IMO, anyway) is that the arrangement of seats inside the cars is so very desperately bonehaded.
It's cleaner than anything in Silicon Valley and less crowded than NYC. Timeliness and reliability are quite lacking though. It desperately needs rolling stock that wasn't due to be EoL'd a decade ago and it needs proper management which the thinly veiled jobs program known as the MBTA doesn't seem to be able to provide.
edit: apparently SF is not representative of public transit in other cities in California.
Assuming you mean California, LA's Metro rail is no dirtier than Boston's MBTA rail. Sometimes it smells a little funky, but so do the streets -- Boston doesn't have quite the homeless population of Los Angeles.
LA’s metro rail is definitely dirtier than the MBTA, and while you’re right that LA faces more challenges with homeless people, there is still a meaningful presence of homelessness on the MBTA, combined with the fact that it’s a much larger rail network in terms of track and ridership and that it has to operate even during horrible winter conditions, I’d say there is a marked step up from LA metro rail to the MBTA in overall quality.
I’ve lived in both downtown LA and Cambridge, and it’s really difficult to conduct life in LA relying primarily on local rail options. Whereas in metro Boston, it’s much easier to live car-free than to own a car. The subway and commuter rail are just a superior way to get around 99% of the time. I mean, it’s not the same degree of car-obsolescence as New York, but it’s much closer to New York in that regard than it is to the situation in LA.
But they are also heavily investing in expanding it (recently opened silver line) . Dc is banking heavily on the future of that rail where NYC seems to have quit caring entirely.
I'm referring to the taxi medallion owners are benefiting from passing legislation that limits rideshare licenses going forward at the potential expense of residences, particularly those affected by the shutdown.
> So far, the city has proposed more water taxis as the primary solution to handle rerouting the 300k daily riders.
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.
I wonder what percentage of cars on the streets of Manhattan are Uber/Lyft, vs. taxi cabs, vs. private vehicles vs. other commercial ones.
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.
"...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.
What's wrong with a vast majority of the vehicles on the road not being owned by the people who use them for transportation? It seems that a large amount of people don't want to purchase and maintain a vehicle they might not always be using and instead pay on-demand like they do for many other services where someone specializes to reduce the cost for others?
Driving a car from A to B is less miles driven than someone driving from X to A to pick you up before driving to B to drop you off them Y to wait for next ride. Thus Uber increases congestion.
Unless you only make 1-way trips, you still need to get from B back to A, so it's much more efficient to have a car that does these smaller individual legs of a trip for multiple people without needing parking space at every destination. Even better if that car can carry multiple people at the same time.
Parking spaces don’t get added at street level so they don’t make congestion worse. Really A to under ground parking at B back to underground parking at A is vastly better than Uber for the same trip.
Overall NYC has token street level parking because it’s such a bad use of limited land.
It's still traffic to get into and out of those spaces. It's more cars on the road, whether parked or not, which means delays given limited throughput.
Having a shared Uber pool encourages the actual namesake of "ride-sharing" and gets multiple people using the same cars, hopefully at the same time, or at least waiting on the street where they take up much less space than a car. Even a small amount of passenger pooling and avoiding the inefficient parking movement can make a massive difference in road throughput
You can’t defend Uber by reference to Uber pool when most Uber rides are not shared. If you want more busses that’s cool, they really help but having a few cars with a couple extra passengers occasionally does little.
That said if you want to limit Uber to always using Uber pool you are going to get strong objections.
It was referring to a "pool" of cars. And yes I can defend it because the official Uber Pool is still a non-zero amount compared to individuals using their own cars. Remember your first post claimed that parking spaces are not at street level even though that's not true, and entrances do have to be at street level, creating bottlenecks. Reduction in total extra cars on the road and reduced traffic to get to parking can lead to significant changes.
An irrelevant non-zero. Over the last 5 years Uber added vastly more miles driven in congested areas which is the only important measurement in terms of increasing congestion. NYC traffic's average MPH is down and it's ride sharing's fault.
