A lifeline for the yellows

Another suicide of a man driven over the edge by the collapsed economics of being a professional driver in New York City. The name of the latest deceased is Kenny Chow. Age: 56. Medallion 6F53. Means of death: a plunge into the East River, after parking his yellow taxi nearby.

Again come the calls to cram the app-hail disruption genie back into the bottle — to dampen the income-killing impact of a flood of Uber, Lyft and other such cars and a doubling in the number of drivers, to 180,000. Once the TLC produces numbers showing drivers’ earnings and the reliability of service, an informed City Council can consider such plans.

Meantime, more than enough is known about the weight of the financial burden that falls on the most beleaguered class of drivers, nearly all of them immigrants, who paid small fortunes to purchase their very own TLC-issued taxi medallions as an investment in their future before the bottom fell out.

The value of the city’s 13,000-plus yellow cab medallions has plummeted along with taxis’ plunging earning power — but the loans that hundreds of drivers took out to buy medallions for themselves rather than renting shifts from taxi fleets, or to subsequently borrow cash against their once-soaring value as high as $1.3 million, loom crushingly large. Keeping pace with monthly payments increasingly infeasible, even after 14-hour shifts. And when loans’ terms end after three years, the entire remaining debt comes due.

With medallion values now as low as $170,000, once routine refinancings are now often impossible, not least because a giant of the industry, Melrose Credit Union, is insolvent and in the custody of regulators.

Chow was a Melrose borrower, as was medallion-owning cab driver Nicanor Ochisor, who hanged himself in March as his loan mega-payment came due. Many more drivers have declared bankruptcy and thus relinquished their livelihoods.

There’s no shifting into reverse on a for-hire vehicle industry radically changed, and mostly for the better, by apps that serve the city more efficiently. And there never was a guarantee that medallions, which once rivaled gold as an investment, were going to keep rising. We don’t weep for the big-money speculators who thought they could cash in and then learned otherwise.

But like underwater homeowners in that decade-old crisis, the driver-owners who are trapped in an economic vise deserve better than this. As it happens, taxi rides are also about to get hit with a $2.50-per-ride fee, the pale shadow of congestion pricing approved by the state Legislature to help fund the subways’ rescue. It’s only right that a portion of the proceeds be set aside first to help lenders rightsize drivers’ taxi loans without going broke themselves.