Don’t bail out taxi medallion owners

Lately, advocates, claiming to care about yellow cab drivers under financial assault, have urged the city to create a bailout fund to help struggling medallion owners.

And where should this bailout money come from? Why, right from the governor’s $2.50 a ride congestion fee that will likely make yellow taxis even more at risk for continued decimation in what can only be considered an extremely unfair and underregulated market that has allowed Uber and its imitators to proliferate with few checks on its growth.

Adding insult to injury is that Uber, the main cause of the decline in medallion values, believes that a bailout fund is a great idea, “In circumstances where medallion owner-operators are having a hard time, where technology has changed and demand patterns has changed their environment . ... ”

So, the firm responsible for all of the taxi misery and all of the environmentally threatening congestion, is now going to become some kind of a White Knight for ailing medallion owners?

Not so fast, since the hardship fees for the fund — as Uber’s CEO later clarified — would also come from fees on the taxis themselves!

As a story on Bloomberg News put it: “This story has been corrected to show that Khosrowshahi believes the fee should apply to taxi rides and app-hailed rides, not just to app-hailed rides, according to a spokeswoman.”

It is pretty clear that Uber may have a self-interested, ulterior motive here.

The company, facing strong legislative reaction to the chaos it has sowed, is trying to avoid political accountability. Uber wants to create an “indulgences” fund reminiscent of the practice in the Medieval Church that allowed sinners to buy their way into heaven.

But at least sinners in those times weren’t asking their victims to help pay their passage to the Pearly Gates.

All the talk of a bailout fund, then, is smoke and mirrors to cloak political misdirection.

The reason all of this makes no sense is because a fund for struggling medallion owners and taxi drivers ignores the underlying issues that are causing all of the hardships — on citizens and taxi owners as well.

And it elides the fact that there are just too many cars on New York City streets; the shocking failure of city regulators to create a level regulatory playing field in the first place is what produced record congestion. That’s how Uber came in and proliferated without any control on their numbers.

Now there are too many cars and not enough passengers — a recipe for disaster. The City Council realizes that radical reforms are needed so that no more owners and drivers are driven to the ultimate form of despair. The Council, led by Speaker Corey Johnson and Council Member Ruben Diaz, is working on an omnibus bill to rectify past failures.

In the past, the city accommodated its rules to the Uber business model. Under the proposed changes, it will be Uber, Lyft, Via and other companies that will have to adapt their profit-centric methods to the city’s rules — a long overdue re-arrangement that creates a proper public policy balance of power.

The suicide of a sixth taxi driver last week will not be addressed by a fund from the very malefactors that helped to drive 59-year-old Abdul Saleh to take his own life. Immediate legislative action must take place before tragedy strikes yet again.

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