Drowning in yellow sea

Surge of new cabs struggle as post-pandemic demand lags

The number of yellow taxis on New York City streets is growing post-pandemic — but passenger demand has not kept pace, and a third of taxi medallions remain dormant, the Taxi and Limousine Commission says.

“We had over 9,000 taxis in service in January, 1,000 more than the same time last year,” Taxi and Limousine Commission head David Do told the City Council this week. That amounts to about a 12% increase in the yellow taxi fleet, and is the largest number of working taxis since the COVID pandemic hit in 2020.

The inexact January figure — exact data for the month isn’t available yet — exceeds the 8,841 cabs the TLC reported were on the street in December.

But yellow cabs made only half as many trips in January 2024 as they did in January 2020, TLC data shows.

While the number of available yellow taxis is up by around 12% over the last year, taxi trips citywide have only increased by 4%.

“The post-COVID bounce-back has been slow,” said B’hairavi Desai, head of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

“The return of the taxis has been slow,” she said. “The return of the riders has been even slower.”

By law, the city limits the yellow fleet to 13,587 cars allowed to make street hails and marked with a TLC medallion.

With roughly 9,000 medallions currently paired with cars — or “hacked up,” in taxi-speak — a third of medallions are currently “in storage,” meaning their owners have not associated them with a car.

Decades ago, it would have been unusual for any medallion owner to leave their medallions idle.

From the late 1930s — when Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor — to the late 1990s, during the Rudolph Giuliani era, the number of medallions was frozen at 11,787. For much of that time, the taxi business was so lucrative medallion owners wanted their cars on the streets as many hours a day as possible.

By 2019 — as rideshare giants like Uber and Lyft had undermined the ubiquity of the yellow cab — there were over 11,400 medallions affixed to taxi hoods, about 2,400 more than today.

Desai, whose organization also represents drivers in the app-based rideshare side of the industry, said the similar dynamic was affecting Uber and Lyft drivers.

The number of TLC approved Uber and Lyft vehicles has increased since the pandemic, with 82,374 cars as of December 2023, the most recently available TLC data shows. That’s up from 80,925 in December 2019.

But despite the increase, those cars now make just 92% of the daily trips the Uber, Lyft and “for hire vehicle” fleet made in 2019, Do, the TLC commissioner, said.