Lack of new Taxi medallions means it's not Taxi's fault. Their has been no increase in street level parking it can't make things worse. Uber on the other hand adds cars to the road above and beyond the limits of street level parking or even any parking which limits normal drivers.
PS: As you have not countered my argument I can only assume you countered the point that Uber is making congestion worse.
You're underestimating how severely restricted the parking supply here is via simple physics. It's not just driving from A to B, it's driving from A to B and then circling around for 15 or more minutes trying to find a parking spot.
In many places, parking at your destination is more restricted than road space along the way to your destination.
You'd need to allocate more parking spaces then. You can have more roads if you have less parking.
Also, having a car sit idle 95% of the time is not an efficient use of money. It's the same model as virtualization with servers (sharing unused capacity brings down the costs for everyone).
Also, there's the tremendous amount of time wasted and hassle to park, especially in big cities that have multi-story parking garages. Especially with their "compact" parking spots that even compact cars have trouble fitting into.
Parking spaces can go 3D via underground parking a lot more easily than roads can go 3D. Street level parking is a fraction of total parking in the hart of NYC where congestion is a huge issue.
On the other hand utilization in the ownership case is very low, which therefore consumes lots of parking space which... consumes lots of street space which... reduces total bandwidth.
Another factor is that the mere existence of options like Uber and Lyft likely means people take trips they otherwise would not.
The thing Uber/Lyft do remove is the need for so much parking. On the flip side, do they need more places to idle and await new rides, if we don't want them to congest roadways while doing that.
Nothing's wrong with that; in fact, that seems like the ideal scenario. I think there should be a financial disincentive to owning a car in the city, especially if most of the congestion is due to private car ownership.
If Uber+Taxi make up a small percentage of traffic, then limiting them to fix congestion seems like a stupid idea.
Given the fact that congestion is an admitted issue, it's possible that it's not enough; plus, many people use street parking, which costs time instead of money.
> 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.
As someone who lives in Eastern Queens, Uber has changed my life. There is no other kind of reliable taxi out here, and uber lets me live without a car.
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.
When going from JFK to somewhere else in queens, yellow cabs are supposed to get a voucher from the dispatcher that allows them to skip to the front of the line when they get back to the airport. The fact that he was surprised when you said Queens implies that the dispatcher failed to do this, which explains both his going back to the dispatcher and his annoyance.
And maybe this is the reason. Not that it should matter... But why then should I care? Why should I have to deal with the problem? I tell you what, I've never had this happen in the hundreds of Uber and Lyft rides I've taken this year or the thousands in the years before.
So... Okay there's a reason. But that reason still demonstrates why one would prefer rideshare over taxi.
If the symptom is "I don't want task X, I'd rather sit here earning nothing waiting for task Y", the root cause is compensation being too low for X and too high for Y.
The best note on this was from the Republican running for attorney general in the state in that he could not believe that the city was returning to the racist system whereby blacks would be having a reduced mobility option because of the known, yet not handled, yellow cabs not picking up blacks. A better system was identified that helped fix an issue and we have a city council so beholden to the taxi network that they are willing to screw over the populous.
Not sure, but green cabs do address the bias against the non-Manhattan crowd. It is very common for yellow cabs in NYC to refuse rides to Brooklyn/etc. Destination discrimination "isnt allowed" but there isn't really a way to enforce the rule.
Could you lie when hailing the cab and once inside say they misheard you and say the genuine destination? Not allowed I imagine but pretty hard to enforce that rule? (Genuine question, as a UK reaident I’ve little experience of the US taxi system and have always had excellent service from taxi firms in the UK - as a result I’ve never really understood the problem Uber is solving in the UK)
Yes, I did that a couple of times. Then once I got in, i changed the destination. It made for a tense ride because you're already in an adverserial transaction for something that should be a default right of rider.
Oh, and my mom has bigger problems. Cabs pass her by at Manhattan hospitals. Of course no one knows drivers' intents for sure, but there is some quick eyeballing, i'm sure, of whether the potential passenger is B&T (Bridge and Tunnel -- NYC Yellow cabs hate B&T passengers because they often have to deadhead back to Manhattan on the return trip -- so they take pains to avoid B&T passengers, which favors wealthier Manhattan residents and harms residents of other boroughs.) Uber/Lyft has been a lifesaver for her.
