The safety and comfort of ridesharing

"It’s so 2015," Vogue writer Karley Sciortino's friend said to her in Los Angeles last year. "This girl I know just fucked a guy she met in an UberPool." Intrigued, Sciortino spent some time researching and discovered that there were indeed a bunch of young people hooking up in the back seats of Uberpool and Lyftline cars.

Via-cles are getting bigger

As of press time I have been unable to confirm this, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched. What I have seen is that the vast majority of passengers on Via and express buses are women, of all ages. The first five or six times I took Via, the other passengers were all women.

Contrast these tales of young twentysomething women eagerly flirting with men in Uberpools to the horror stories of women of all ages being harassed and assaulted on subways, and it's clear that women feel a lot more comfortable sharing Ubers and Lyfts than subways with strangers. It's not too hard to figure out one reason: taxis have a driver sitting just a few feet away who could potentially intervene if a guy oversteps any boundaries. Both services also have rating systems for passengers, and a passenger who harasses other passengers is likely to get low ratings - or even be banned from the service.

But women also report feeling more comfortable on local buses (in Manhattan), express buses and commuter trains. Public buses and commuter trains can't ban passengers, but they do have a lower passenger-to-driver ratio than subways. The higher fares on express buses, commuter trains and taxis also discourage overcrowding (but not always, especially on the Long Island Railroad). And that feeds into the hookups as well: a guy who can afford to take an Uber, even if it's an Uberpool, is more eligible in some women's eyes than a guy who takes the subway.

I should point out here that it's not just women who are discouraged by crowds from riding transit. As a guy I've had to deal with belligerent and inconsiderate people. Some of them have even wanted to fight me, but I don't trust them to fight fair.

In my middle age I have aches and pains - not always enough to qualify as a true disability, but enough that I don't want to stand up in crush conditions for an hour. At those times Via or Lyft can be a welcome relief. I don't want to separate myself from other travelers. I just want a little space, a seat and someone who can step in and protect the vulnerable.

Old-style taxis and single-passenger Uber and Lyft services have their own problems. Women are regularly harassed and even assaulted by male drivers, to the point where every once in a while someone tries to start a service with all female drivers. The presence of additional passengers can actually counter this harassment somewhat.

As I wrote last month in response to Emma Fitzsimmons and Sarah Kaufman's posts about the experiences of women on transit, this runs counter to the Spartan aesthetic of some transit advocates. In this view, if even one person is crowded on a train, all must be crowded.

Of course it's not fair for women and guys who aren't tough to pay more for the privilege of not being assaulted on our way to and from work (or shopping, or fun). Poor people will be faced with the choice of an unsafe trip or no trip at all. We should do more to ensure a minimal level of safety and comfort for all.

This does not mean that we shouldn't allow people to pay more for comfort and safety. They have already been doing that for millennia, and most commonly these days they do it by driving their own cars or taking taxis. Uberpool, Lyftline and Via offer that missing middle: safer than the subway but more efficient than a private car.

I don't think I've heard women who regularly take transit accuse Uber or Via or even Leap of elitism. These accusations come mostly from men and cyclists, who seem to think that transit can create a classless society all by itself. I'm not waiting around for that.

The Via experience

Here in New York when people talk about "microtransit," they usually mean Uberpool or Lyftline, and those are the services I've been focusing on. Some have mentioned a third service, Via, that works a bit differently. Via is all shared; there is no service where it's just you and the driver, like a traditional taxi. The prices are fixed: currently five dollars per trip on weekdays if you buy credit ahead of time, and up to just under ten dollars for a pay-per-ride weeknight.

Photo: Via publicity photo

I've tried Via several times over the past year. The only real complaint I have is that they don't go to Queens: the service is restricted to Manhattan. I have hope, though, because when I started it was only available from Fourteenth to Fifty-Ninth Streets, and it's now available from the Battery to 110th Street. The next expansion will probably be Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope, but I don't think they'll ignore western Queens for long.

The first couple of times I took Via I had to wait a while, and it was just me and the driver, but the service seems to have caught on quickly. Every time since then, there has been at least one other passenger and the wait time has been minimal. If I've had to wait more than five minutes it was because my "Via-cle" (har) was stuck in traffic less than two blocks away.

Via is much more like a bus than a taxi. Twice I've gotten sedans, but the Via-cles are usually SUVs. I've had at least one trip with three other people, meaning I had to sit in the third row of one of those Suburbans or Navigators or Explorers. Since those aren't really made for people getting in and out frequently, I'm wondering how soon Via is going to start running vans big enough to stand up in.

