New York Could Become First Major U.S. City to Cap Uber and Similar Vehicles

The medallion owners are losing too much money. They have to fight back. (At their peak the medallions in aggregate were worth over 10 billion dollars)

Its a terrible industry. Ive seen taxis not pick up people due to their color. They all change shift at the same time. They don’t work in the rain. The driver frequently isn’t the guy in the picture. To complain you have to show up at a hearing during work hours.

Good riddance!

But as a bicyclist it's deadly. I'm in SF, it happens all the time on second St and on market. I thought they weren't even allowed to drop off on market but it happens all the time. It happens to me like once every 3 months but I see it every week happening to others. I keep an eye out for those Uber badges and expect to get cut off.

You're reading way too much into that map if you think people in low rent areas drive into Manhattan. Driving into Manhatten is slow, expensive and finding free parking is a pain in the ass.

Most of the red dots on that map are in Bergen and Rockland county. The concentration of red dots just above the George Washington bridge is where Chris Rock lives. My friend's hockey teammate lives there too. He owns a hedge fund and has his own hockey rink in his backyard.

I'm not saying everyone driving into the city is a millionaire, but they're not working at Starbucks. You'll need a much better job to afford living in Bergen and Rockland county.

> Really, the best solution here would be provide alternatives that suck less than driving 2 hours in New York City traffic - then people would stop driving all on their own.

We have those alternatives. They work pretty well, and the result has been that most people don't drive into the city. This is old news here. You don't have to sell people on not driving into the city, most abhor the idea. Look at the map again. Most use trains and buses.

In the map, you'll sometimes see clusters of red squares where people normally take buses. Some neighborhoods are more likely to use dollar vans and other unofficial shuttles.

If you are taking the bus from New Jersey, you're not sitting in the same traffic as the cars. In the morning, a long parade of buses flow into the Port Authority terminal in their own lanes.

Like most people here, I'm all about expanding mass transit whether it be trains or buses. People shouldn't have to rely on car services like taxis or Uber/Lyft when buses and shuttles could be a fast & cheaper alternative.

The bottom line is metro areas should take control of their roads and put them to more efficient use. Getting around on the subway is pretty good, but buses could be a fast alternative if certain streets and avenues were marked transit only.

It's interesting how these politicians are talking about congestion, but they are unwilling to introduce congestion pricing to directly attack the issue, because no-one lines new taxes and people don't have a basic understanding of markets.

And I also find it frustrating that publications like the NYT won't call these politicians on their bullshit and prefer to write completely uncritical articles now that Uber is unpopular.

As other commenters noted, medallions were (are) intended as an exclusive license to pick up street fares/hails. For many years before Uber existed, a separate class of service called "for-hire vehicles" (FHVs), commonly known as black cars or Town Cars, existed and doesn't seem to have been part of the medallion exclusivity (at least in NYC).

Here's the closest I could find to a primary source documenting the difference between a medallion and a black car in NYC: http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/industry/for_hire.shtml (see related links from that page).

At least based on what I can find on the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission site, the TLC never required that FHVs use a central base/dispatch, and even clarified in 2015 that a central dispatch/base was not required (http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/newly_passed_rule_...).

If this assessment is accurate, that is (a) medallion owners never had exclusivity for prearranged rides and (b) a central base isn't required, then as soon as smartphones were everywhere (and thus almost all rides were easier to prearrange in an app), medallion demand was eventually going to drop. Medallion owners didn't realize that they legitimately competed with any new methods of prearranging a ride, including smartphone apps -- their competition wasn't black cars, it was prearranged rides. If Uber hadn't created the market, a black car operator probably would have eventually.

Presumably they'd have started with existing FHV drivers (as Uber did when it was UberCab), but the NYC FHV requirements are straightforward enough that they could have recruited and licensed new drivers as demand grew (https://nyc.drivewithvia.com/get-a-tlc-fhv-license/, https://dmv.ny.gov/driver-license/get-license-drive-taxi-or-...).

(And to play out the medallion exclusivity: if a new, improved method of ride hailing was created, medallion owners would have exclusively benefited. If you've seen a taxi line/taxi hub serving multiple hotels in a downtown business district, one could call that an innovation which made hailing more competitive. Imagine if taxis had installed tiny kiosks with taxi call buttons and self-service credit card readers throughout the city, and guaranteed a taxi would be there in 2 minutes after a fare swiped.)