Slamming on the brakes

Like just missing a cab to someone who flagged it down before you, the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission has a bad habit of failing to notice trends that could be harmful and only belatedly trying to catch up. That’s what happened when the agency let tens of thousands of Ubers and Lyfts flood the streets to meet demand. With no legal limit, new cars kept being added until traffic slowed to a crawl. By the time a cap was imposed in 2018, there were more than 85,000 vehicles competing for fares.

At the time, well-meaning regulators wrote an exception to permit new wheelchair-accessible vehicles, and in 2019 extended that to battery electric vehicles. The TLC says its intent was to have the new WAVs or BEVs replace existing cars, not to open floodgates to new ones. But stupidly, that wasn’t spelled out anywhere.

So along came Revel, purveyor of those baby blue electric rental scooters, with the idea of using the BEV exception to create a mini-fleet of 50 electric cars, with TLC-licensed drivers on fixed salaries instead of working for fares. Who can blame them for being enterprising? Not us; government sets the rules of the road, and business follows.

But who can blame the TLC for belatedly realizing that under the same provision by which Revel is seeking to add a few dozen cars to city streets, Revel or others — Elon Musk, Uber, whoever — could soon unload 50,000 more? And so, Tuesday, the commission rightly amended its poorly written rules, prohibiting electric vehicles except where they replace an existing for-hire vehicle.

Revel will now have to make its case to the courts. It should get an okay for the 50 and no more. On one condition: Revel says its cars were only for rides below 42nd St. No can do. For good reason, for-hire vehicles can’t discriminate on destination. Take all passengers anywhere they want to go in the city or don’t take them anywhere at all.