A number of people have objected to Uber and Lyft because of the “gig economy” arrangements they have with their drivers. Of course, they’re not much worse than the taxi medallion owners in that regard. But on one recent Via trip the driver was chatting with us, and he said that Via drivers are all paid by the hour, possibly even full time. If that is correct, it sounds like a much better deal for them than just about any other taxi arrangement.

As I’ve said before, Uber and Lyft are a huge improvement over the way we did taxis up to a few years ago, but in their current incarnations they won’t do much to help the transit capacity crunch we’re feeling in cities like New York. The Via model is much more promising, and the more Uber and Lyft act on those lines, like with Uberhop, the more helpful they will be in relieving our capacity constraints.

There was another fascinating aspect of my experience with Via, and to some degree with Lyftline and Uberpool, that deserves its own post. I'll write about it soon!

The Uberpool/Lyftline experience

I wrote last year about how the current challenge for transit in cities is not building ridership but making room on transit for all the people who already want to ride, but are getting passed up or squeezed on. A lot of people have been paying attention to Uber and its competitor Lyft, and their Uberpool and Lyftline services may already be reducing car ownership. I've tried them both multiple times over the past couple of years, and they've gotten more promising.

Photo: Jazz Guy / Flickr

When I first tried Uber, all they offered were big SUVs, that you had all to yourself. It was more convenient than trying to find the number for the local car service and wait on hold, but it was too expensive for me. The smaller Uber, and Lyft vehicles and the ability to share rides with the Uberpool and Lyftline brought the price down to where it was a potential splurge for when I was tired of the subway.

After decades of taking taxis rarely, if ever, I was actually underwhelmed by the taxi experience in general. People pay so much more than for a subway ride, but the ride is often a lot slower and less smooth. Basically, you're stuck in traffic in a car with at least one stranger, who controls the radio and the heat, doesn't necessarily know where they're going, and sometimes really wants to talk. How is that relaxing?

Sometimes it is definitely worth paying for a taxi, to have a guaranteed seat, a one-seat ride, or door-to-door service. For places and times where the buses and trains run at low frequencies it can be a lot quicker.

I was interested to see how well these sharing services work. For the first several months I had the vehicle to myself, even if I took advantage of Lyftline's offer of waiting ten minutes for a lower price. But recently I've had a few shared rides. One couple was on their way to LaGuardia, and taking us home must have added at least fifteen minutes to the trip. I hope they left plenty of time!

One thing that can't come soon enough is services like "Uberhop," currently in pilot in Seattle, where you can get quicker and/or cheaper service by walking to a point chosen by the software. Last year I was waiting for a Lyftline to twist through a maze of one-way Greenwich Village, and noticed that my fellow rider was being picked up a few blocks away. I texted the driver, and was able to get to the car right as the other passenger was getting in. I saved all three of us another four-block loop on congested streets.

A promising application of this technology is when there is an unexpected outage on the subway, or even a skipped bus run, and a surge of SUVs (or even vans) come and whisk the waiting passengers away. Cost is a potential factor, but I think if people could be confident that a car would come quickly and get them there with minimal delay, a lot more of them would do it.

More observations on this issue coming soon.

Our stratified transportation system

A lot of people are nervous about the possibility that privately-run electronic taxi-hailing systems like Uber and Lyft could take over functions that have recently been filled by government-run transit services. Others are disturbed by the sight of privately-run companies like Leap and Bridj marketing local bus services as luxury products. I share some of these concerns, and I've addressed them in previous posts.

What I don't share is the idea that any of these services will create a "two tier" or "stratified" system with one service for the rich and one for the poor. There's a simple reason for this: we already have one.

If you go to a small city like, say, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you'll see our stratified system in action: the people on the buses are mostly poor and nonwhite, and everyone else is driving. Ride the bus in a city like Kingston, New York, where the received wisdom is that "everyone drives because you need a car to get around," and you'll see that there are still people who don't drive: the extremely poor and the mentally and physically disabled. Here in New York the majority rides the subways, but there is a stratum that drives everywhere, and pretty much runs the city.

The bus and rail strata are largely run by the government and paid with tax money, but some of the money comes from fares paid by passengers. In the strata where people drive, passengers often contribute the labor of driving themselves, and pay a lot of money for the vehicles, fuel, insurance and other costs, and also contribute to the construction and maintenance of road, bridge and parking infrastructure through taxes. But as has been shown time and again, they do not pay the entire cost of the system; a much larger share of general tax revenue goes to driving than to transit.

This stratified system can be very cruel to those in the bottom strata, and it generally gets worse the smaller the share of the population that takes transit. The poorer the average transit user is, the slower, dirtier, more crowded, less frequent and less reliable the transit.

