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The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

blog.priceonomics.com

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Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#141

Post by argumentum »

jbooth wrote: post #128
omonra wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have every right to be offended or insulted. But it makes no difference to the validity of the argument presented.

Well the argument is clearly invalid. Slave owners?? But there's a difference between lousy analogies that further debate through clarification and lousy analogies that lead to everyone telling each other fuck you.

I had no intention of offending you, or the poster, and if that is how it was taken, I apologize.

The poster was concerned about potential losses incurred by existing medallion owners if the law changed. The comparison was made to point out that laws are often wrong, sometimes more seriously wrong (as with slavery or genocide), sometimes less wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

Individuals or classes who benefit from bad laws should not get an affirmative right to recover losses incurred when these laws are changed. In the most serious cases like slavery or genocide, they may even be punished ex post facto for following such laws. I'm obviously not advocating that here, only that the law be changed through the democratic process, despite the potential effects on existing medallion owners.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#142

Post by drakeandrews »

argumentum wrote: post #45
mattmanser wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, why sinister? What has happened? Another poster is claiming the unregulated Amsterdam market has been taken over by organised crime. That actually sounds sinister.

It's sinister because it pretends to be altruistic while simultaneously serving the interest of a small faction.

Isn't it sinister because it's serving organised crime? Would you feel it similarly sinister if the market had been cornered by a startup (or three) with some silly name and a pile of VC debt?

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#143

Post by joezydeco »

enjo wrote: post #80
argumentum wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand .. why would you purchase a home without the land it rests on? In a free market, perhaps there is some lower price where you would do this, but there is also a higher price where you could purchase the land as well.

People buy Condo's all the time. Also, in the United States, you very often give up mineral rights. So you may own the "ground" your home is on, but you don't own whatever comes out of it.

Condominium owners usually own a proportional share of the land that the building rests upon and the common areas of the property.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#144

Post by YokoZar »

superuser2 wrote: post #67
NoPiece wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say, "it's dishonest to pretend that regulation is strictly driven by parasitic behavior," but I was just quoting directly from the nyc.gov site that explains that's exactly why those regulations came to be. You can argue separately for safety regulations, but that's not why NY started to regulate cabs - it was protecting an existing industry from competition. Also, put yourself in the 1935 mindset - was there ev…

> it was protecting an existing industry from competition Otherwise known as "keeping people employed at a living wage." When the market decides that human labor is worth nothing, it's irresponsible not to contradict it. I will agree that medallions should have gone away after the crisis, but it wasn't "parasitic" at the time.

You can also spin this as "keeping people who need a ride poor by raising the price of the good they depend on", or even "preventing the poor from working by making it uneconomical for them to get to work".

If you're going to argue in favor of breaking competition, you absolutely have to have a better argument than "it's good for the sellers." There's two sides to every economic transaction, and I see no evidence that cab-medallion-owners are drastically more worthy people than cab-riders.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#145

Post by tiglionabbit »

alwaysdoit wrote: post #123
YokoZar wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to limit congestion, price congestion. Don't limit taxis, the right to drive people, the right to drive a car ending with a particular license plate number, or the amount of fuel available (all have been tried to reduce traffic) -- just make the roads themselves cost more when there are more cars on them, and make the roads cost less when there aren't.

And here I thought you were going to propose a solution? The implementation of "make the roads themselves cost more" is empirically non-trivial.

Lets get everyone on Fastrak and see how they like it :P

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#146

Post by codex »

brc wrote: post #130
codex wrote: post #87

Medallions exist for a very good reason: they prevent a tragedy of the commons from creating gridlock and pollution in major cities by limiting the number of cars circling around doing nothing on city streets. Most of the time, cabs just drive around waiting for a fare. This is because cabs are often hailed when they are seen, but even if a cab is summoned by a phone call (or smartphone) the closet cab to the fare is…

I find this a very weak argument. You're essentially saying that we have to limit car usage because too many cars cause congestion. Congestion has an explicit cost (wasted time) even if it is not priced in with some artifical time-of-use payment. Ultimately people will get onto the road one way or another if they need to get somewhere at a set time. So by limiting cab licences, all you are doing is limiting the mix o…

The idea is not to reduce cab counts to the point where people call towncars instead; that's likely a worse outcome, because the towncar spends only ~1/3 of it's time full: the other 2/3rds are spent driving to and from the towncar's parking space.