There is also a larger problem Uber solves (one of many) -- once you lose density (i.e., outside airport/centercity) it is hard to hail a cab, so you have to dial a cab. You dail, they invariably say "wait outside be there in 5 min" -- sometimes they show up in 5min, sometimes 10min, sometimes 30min, sometimes never. Variable pricing and GPS tracking solves this.
A lot of these problems were traditionally not problems at all, but the NYC transit system has ground to a halt on evenings/nights/weekends in the past 3-5yrs, so people are relying increasingly on Uber/Lyft and pooled rides for things traditionally accomplished via mass transit.
> There is also a larger problem Uber solves (one of many) -- once you lose density (i.e., outside airport/centercity) it is hard to hail a cab, so you have to dial a cab. You dail, they invariably say "wait outside be there in 5 min" -- sometimes they show up in 5min, sometimes 10min, sometimes 30min, sometimes never. Variable pricing and GPS tracking solves this.
Variable pricing solves this for people with the ability to pay. Rationing scarce goods by wealth is not necessarily a better overall outcome then distributing scarce goods by lottery.
Also, if full-time night-shift cabbies are driven out of business by part-time rideshares, you may end up in a situation where the only night-time service available - ever - is at surge pricing. This is less of an issue in NYC, then it is in smaller towns.
I agree with almost everything you say. However, I do want to note that you can pay with dollars or pay with time. The old way was that you paid with time/uncertainty. You'd wait, and wait, and wait. Now you can get what you want right away, you just need to auction/bid on it to get it immediately. Totally agreed this solves the problem for those who can bear higher prices, so it disfavors the poor.
That said, people have voted quite a bit with their wallets and accepted surge pricing to solve the old problem of uncertainty. When I used to be a consultant and go to the airport every Monday morning, i'd have to leave 40+minutes earlier just in case the dial-a-cab randomly decided not to show up for 30min. That problem has mostly gone away.
Same thing for rainy weather -- cabs would disappear. That was legitimate because the cost of driving is indeed higher in rain (fewer rides per hour) and thus deserves more compensation. Instead...the old way was...dial-a-cabs would just stop answering their phone during storms, etc.
Sometimes people did nasty things like call 2 separate cab companies, go with the first arrival, and leave the other one hanging (another problem solved by ride-hailing services, who have the concept of identity and reputation scores.)
Same thing for rainy weather -- cabs would disappear. That was legitimate because the cost of driving is indeed higher in rain (fewer rides per hour) and thus deserves more compensation.
I think you have this backwards. The traditional explanation is that it's harder to get a cab when it rains because demand goes up, not down, because no one wants to walk in the rain. The more complex modern explanation[1] is that the higher demand but slower traffic offset, so cab drivers make the same amount in the rain as at other times. In either case, I don't think the cabs actually "disappear", rather they are all occupied. Or maybe this is what you meant?
>I do want to note that you can pay with dollars or pay with time.
And it's generally far better overall to pay with money. If you pay with money, then someone gets that money - Uber drivers earn more through surge pricing, in this instance.
If you pay with time, then that time is simply gone forever.
It's not raining. There's one cab. The fare costs 5 dollars. There's one rider. Everything works great.
It's raining. There's one cab. The fare costs 5 dollars. There's two riders. The driver flips a coin. One rider pays $5, and gets a ride. The other has to wait, and then gets a ride.
It's raining. There's one cab. There's surge pricing, so the fare costs $15. There's two riders. One rider can afford to pay $15, and gets a ride. The other has to wait, until the surge dies down, and then pays $5 for a ride.
When there's a shortage of cabs, someone will have to pay with money. Under the lottery system, it's a random rider. Under the price surge system, it's the poorest rider. You haven't actually produced any more value in the third case. The same amount of time is wasted.
It's not the "poorest" rider though who pays with time. It's the person who values the ride the least relative to time. That isn't totally uncorrelated, but it's significantly not the same, which is what produces more value.