Even here in New York, the driving classes are constantly blocking improvements to transit, whether it's another commuter rail track, extension of an el train, allowing bus pickups or dedicating a bus lane. So yes, I know firsthand how bad it is to have a stratified system with minimal investment in the lowest strata. And I can't see how Uber, Lyft, Chariot and Bridj could possibly make things any worse.

In fact, I see it the opposite way: that people who take these taxi and premium bus services are less likely to identify as drivers and more likely to take transit and support transit expansion. If they don't have cars to park, they're much less likely to go crazy over reallocating street space from parking to transit.

As I've written before, I'm not a libertarian, and I'm not even much of a capitalist. One of my goals is access for all to jobs, housing, shopping and services. I would be open to a state solution, a government monopoly on transportation with a single level of service. But to impose a government monopoly on transportation would require drastic state action. Use your transit quota well, comrade! The government would most definitely be coming for your cars. Who would be first up against the wall - Rory Lancman?

In any case, I'm trying to think of an area where our government provides a monopoly with a single level of service, and coming up blank. Housing, food, energy, school - there is usually some government service, but it always has substantial competition from the private sector. Even services that are nominally single-tier like identification, permitting and licensing have inequalities. If you can afford to pay a rush fee or an expediter, or if you just live in a wealthier area, your interactions with the government will be quicker and smoother.

It's not just our government, either. The most revolutionary, egalitarian governments ever have failed pathetically at imposing transportation equality, when they've even tried it. Even the Soviet Union had its Ladas for the Party officials.

Sadly, these people who bleat about "stratification" don't even have the vision to realize the amount of stratification between cars and transit or the guts to mention it, much less address it. They would never think about taking away cars or parking, or defunding roads. They'd rather make a big show of opposing inequality that doesn't exist than address inequality that exists.

Could Lyft and Uber reduce congestion?

Charles Komanoff has created an open-source multimodal transportation model for New York City, available for free download as an Excel spreadsheet. In July, after learning that there were almost two thousand Uber cars on the streets of Manhattan every weekday, Komanoff used his Balanced Transportation Analyzer to estimate that these cars had slowed traffic by seven percent.

Photo: Jeffrey Zeldman / Flickr

A month later, some new information came out: taxis were sitting idle on the streets of Greenpoint. Drivers had found that they could make more money with Uber and Lyft than with the medallion giving them the right to pick up street-hailing passengers in Manhattan.

This suggests that instead of adding to the cabs in Manhattan, many of the Uber and Lyft cars have been replacing them. This is confirmed by an analysis conducted by Reuben Fischer-Baum and Carl Bialik for Five Thirty Eight. The net increase in congestion may be a lot lower than Komanoff estimated, especially since, as he mentioned, cabs hailed with apps don't have to cruise the streets.

I emailed Komanoff, and he was aware of this new data. "I revised my approach in mid-summer. I think the main change was a higher assumed displacement of yellows, which resulted in a lower impact of Ubers. The impact of 20,000 Ubers (not all of which are in the CBD all the time, obviously) is now a 4.3% slowdown in CBD speeds," he wrote.

To me this suggests that there is a limit to the number of taxis that we can add in Manhattan's Central Business District ("the CBD"). If vehicle speeds slow below a certain point, some passengers will decide that it's not worth their time and money, and either take the subway, go at a different time, or go somewhere else. The "surge pricing" (in fact, a form of congestion pricing, which Komanoff has advocated for all vehicles for decades) practiced by Uber and Lyft probably also serves as an extra disincentive.

If enough passengers make this decision, the driver doesn't get the hail. Because the fare they get for sitting in traffic is different from what they get while moving, they may decide that even if they pick someone up it won't be worth their time. And in fact, electronic hailing and traffic monitoring allows drivers to read and respond to these signals more quickly. A driver can now get a sense of the number of hails before they even enter Manhattan, and choose to go elsewhere.

The Economist's analysis of trip data suggests that these services are not adding very much to congestion: "During the two years to June 2015, Uber’s pickups in the CBD rose from an estimated 175,000 to 1.8m [per month], while yellow cabs’ hails in the area fell by around 1.4m. This implies that where Uber and yellow cabs compete most directly, just 13% of the growth in Uber rides has added to prior demand. The remaining 87% has replaced trips that would otherwise have gone to taxis."

It's even possible that electronically hailed cars could eventually help reduce congestion, and provide an alternative to subways and buses. Of course, not if they're single-passenger taxi trips: as I said recently, if Uber and Lyft simply take a vehicle with one person who's both driver and passenger and replaces it with a vehicle with one driver and one passenger, it may lead to a reduction in carnage and an improvement in the way people relate to each other, but there would be no net change in the number of passengers per car, and thus no practical change in efficiency or pollution.