Ideally cabs would spend near zero time driving around empty. Today this is solved by medallions, imperfectly, but tomorrow this can be solved by technology.

What can't be solved by technology is the number of cabs trolling around. You can have perfect GPS based dispatch, with your next fare always ready to get in your cab just as you're dropping off the last fare, and there would still be huge problems, because there's nothing to stop this ideal set of 100% in-use cabs from being diluted into five times as many 20% in use cabs. People will take the closest cab and drivers will drive around to make sure they're the closest cab.

You can charge a per-mile tax on empty taxis, but that just raises cab fares for citizens (or forces caps) for no good reason. Just set the optimal number of cabs by fiat.

In some respects, this is a natural monopoly.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#147

Post by JackFr »

ericd wrote: post #63
JackFr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far from obvious that demand has outstripped supply. The population of Manhattan was significantly higher in 1937 than it is now 1.9 million vs. 1.6 million. On a population basis it would seem that we would need fewer rather than more cabs. What drives the demand for cabs is the the price of a ride versus the alternative. If the regulated fare is low relative to subways & buses and the overall price level, cabs…

You really can't compare the use-per-capita of cabs between 1937 and 2013...

Why not? An ellipsis isn't an argument.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#148

Post by jonknee »

adventured wrote: post #113
seanalltogether wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've brought this up in another thread, but over in the UK, due to a lack of property taxes, its possible to purchase a home, yet stil have to pay a yearly ground rent to a private party. The cost to own land in nothing, so there's little incentive to ever sell it, and instead lease it out. People may complain about property taxes in the USA, but it prevents this very practice from happening. It would be better for e…

That and the fact that the US is 1/7th as densely populated as the UK (UK is 260 people per km, the US is 34/km). The US is #179 on the population density list country wise. If someone won't sell you a piece of land, there's a vast supply of other land to look at. The only place you'll run into a problem is in a few high density metros like NYC.

Those are pretty dishonest stats though considering the vast majority of that land is extremely rural and much of it is owned by the Federal government (the Feds own 28% of all land in the country). The UK doesn't have something like Alaska which is both huge and empty (Alaska alone is 7 times the size of the UK, but has just 730k people).

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#149

Post by adg »

adventured wrote: post #104

"In the last half decade, two trends conspired to end the taxi medallion regime. First, people are more comfortable with trusting strangers." This isn't true. When I was growing up, hitch hiking was still very common. I'd argue that people used to trust strangers to a radically higher degree before the prohibition based crime wave (the one that makes swaths of every city in the US more dangerous than Afghanistan) tha…

I agree. But as the article goes on to point out, we are not more trusting of complete strangers, but rather strangers who've been vetted by many AirBnb reviews, background checked by Uber, etc. Technology has changed the definition of a 'stranger'.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#150

Post by JackFr »

malandrew wrote: post #122
JackFr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far from obvious that demand has outstripped supply. The population of Manhattan was significantly higher in 1937 than it is now 1.9 million vs. 1.6 million. On a population basis it would seem that we would need fewer rather than more cabs. What drives the demand for cabs is the the price of a ride versus the alternative. If the regulated fare is low relative to subways & buses and the overall price level, cabs…

What I don't get is why a city as dense as NYC supports any transportation method that puts a few individuals above the public good. Cars in a dense urban area epitomize the tragedy of the commons. Buses and delivery trucks are the only vehicles that must have access to the street. Everyone else should be walking, taking public transportation, or bicycling. Not having to wait on a street corner for a crosswalk signal…

Taxis are not the problem. Private cars are the problem, and the city does a pretty good job keeping them out of Manhattan as well, with tolls on many of the bridges (any bridge into Manhattan connected to a highway is tolled; local street bridges are not) and a 19% parking tax.

But there are certain situations where you need a taxi and the bus or subway won't do. Think the elderly, families with small children, etc.

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