Uber suing city, fights car quota

Uber has thrown a wrench in New York’s plan to cap the number of app-based forhire cars seeking business on city streets.

Uber sued the city in Manhattan Supreme Court on Friday, saying the one-year cap would hurt people in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, where it is tough to hail a taxi.

The suit also accuses the city of overstepping its authority in passing the cap and giving too much power to the Taxi & Limousine Commission to permanently limit Uber, Lyft and other app-hailed cars after the one-year cap expires.

Additionally, the suit argues that Uber and other app companies were hit with the cap despite the fact that the only official city study on the industry absolved their cars from causing congestion.

The city’s decision to impose the cap was unfair, Uber says.

“The city made this choice in the absence of any evidence that doing so would meaningfully impact congestion, the problem the city was ostensibly acting to solve,” its suit says.

But the city says that the cap is a legitimate response to the problem of carcrowded city streets and of declining pay for taxi and app-hailed car drivers.

“No legal challenge changes the fact that Uber made congestion on our roads worse and paid their drivers less than a living wage,” Mayor de Blasio spokesman Seth Stein said in a statement. “The city’s new laws aim to change that.”

The one-year cap — the first effort by any city to limit new registrations of Uber and other app-based cars — was meant to give the de Blasio administration time to study whether limits on the fast-growing app industry are needed to break traffic gridlock.