There is one major difference in shifting from single-occupant vehicles to taxis: ownership of the vehicle passes from the individual (usually the driver/passenger), to the taxi driver or fleet owner. This means that control of the other passenger seats passes from the driver/passenger to the taxi service. As many people have observed, when combined with real-time schedule coordination, this makes it much easier to add passengers.

Uber offers an electronic carpooling service called Uberpool, and Lyft offers one called Lyftline. With these services, instead of carrying a single passenger, a Prius sedan can carry up to three comfortably, and an Escalade can carry five. The companies claim that they are very popular: Uber said that "almost 50,000 New Yorkers" used Uberpool in the last week of October. In April, Lyft said that Lyftlines made up thirty percent of its rides in New York. Unfortunately, both of those numbers are fairly useless for our purposes because they don't say how many of those rides were in Manhattan during business hours.

Still, each of those shared trips represents one of several possibilities. One is that the person took Uberpool or Lyftline instead of driving their own car or taking a separate cab. If these services do take, say, a thousand cars off the streets of Manhattan every rush hour this way - cars that are not replaced by other taxis, personal cars, or even trucks - that's a very good thing. Komanoff's model indicates that if we could get 32,000 less cars going into Manhattan every day, it would increase speeds by 3.2%.

It may be that the possible congestion limit I mentioned above is actually an optimal congestion point, and every car taken off the road by these carpool services will be replaced with another car, taxi or truck until it reaches that point. In that case, the only way to free up space on the roads would be to increase the price - tolls on the bridges, raise on-street parking rates, reduce government employee parking placards or implement a taxi congestion fee. In the meantime, at least this means more people that will be able to get into Manhattan.

Another possibility is that the person took Uberpool or Lyftline instead of taking the subway or bus, leaving space for someone else. A number of transit advocates have gotten all doom and gloom about this, saying that these services will "poach riders" from the public transit agencies, depriving them of fare revenue, but here in New York today the system is at capacity. All rush hour, people are watching full buses and subways pass them by. Poaching is simply not an issue, and will not be for the foreseeable future.

As I've written before, I do not believe that electronically hailed taxis can be a satisfactory replacement for fixed-route transit. I do believe that they can help us deal with our current capacity crunch, and potentially ease the way to eliminating personal cars. I've got more to say about this in the future.

Expanding transit and taxis

I wrote recently that by making taxi service more convenient and flexible, electronic taxi hailing services like Uber and Lyft have the potential to replace private car trips and even some car ownership. But some argue (or worry) that they can go further and replace public transit. I've already pointed out that even in this unlikely event, it would not necessarily be a bad thing.

The main value of transit is that it gets people out of cars, and the main challenge of transit in the 2010s (in large, walkable US cities at least) is that it doesn't have enough capacity to accommodate all the people who want to get out of their cars. The main goal for transit advocates right now should be to grow that capacity.

Since the days of Red Mike Hylan, transit advocates have focused on funding capacity expansion through government contracts, and big business has been a dirty word. But it's not at all clear that Hylan was right: the fact that the new 7 line extension was the first real rapid transit expansion in New York City since 1989 shows that we can't just forbid private investment in transit and expect the public sector to step in.

Some subway and commuter rail expansions are massively over-engineered and take forever (the Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access). Others are loaded down with park-and-rides (the Northern Branch), and eventually deep-sixed by ambitious politicians (the Rockland-Westchester corridor). Politicians have shut down many promising subway (Astoria extension), commuter rail (LIRR Third Track) and bus (Main Street bus lanes) proposals at the behest of NIMBYs or even cycling advocates (the Rockaway Beach Line).

The most shameful smothering of transit expansion was where ostensibly left-wing, pro-transit Manhattanites and their ostensibly left-wing, transit-loving representatives tightened constraints on the capacity for bus movement and storage, and blocked attempts to expand them, without a peep out of supposed bus advocates.

If we can’t count on government to expand transit fast enough to meet demand, or to even allow private buses to meet that demand, we have to see if someone else is willing to meet it. And that’s where Uber and Lyft, and less well known services like Via, come in.

These electronic taxi hailing services have essentially used venture capital to finance a massive expansion and upgrade of New York's taxi fleet. Hundreds of late-model Priuses and Suburbans have begun cruising the streets of New York, replacing Lincoln Town Cars and Ford Tauruses.

This is happening not because The People demanded an expansion and upgrade of the taxi fleet. (The bourgeois poseurs who claim to speak on behalf of The People would never demand such a thing, because it sounds too bourgeois.) It is not happening because the Sensible Bureaucrats conducted a study and decided to spend the money. (The Sensible Bureaucrats made some headway, but their colleagues were too busy cowering in pathetic fear of the power of the taxi medallion owners.) It is happening because Uber and others are making a profit on the financing of these vehicles, and the venture capitalists pouring money into Uber and Lyft are expecting to eventually make a profit themselves.

