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The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

blog.priceonomics.com

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Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#171

Post by malandrew »

jasonwocky wrote: post #152
malandrew wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Well, for one thing, NYC is answerable to NYS. Lots of people commute into NYC from its suburbs, they like to drive, and they do vote.

There's a solution for that. Grand Central Station. Thousands upon thousands of people commute to NYC by train everyday, leaving their cars at the suburban train station parking lot.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#172

Post by caf »

codex wrote: post #146
brc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The process that would stop 100% in-use cabs from being diluted into fives times as many 20% in-use cabs is that the 20% in-use cabs would all be losing money.

If congestion is the problem, then directly charge for that - London has for example implemented a time-based congestion charge for the city centre.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#173

Post by caf »

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.

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/roadusers/congestioncharging/

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#174

Post by joezydeco »

rdtsc wrote: post #155
joezydeco wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That seems almost like a scam. Kind of like time shares.

Why would that be a scam? If anything, it protects the unit owners from things like the landlord selling the building and forcing everyone to move. You can't sell an entire condo building and land without clear title from every single unit owner.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#175

Post by caf »

codex wrote: post #109
jstanley wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Why would a free market not prevent this? if there are excess taxis, taxi-driving is not profitable. If taxi-driving is profitable and there is still gridlock, that is a different problem. Avoiding gridlock by creating an artificial shortage of tran…

Simple: the number of cabs at which taxi driving is no longer profitable is far, far more than the optimal number of cabs. The optimal number of cabs balances cab availability with traffic such that the time taken to go from point A to point B is minimal. This takes into account the time it takes to hail the cab (waiting around if there is none) and the time it takes for the cab to fight though traffic to point B. An…

The market fare is also affected by the number of cabs - if the number of cabs available significantly exceeds the demand for cabs, the market fare will fall. This means that each additional cab on the road is a double-whammy against the profitability of all cabs - it reduces the market fare and it increases the average idle time.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#176

Post by Torgo »

lukeschlather wrote: post #135
brc wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, though, it's not that different to property taxes, just that the land is owned by some lord instead of the central government. The effect is just the same. Nobody really owns their land, whether leasehold or freehold. Ownership is really just a right to exclusive use in the best case. As the old saying goes, if you want to know who really owns your land, stop paying taxes and find out.

The cornerstone of democratic philosophy is that there's a huge difference between a central democratic government and some lord.

Any country that actually believed that would have true allodial title.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#177

Post by tomcorrigan »

mech4bg wrote: post #66
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…

We don't have yearly property taxes in Australia, just council rates which are usually around 0.2% of the house valuation (which is much lower than in the US AFAIK). However we don't have the split land/house purchasing like in the UK (or it's not very common at least) - I wonder why?

We most certainly do have yearly property taxes in Australia. Your principal place of residence is exempt. Your holiday house, or your office building is not.

That is why residential property is almost entirely freehold not leasehold.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#178

Post by ghshephard »

rdtsc wrote: post #154
lukeschlather wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cornerstone of democratic philosophy is that there's a huge difference between a central democratic government and some lord.

In theory, yes. In practice, not so sure. As a little guy I still owe someone money even though I "own" the property. There is also mineral rights and such that make it complicated. Then zoning. At the end of the end of the day someone comes and slaps me for not paying them "rent".

Not to mention eminent domain - where if your property makes sense for a freeway, pipeline, or, in a new twist, a shopping mall if doing so will improve the "Public Good" - someone can basically just pay you what they calculate as fair market value and tell you to move.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#179

Post by jacoblyles »

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.

In many of these cities, it is impossible to flag a cab at any price during peak hours. It would be far more efficient for the government to top up the earnings of low-earners than to manipulate the supply of cabs.

Re: The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions

#180

Post by jacoblyles »

tptacek wrote: post #4

Apart from all the obvious externalities of cab driving operations, the extremely high probability of fraud, and the fact that policing cabs is extraordinarily expensive, there's another problem a lot of these analyses miss about why cabs are regulated the way they are. In many large cities, the taxi system is a fundamental component of the transport infrastructure. There are locations in most cities that are not eff…

I'm still looking for a regulation omni-apologist who can explain to me why it is rational to restrict the supply of cabs so that it is impossible to flag one during peak hours in many cities. It seems the taxis monopolies benefit and the politicians they support benefit, but the vast majority of us lose.

That's why uber exists and is highly profitable. Unregulated cabs at any price are better than regulated cabs that might as well not exist. And it doesn't hurt that uber has innovated on an industry that has been stagnant for a long time, like most regulated industries.

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