By law, they have to take you to where you want to go in the five boroughs, plus... Westchester and somewhere else. So the trick is to get into the cab before they figure out that they can speed off before you can grab their number and file a 311 complaint.
This all makes sense. But i cant get my meek and honest mother to start acting like this. It requires a certain level of street smarts. It is almost a weekly issue for my mom, going into Manhattan for doctors' visits and the like.
Uber solved many of these types of issues democratized access to taxi rides.
I’ve never really understood the
problem Uber is solving in the UK
I've had excellent service from taxi firms in my hometown in the UK, and I always try to use a local service before I resort to Uber.
Times I've resorted to Uber include when I visited Bournemouth and got scammed by a driver who "didn't have change" for £20 on a £16 fare, when I visited Coventry where taxis don't accept credit cards, and when I visited Montreal where their homegrown uber-equivalent doesn't support foreign phone numbers.
In other words, fairly basic service delivery issues that local taxis could easily solve, but that for some reason they haven't solved.
It's pretty easy. Undecover bylaw enforcement can hail a cab, ask to be driven to Brooklyn, when the driver refuses, cite them, and pull their medallion for a month.
I guarantee you, after a few medallions get pulled, this problem will evaporate.
You present a perfectly valid approach...but one that isnt used. POC not being able to get yellow cabs is a problem since I was a child of 1980s NYC...and probably much before.
So once cant support the Uber crackdown and say: oh, and we can [theoretically] "just" crack down on discrimination using this method. It hasnt been enforced for 30+yrs, no need to assume laws will be enforced suddenly starting today.
That doesn't work when the people with medallions are buddies with the people who determine the budget for enforcement.
When the medallion owners all tell their politicans that $agency is terrible and bad for business then $agency gets told to knock it off and/or de-prioritized in next years budget.
Green cabs have definitely helped with added supply though I can't speak to how they have addressed marginalized groups.
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.
It’s ironic that this was passed this morning, because this morning a power issue at Canal managed to knock out all service on the A/C/E line for hours... leaving me to have to get a Lyft to work. For the second time in a week. I’m all for greater regulation for ridesharing companies, but making it even harder to get around at a time the subway is in full crisis is a terrible idea.
I don't think these issues are actually that separate; both of them seek to limit Uber trips; one does it on the demand side by increasing the price, the other does it on the supply side, by directly constraining supply.
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.
This benefits the drivers at the expense of consumers. Maybe that's worth doing, maybe not. I don't think there is a right answer to that since it depends on your perspective. In either case, it seems like the problem they're trying to address is congestion, which could be better addressed by taxing drivers more highly. Then only the more productive rideshare and taxi drivers would be on the streets, plus you'd get rid of a lot of the other drivers who don't value their ability to drive that highly. I used to drive into NYC fairly regularly, since I liked being able to park near where I was going, but if it cost more I would have just taken the train and the subway.
The number of drivers finds equilibrium on its own. Too many drivers = too low wages, so people stop driving. Too few drivers = high wages/wait times, so more people become drivers.
I'd expected better from NYC. They are again trying to put back "Medallion" culture back in so that only powerful few can operate taxi business and essentially are licenced to exploit drivers from 3rd world. The city should have seen its taxi system as shameful arrangement where rich people created laws to get license for what was a slave market for all purpose and intent. People like Michael Cohen had exploited this system to make 10s of millions of dollars from the sweat of taxi drivers for practically zero effort. There are no reason to artificially limit the number of taxis. The demand and supply are far more efficient and desirable than politicians.
Given the problem, this seems like a reasonable action on the part of the NYC City Council. But I'm confused by section on congestion pricing:
> 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.
Because it's regressive. It takes money away from people who drive, who are often people who are blue collar, spread out in the outer boroughs, or who need to bring tools to do their jobs, those who are forced to cross the city to get anywhere west of town, etc.
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".
[citation needed] that congestion-pricing is regressive. I'd expect the exact opposite: those in NYC who take private cars, rather than public transit, are higher-income.
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.