Of course, that's just taxis, and as I wrote earlier, by itself it won't get us to our goals. But is it a sign of a potential way forward for transit expansion?

The value of Uber and Lyft today

Over the past few weeks in New York we heard a lot of overheated rhetoric about electronic taxi hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, particularly from the former taxi monopolists and their proxies in the de Blasio administration and City Council member Ydanis Rodriguez.

Photo: Ilya Nikhamin / Flickr

Reading their tweets and soundbites actually reminded me of the way I felt reading the end of the Power Broker. I find Uber to be super creepy, and Lyft only somewhat less so. But I hate the medallion system and how it's enriched a select group of millionaires while saddling my city with crappy service. In that respect, Uber and Lyft are a huge improvement.

The first time I used Uber I was way out in eastern Queens and hadn't seen a boro taxi, never mind a medallion cab, in fifteen minutes. I could have looked up the local car services and called around until I found one that had cars available. Instead, I had an Uber in ten minutes. I should have checked the app sooner.

More recently I was standing in Union Square with my elderly mother at 4pm on a weekday. I raised my arm, and a cab pulled over. The driver stuck his head out the window: "I'm only going to midtown." Another taxi: "I'm going downtown."

My mom said, "I really need to get home, Cap'n." I pulled up the Uber app: 1.4x surge pricing. I hit "request" and in five minutes my mom and I were relaxing in the back of a car on the way to Queens, with no grumbling from the driver.

Uber and Lyft can be a lot more convenient for allocating car resources in times and places of scarcity, like eastern Queens or the shift change in Manhattan. They, and other taxi services, are also a lot faster and more convenient than buses or Access-a-Ride. It's a great alternative to owning a car for people who can't climb stairs and don't have a station with an elevator nearby. It's a lot more expensive than a subway or bus, but if you can walk for most trips they're a lot cheaper than owning a car.

Bizarrely, some crazy Queens old-timers have actually accused me of mistreating my mother by relying on taxis to get her to appointments instead of doing the responsible thing and buying a car. It's a very weird way of thinking, but a lot of people buy into it and drive their parents or their kids all over the city in bad traffic.

That's one way that Uber and Lyft provide value on an individual level, but how does it scale? If they replace car or taxi trips that's great, because they don't require as much parking. If they can help people to give up car ownership, even better, because that requires less parking and may convert someone who identifies primarily as a driver into a pedestrian or taxi rider with a different set of priorities.

Shifting to Uber or Lyft or boro taxis may also help reduce carnage. Forget driverless cars: most driving is currently done by amateurs who are frequently distracted, fatigued, enraged or just not very good. Police, prosecutors and judges hold them to a lower standard, and usually identify as drivers themselves.

In contrast, the professionals who drive for Uber and Lyft will hopefully have more training. This is less true outside of New York where drivers are not required to have taxi licenses, but still more likely than complete amateurs. Drivers will also have more accountability, because Uber and Lyft know that bad driving is bad for business.

On the other hand, if we're simply replacing car trips with taxi trips, that does not reduce the average number of passengers per vehicle, and thus its effect on congestion, pollution and energy use are negligible. For those areas, we will need more carpooling.

Transit vs. e-hailing and transit vs. cars

Recently I wrote about some discussion from Timothy B. Lee and Chris Plano about the possibility that "ride-hailing could actually be stealing riders from transit." Building on Plano's musings and some data released by Uber, in April Eric Jaffe envisioned an "integrated system," with larger vehicles, and some challenges:

In an ideal world, microtransit providers would become the feeders to public transportation's core routes. They'd address what experts call the "first-mile, last-mile" problem—that gap at the start and end of every trip that's difficult for traditional transit operators to serve in a cost-effective way. Coverage to low-density corridors or remote neighborhoods becomes very doable. A car-free lifestyle becomes that much more viable.

[...]

An integrated transit system with public agencies as a core and microtransit as a feeder might be the urban ideal, but whether profit-minded private companies would submit to such an arrangement is another question. One reason public transit agencies can't reliably serve feeder routes in the first place is they tend to lose money. Asking microtransit companies to take that role might not harmonize with their business mission.

If an integrated scenario doesn't pan out, the flipside might be an ugly competitive one—with microtransit providers trying to poach bus and rail riders in key high-density corridors. That outcome would create a two-front fight for transit agencies. On one side they'd be battling for riders against private services with potentially greater resources. On the other, as fare revenue eroded, they'd be battling public officials for more funding to stay afloat.

