What the city’s for-hire vehicle drivers, and the rest of us, deserve
New York is the only city in America where most people don’t have their own cars. We rely instead on the wobbly three-legged stool of subways, buses and for-hire vehicles (taxis, Ubers, liveries and the like) to get around when we’re not walking or biking with our own two feet.
The struggling subways and buses have finally gotten a financial boost, with an actual management turnaround yet to be implemented.
The third leg of this stool must now be stabilized, because the 180,000 drivers who sit behind the wheel for long hours to keep us moving seem to be in real trouble. And without the drivers of yellow taxis and green cabs and black cars and liveries and app services, 850,000 daily rides won’t happen.
There’s no doubt why. The once static industry — and reasonably steady incomes — of 13,587 yellow taxis mostly cruising the southern half of Manhattan has been shattered, over the past eight years, by the arrival of app service Uber and its smaller competitors Lyft, Juno and Via.
Yellows had exclusive street-hail rights in Manhattan. App-based services legally found a clever, way to challenge the monopoly. Offering competitive prices and cars absolutely everywhere, they poached customers.
The value of cab medallions, once an investment better than gold, went through the floor. And traffic congestion gets ever worse.
In pre-app 2011, there were 90,000 drivers deployed in 50,000 vehicles across all sectors. Yellow fares that year: a half million a day. Since then, the number of drivers has doubled and the number of cars has climbed 160% to 130,000 with the addition of 70,000 app cars.
While the app revolution has been a boon to passengers, especially uptown and in the boroughs where taxis rarely ventured, the flood of new cars and drivers has made the economics of the business increasingly unsustainable.
More and more drivers work more and more hours and make less. At least so say surveys and oft-repeated anecdotes. Several drivers have committed suicide in the last six months.
A raft of bills are floating in the City Council. Some, like limiting drivers to only take fares from a single app while imposing a punishing $2,000 annual fee on those who drive Ubers and Lyfts, would hurt thousands of hardscrabble immigrant workers in the name of helping others. Others, like a minimum wage for drivers, are impractical.
Check your mirrors before changing lanes, New York. The first step is to definitively understand what has happened to driver income in this utterly upended sector of the economy by doing a deep dive into earnings data. That’s the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s job. They’ve got the facts.
The TLC must quickly produce an analysis of how much drivers are making, and whether there’s a substantial number of underutilized vehicles clogging the roads.
If in fact drivers are drowning, the agency must offer reforms — rooted in the facts on the ground. Those could include higher fares or minimum fares. Or lower the slice of the fare that the app takes.
Or tap the brakes to slow the growth of an Uber-and-Co. fleet that keeps rising by a likely unsustainable 2,000 drivers a month.
Drivers have to be able to make a living. Passengers have to be able to get a ride without waiting forever for pickup, or in traffic. Everything else is politics.