It's regressive amongst those who drive, that's the point. By definition, that category is more oriented towards middle class, upper middle class; the poor don't pay the tax because they can't afford city driving in general.
That's not quite evidence, and my intuition would still be: the more one drives inside NYC city limits, the richer one is. And the more one uses car services that would also pay the tax, the wealthier one is.
So: it's highly progressive when you consider all NYC residents, including those who don't drive. And it's maybe a little regressive between the wealthy and the very-wealthy, just on the general pattern that the very-wealthy spend less of their income. So, boo-hoo for the merely wealthy.
Congestion pricing doesn't seem nearly as regressive as gas taxes or sales taxes, narrowly focused as it is on just those driving in an especially wealthy and especially congested area.
And the parent post's idea that it'd hit the "blue collar" especially hard is, without evidence, just hand-waving. Their time is valuable too, and commute/on-the-job-travel time saved, from pushing lower-value travelers to non-road (or on-road-but-shared-vehicle) paths, could be worth more than the congestion fees.
> the more one drives inside NYC city limits, the richer one is.
Why would you say that? A rich person would not spend hours every day commuting though rush hour traffic, or spend most of their day inside their work vehicle. They would buy or rent a central home, possibly near the central office building where they work. City driving in itself makes for a very low quality of life and most rational people would minimize it, given the option.
So I would expect there's either no driving-income correlation, or it's inverse. So reducing congestion would make life easier for rich people, who don't care about the money and only care about the time - by pricing out people who are, by definition, poorer and can't afford to buy that convenience. You could say that the resulting post-tax distribution is progressive, the rich paying and driving more; but that's just a way of distorting the initial argument, that introducing a flat congestion tax is strongly recessive - to the point of completely pricing out poorer people.
I would say that because I'm familiar with the NYC area!
There's expensive tolls, and limited & expensive parking, but excellent public transportation – the USA's most extensive and most-used subway system. NY state has the nation's highest (regressive!) gas taxes.
New York is far-and-away the US city with the lowest rate of car ownership:
Manhattan is the most likely place for congestion pricing. But, though rare in the USA, many Manhattanites never learn to drive! And only 8% of Manhattanite workers commute by car to work:
So, people who elect to drive in NYC (outside of driving-on-the-job) are richer than the New Yorkers who don't drive. Further, New Yorkers are richer than other Americans. Ergo, a fee that falls on people who choose to drive in NYC is unlikely to be "regressive", barring any actual evidence to the contrary.
> Car-owning households in NYC are significantly richer than zero-car households.
I have no doubt that's true, as in most other places on the planet.
The thing is, you are making an absolute argument: those who drive in NY are richer than those who don't. I don't deny that. I'm making a relative argument: within the driving group, the poorer ones will be priced out. You say those are not poor, but "merely wealthy". Our grand-father said they are blue collar workers. You both lack data, and I suspect that we will see a wide, gentle slope, with most rich people driving, but also an important minority of the lower classes, depending on personal circumstances.
The thing is, does the exact composition of the driving public mater for the regressivity to be a political problem? Some will be priced out and they will scream bloody murder, because from their perspective they were sacrificed in favor of the rich. You could go out and say "boo hoo, you are merely rich", but that's a politically imprudent move - a thousand personal stories will pop up about those marginal blue collar workers no longer able to feed their families.
So you could be right that it is not regressive in a broad, social justice sense, but that's not the sense in which the problem will be sliced. Rather, the vast majority of the affected merely rich will invoke the principle of the matter, and in principle it's designed to price out the poorer drivers, there's no doubt about that.
An idea I'm toying with is to distribute "tradable driving coupons" to all people holding a drivers license. A flat tax would develop on the market, so the net effect is similar to congestion charging. But now the tax does not go to the city, but to the poorer residents who opt not to drive. Ideally, fiscal credits should be earned, so as to not reward those who don't pay any tax and thus have no contribution to the infrastructure. This beautifully solves the political problem and makes driving a matter of personal choice: you are now rewarded for preserving the public good.
OK, we agree that I'm likely correct, barring any other evidence that remains unpresented, that road congestion pricing in NYC wouldn't be "regressive" over all New Yorkers/visitors.