As with the earlier discussion, an important angle that is being missed is pricing. Jaffe talked to David King for his post, and King should have told him that such an integrated system was already tried here in New York back in 2010 and the plan failed miserably, in part because it didn't give the operators the freedom to set their prices. If the "microtransit" providers can charge what the market will bear for feeder services, they might be able to make a profit.

Note that Jaffe is actually claiming that e-hail carpooling and jitneys compete with public transit for two distinct resources: riders, who bring in fares, and political support, which brings in subsidies in the form of cash and land (street space). These are not necessarily the same at all, and the claims should be evaluated separately.

I've talked about this before and I've got more to say about it in a future post, but right now I just want to reiterate that in the big coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles - basically, the cities where Uberpool and Lyftline either currently operate or are likely to be successful - the game has changed, and transit agencies are no longer hurting for riders. Any passengers attracted by these services will simply make room for more passengers on the public trains and buses.

Jaffe's second concern, that electronic carpooling services will take political support from public transit, reminds me of the old joke by Apocryphal Winston Churchill: we've already established that competition can affect the level of political support for transit, we're just debating how much - and where it comes from.



Jaffe's concern about political competition is part of what I call the Cycle, and have been discussing for years. Yes, the level of political support for transit subsidies is affected not only by the number of riders, but by their aggregate political power. But that's far from the only factor, even when the government is not as corrupt as New York State.

For decades, transit was losing riders to government-subsidized systems of highways, parking and cheap gas, but for some reason people tend to not want to think about that. Jaffe has occasionally written about it, but think about most of the people who wring their hands over the plight of the poor bus. Remember them talking about how massive subsidies to roads in the State budget, or the Tappan Zee Bridge, will drive public transit out of business? Me neither.

It's always been a bit of a weird argument that we should not allow private services that compete with government services. In the Soviet Union, maybe, where you had a carefully planned economy, you might not want anyone disrupting that. But this isn't the Soviet Union. We don't complain, as far as I know, about private universities putting public universities out of business, or for-profit cheese companies competing with government cheese. And yet somehow transit is a great opportunity for people to rail against those nasty big businesses - as long as you don't mention the competition from massive government subsidies to private cars.

No, e-carpooling will not replace fixed-route buses

A lot of people have been talking about "microtransit" lately - sometimes meaning shared e-hailing services like Uberpool and Lyftline, but also some larger services like Bridj, Via and Leap, and even dollar vans. I've read some wise things, and other things that are ...less wise. I think this is going to be a few posts, and I'm going to start with the question of whether electronic taxi-sharing services like Uberpool and Lyftline will, or even can, drive public buses out of business, and the role of pricing.

Photo: dibaday / Flickr

Last August, Timothy B. Lee wrote,

In the short run, these services will be a way for yuppies to pay a little less for their taxi rides. But they're also starting to blur of the line between taxis and buses. In the long run, that line is likely to disappear altogether, as all conventional buses are replaced by smaller and nimbler just-in-time transportation options.

No, "flexible" transportation services are not going to replace buses, ever, as long as they're competing on a level playing field. Jarrett Walker had the ultimate takedown years ago, and then reprised it again and again when people kept repeating the same nonsense:

You can spare yourself a lot of confusion about flexible service by keeping in mind the physical facts of the matter: Driving a special routing to respond to a customer request takes more of a driver's time than picking up a customer along a fixed route. Since we pay for service mostly in hours of labor, we have to care about how many passengers we'll serve with each labor hour, so flexible service is intrinsically limited on that important score. That's why when flexible routes near their (very low) capacity limits, we usually try to turn them back into fixed routes.

In February, Uber analyzed its data from Los Angeles and concluded that many people were using it as feeder service to get to the Metro, leading Chris Plano to reiterate Timothy Lee's speculation in March:

On the other hand, ride-hailing could actually be stealing riders from transit. If the same trip can be completed in less time with an Uber or Lyft than using the Metro, some riders will choose the speedier option. However, at the moment, it is unlikely that hordes of people will abandon transit for ride-hailing simply because transit is still less expensive.

Jarrett himself, in a comment on Plano's post, mentions that Uber and Lyft executives "are often quite explicit about wanting to draw people away from public transit," and seems to believe that because the e-hailing services are less regulated than the public transit agencies, they might actually succeed.

I'm not convinced at all. I'm guessing that these are actually people who might have driven to the Metro station, but even if they switched from riding feeder buses, Plano is dancing around an important point: these are people who are willing to pay a premium price for a faster trip. Let's say they're spending five dollars for an Uberpool to the train station. They would probably be happy to pay four dollars to ride a public bus, and for four dollars a pop (no free transfer), LACMTA would probably be able to run the buses frequently enough to satisfy them. But because LACMTA charges a consistent $1.75, and would probably be bitterly attacked if they tried to charge more in some neighborhoods, this leaves an opening for Uber. I really doubt that Uber could make that work, even with driverless cars, for less than a bus fare.