If the congestion fees go to expenditures that broadly benefit all New Yorkers, it's far a simpler system than "tradable driving coupons" and could wind up highly progressive. (At one extreme, this "broad benefit" could be just a per-capita rebate of fees collected, in cash, to all residents.)
A "coupons" system would trend towards being just like fees: at the margin, every coupon-holder has to decide whether they prefer cash (from selling their coupons) or driving, exactly like someone facing a congestion fee. Roughly the same set of people "priced out" by fees would be eager to sell rather than drive.
A coupon-system might be nastier to the non-conscientious, because there's likely extra budgeting/deadlines/resale-effort involved. And the lost revenues for broad public projects would have to made up through other NY taxes – some regressive, some progressive – so the net effect on household budgets of a big "coupon giveaway" would be unclear.
On the regresivity issue, the original discussion in this thread was why the tax is politically unpopular. And the answer is: because it's perceived as regressive by the voting public, and acts regressive within the driving segment. You point out to a widescale redistribution effect to the non-driving public that counteracts this, but I disagree that it makes a significant difference outside a very narrow intellectual public like this forum. Congestion charging will always be an uphill political struggle.
Thank you for the perspective on the voucher idea. Yeah, in a perfect world, it's equivalent with a congestion tax coupled with a tax deduction of equal amount, I've hinted to that. But you would need to dynamically change the amount of the tax to keep up with road supply and demand, and that will clearly be be an explosive political decision. Also, for cash in hand to be psychologically equivalent to public services, the voters have to have full trust in the public spending process, which seems unlikely. So in practice revenue generating vouchers could be much more palatable. The additional transaction costs and friction could be negligible compared to a traditional congestion tax: to drive more than your allotment, you load your driving wallet with cash that is deducted at prevailing market voucher prices; at the end of the year, if you generally drove less than the allotment, you will find a nice tax credit waiting for you inside the public tax internet gateway.
By the way, I'm a city councilor in my European town and that's why I might show a strong slant towards practical ways to achieve political consensus, as opposed to just going for the superior theoretical solution. Cities rarely move on theoretical optimum paths and recently, of all idiotic policies, I had to struggle for ending the public subsidy of free parking. No-brainer, but wait until a significant part of the public received if for decades and strongly believe it's some sort of natural right.
This is the most common objection, but it's not a very strong one, for at least two reasons:
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.
Of course we ration scarce resources. But the nature of government services generally is, and should be, that we don’t just ration them by ability to pay. If that led by definition to optimal outcomes then the private sector could handle it. Government is for all the other stuff.
Should we charge $500 to get into national parks? Why not? Should we just charge people for the health care they consume a la carte or should we have a national system for that? Why?
As you can see you’re hitting on a general philosophy question here. My argument would be that trying to set shared government services at market rates tends to lead to deeply regressive outcomes.
There certainly are smart arguments on both sides with congestion pricing. Externalities matter. Are cars inefficient? And so on. But my intention is to illuminate the other side of the coin, which seems perpetually unrepresented.
I'd argue it's still a strong objection, your solutions require a lot more bureaucracy and would still be filled with loopholes.
A couple quick ones:
1. Registering the car in your grandparents name, who have no income, to avoid tolls. Or perhaps your stay at home spouse (assuming you file separately).
2. Make your next vehicle a light truck or van to avoid potentially hundreds in monthly congestion tolls. Luxury trucks are very much a thing.
I agree your plan would technically work, but it would be filled with exceptions, loopholes, and political handouts. That is rather fitting for NYC though.
> I agree your plan would technically work, but it would be filled with exceptions, loopholes, and political handouts. That is rather fitting for NYC though.
The end result of which would be a whole bunch of people paying a congestion tax who aren't paying one today.
If we start to allow those who can't afford the congestion pricing to get a discount on congestion pricing, do we really have congestion pricing? Or just a new proportional-to-income "driving tax" in addition to state, county, and city taxes?
A "driving tax" is just another way to say "congestion pricing." Driving introduces massive negative externalities and should cost a lot more than it does today.