Stay tuned for more!

Twenty dollars, same as in town

This has been a bad week for anyone who cares about reducing car use in New York. On Friday morning, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the launch of the city's bike share program was postponed until the spring. Friday afternoon, State Supreme Court judge Arthur Engoron declared that the Five Borough Taxi Plan was unconstitutional. On Monday the Metropolitan Transportation Council voted to approve the disastrous Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project, and the state immediately applied for a two billion dollar federal loan. Today State Supreme Court judge Bruce Cozzens declared that a payroll tax that funds a significant chunk of the city's transit operations is unconstitutional.

Of course, both the MTA payroll tax and the borough taxi plan were, ah, suboptimal ways of paying for transit and providing reliable street hail taxi service to the outer boroughs. Nobody's crying for either one. If anything, we can hope that they'll be replaced by better solutions.

Photo: Kristen Artz / NYC Mayor's Office

Tonight I'm going to talk about the taxis. I wrote a bunch about the taxi situation last summer when the plan was being hammered out.

If the taxi plan is reborn, one thing that I hope will be changed is the pricing. The plan passed by the State set the "borough taxi" rates to be exactly the same as the current yellow taxis. I understand that it's simpler to have one system for the entire city, but it's a bad idea. I didn't want to bring it up when it seemed like a done deal, but if they're going back to the drawing board anyway, I want to put my two cents in.

There are good reasons why a one-bedroom apartment, or an Italian hero, or a haircut, costs more in Midtown, less in Forest Hills, and even less in Corona. The cost of doing business is more expensive, and the demand is greater. The same principles apply to taxi service: it's more expensive for taxis to cruise, to refuel (if they can find a gas station), and to park for breaks. There are a lot more people in Midtown willing to pay for taxi service than in Forest Hills or Corona. If the drivers could vary their prices based on location they would, but the city doesn't allow it.

I've talked about what happens in Manhattan when demand is high: shortages. There are more people looking for cabs than there are cabs, and that leads to queuing and fighting, as dramatized in this video.

When there are more cabs than people who want to hire them at those rates, the cabs will stay away. But if the supply of cabs is capped already, they will all go to where demand is highest: Manhattan.

Of course, there is still a large number of people looking to hire a taxi at a lower rate. Wouldn't it be nice if there were cheaper taxis that they could hail? The black market has provided those in the form of gypsy cabs. But there are problems with those gypsy cabs, which is why we need the borough taxis in the first place.

Since I found out that the law mandated identical pricing for the borough taxis and the yellow taxis, I've been trying to imagine what would happen. Since the yellow taxis don't meet the demand in Manhattan at the current rates, they might not meet it even with additional taxis and higher rates. There would probably be some kind of black market for borough taxis in Manhattan, like an out-of-the-way corner that's not watched by the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

In the "inner boroughs" - the denser neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn, the western Bronx and Western Queens - demand would probably match supply during rush hours, and maybe during nightclub hours, but I'm not sure about other times. If it does, there may be competition from yellow cabs. If it doesn't, it might be hard to find a borough taxi, or their might be another black market strategy to pay lower fares, or maybe even some gypsy cabs.

In the true "outer boroughs" - the areas where taxis face the fiercest competition from private cars - it will be harder to find a borough taxi than it is to find a gypsy cab now. Like I said, suboptimal.

From an efficient market standpoint, the ideal solution would be to have perfectly fluid pricing, with the fare negotiated for every transaction. From my standpoint that would suck, because even though I come from a family of Jewish businesspeople I hate haggling and find it very stressful. It would be nice if it could be all done with computers - just automatically set based on the number of people looking and the number of cabs available in a given area. Unfortunately, we're not there yet.

Stephen Smith loves to tell about the taxis in Romania, where you can tell what the fare will be just by looking at the taxi: the more expensive the car, the higher the fare. But I would settle for two fare structures: yellow and green, with the yellow ones costing (say) 150% of the green ones. Then the city wouldn't have to worry about keeping green taxis from picking up in Manhattan. They'd be free to do that - but they'd probably stay out during rush hours because they'd make more money where there's less congestion.

In any case, this setback is a chance to improve the plan. Let's take it and get the pricing right.

What I would pay for a comfortable ride

Three years ago I wrote a series about comfort, class and transportation. I observed that when it comes to transit, many segments of the population are too old for this shit. Some people are poor enough that they can't afford anything better and have to put up with the subway all the time. Some people take local buses, some take express buses or commuter trains, and some take taxis. Some people buy cars.