Automobiles are one of the absolute worst quality-of-life-impacting things about living in Manhattan. They're loud, dangerous, and smelly.
I'm not trying to hide my cards; if it were up to me, I'd ban private cars (at the very least) entirely in Midtown (at the very least).
The current proposal is just as regressive, albeit in a way that introduces more inefficiency.
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.
Congestion pricing is generally politically unpopular in that it trades clear price increases and the attendant hassle around charging for hazy-sounding benefits.
> 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.
The notion that "the time of rich people is more valuable" seems obviously wrong to me. In some cases the time of rich people has a higher price. E.g. a famous surgeon is rich and also charges a lot by the hour. But there are plenty of rich people that couldn't get minimum wage based on their skills and work ethic.
I think value is an individual metric. E.g., I value good chocolate highly, but chocolate gives my girlfriend migraines, so for her it has negative value. So I think the time of rich people is exactly as valuable to them as it is to poor people. Or maybe less so, in that the rich people I know are on average much more willing to waste time than the poor ones.
Given that, your other schemes are more plausible, but I don't know that they'd be better in practice; the nth-order effects are hard to calculate, but could easily be pathological. Given that the real problem in doing this is the way some people have orders of magnitude more money than people, the cleanest solution is just to tax heavily enough that the wealth difference isn't nearly as large. Which, given the sensitivity of US politicians to the desires of the wealthy, is entirely unlikely to happen.
Well, since we are talking about a common resource and public law that applies to everybody, the subjectivity of value is not really much help. A flat congestion tax is proposed, so I was clearly referring to the monetary value one places on his own time, the amount of money they are willing to give up to reclaim that time.
Cost vs. speed is a fundamental trade-off in transportation, nothing groundbreaking here. It allows an economic discussion and market allocation of various individual preferences. Otherwise we are stuck into positions like "my time with my family has infinite subjective value, so I should clearly be allowed to race my Formula 1 car down 5th avenue back from work" - and there is really no way for me to prove that you don't really love your family to that degree.
What we can all agree is that time wasted in traffic is net social cost that affects everybody, and that it takes very little extra vehicles on the road to go from peak road efficiency to gridlock. The public resource of road infrastructure is badly mismanaged by leaving it in a a congested, unproductive state.
If that's what you were trying to refer to, it might be better said as "rich people can pay more for their time", or "rich people can override the preferences of the poor in a market-based allocation".
The charitable explanation is that "rich people take Ubers, poor people in the outer borroughs drive their own cars." The cynic would point out that "Mayor Minivan" is notorious for driving an SUV from Manhattan to his favorite gym in deep Brooklyn every morning, making him precisely the kind of person who would take a hit from congestion pricing.
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.
It seems that he believes that it would put an undue burden on poorer people commuting into Manhattan:
> 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.
I think it's pretty clear why de Blasio doesn't like congestion pricing: people who are used to driving would feel acute pain, he's quite cozy with the Taxi lobby and raising prices/wages on Uber/etc is politically popular on the left.
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?
> The price of a taxi medallion, which is required to operate a taxi in New York, has plunged from more than $1 million to less than $200,000.
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.
My suspicion is that Uber could out-bribe the taxi lobby by 10x, without moving the needle on profitability. This cap signifies that Uber either a) doesn't bribe politicians, or b) bribed the wrong politicians.
This is plain bribery. I live in Brooklyn. Now I'm less late because of Uber. Before I've gotten fired because of situations where I can do nothing but just let fate run it course as I'm stuck in B train. Or wait for a bus that hasn't even left the station.
Uber and Lyft actually offered to support a $100M bribe-er, I mean, "hardship" fund to support underwater individual (i.e., not those taxi business that own multiple medallions) medallion owners, but the city refused. Which makes sense since how are the politicians suppose to get money from that?
"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.
You know, it would be one thing if this ruling was motivated by serious labor concerns but it really has to do with a bunch of crybabies that bought medallions as financial instrument and are upset that customers are choosing a service that's cheaper, better, and more hip.
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.