I don't want to buy a car. After seeing someone killed by a car, I simply don't want to be the person who kills someone else through a momentary brain fog. That option is closed for me.

I've tried local buses. Here in Queens they're not like local buses in Manhattan. They rarely parallel a subway line, so wherever I go they serve people without any other option. That means they're usually full of people, and at least some of those people don't know how to use cell phones or earphones.

I'd take this minus the seat belts. Photo: NHTSA.

I'd love to take commuter rail or an express bus, and I'd be willing to pay the full $5.50 or $6.25. Unfortunately, the commuter trains from here only go to Penn Station, and I almost never need to go to anything near Penn Station. There are no express buses that stop anywhere in Sunnyside or Woodside - anywhere west of the BQE in fact.

That leaves taxis or car services. But those are just a little too expensive. It's almost always at least $10 including tip to go anywhere in Queens, and usually more. Manhattan is $20 or more. I can afford to pay up to $7 each way, but $20 is not worth it.

I'm not faulting the car services. We're talking one guy who is devoting all his attention (well, maybe 90% of his attention if he's on the phone) to taking me to work. He deserves the money. But I don't really want one guy to be driving just me around. I'd be happy in a bus or a van, with one guy or woman driving six or ten or twenty of us around.

With these choices, you can see why some people buy cars. The best way to get them to stop buying cars is to offer a ride to Manhattan at a higher price point - $5.50, perhaps - and see if enough people will take it. There is a real demand for service that is a cut above the subway. That need is being felt even more urgently today, since I threw my back out last weekend. It would help, of course, if the buses had a lane of their own so that they can be even close to time-competitive with the subway. But I would leave earlier, and pay up to $7.50, for a ride that would guarantee these things:

1. A full-size seat in rush hours
2. A seat with elbow room on off-hours
3. Reasonably clean vehicles and stations
4. Not to have to listen to someone else's music, cell phone conversation, video or video game
5. Not to be asked to accept Jesus
6. Not to be asked to buy peanut M&Ms
7. Not to worry about amateur acrobats making their one big mistake when they're above my head
8. Corridors, stairways and escalators that are not so overburdened that I have to constantly fight left-huggers

I have to say that I myself am bothered by the idea of a more expensive class of transit. I still remember the disgust and disapproval I felt for the first-class cars on the Paris metro and commuter trains. Why would I want to replicate that?

I have to keep reminding myself that there is a class system in transportation, and there always has been. Transit cannot create a classless society by itself.

What is congestion?

A lot of people really care about congestion. A major source of capital funding in this country is the federal Congestion Management and Air Quality grants. Occasionally, in an argument over some aspect of transportation policy, someone will announce, "But your proposal would cause congestion!" and sit back triumphantly, thinking they've just won.

In the past I've argued for congestion pricing, but honestly I just can't get too excited about fighting congestion. If you read my list of goals above, you'll notice that reducing congestion is not on there. Congestion does affect my goals, so I do care on some level, but other factors may outweigh it.

Unfortunately, "congestion is bad" has become such an article of faith that in 2006 when Mayor Bloomberg said "We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here," he was attacked by both car activists and cycling activists. I hope that you, my readers, will be a bit more tolerant.

But what is congestion? I think it's important to distinguish a few different aspects. First of all, congestion is not confined to the movement of vehicles or even people. We can have literal congested arteries, where fat deposits slow or block the flow of blood. We can have sinus and chest congestion, where excess mucus can interfere with our oxygen supply or our elimination of carbon dioxide. There is definitely congestion on electronic data networks, just this evening I heard a podcast where someone was talking about congestion in the power grid, and I imagine there's also congestion in aqueducts and sewers.

Back in the realm of vehicles, the most familiar form is road congestion, but we also have air traffic congestion and rail congestion. Road congestion isn't always vehicles: we can have congestion of bikes, pedestrians, roller skaters or golf carts.

What all these things have in common is trouble with flow. Interestingly, it's not all about speed. Sometimes the overall throughput is satisfactory, but the trouble is that there are stops and starts. Other times the flow is constant but it's too slow. There are also two different sources of congestion: either it comes from increased demand, or from other stuff blocking the duct. For example, in power congestion it's simply that people are trying to force more electrons through a grid of a constant size. In contrast, nasal passages and bronchial tubes stay the same width, but get blocked by mucus. Sudafed works by decreasing the production of mucus, while Mucinex works by thinning the mucus; both reduce the blockage, allowing air to flow better.

We see the same divisions in road congestion. Sometimes people get to where they're going in a reasonable amount of time, but they spend too much time stopping and starting, while other times the cars flow at a steady pace but slowly. Sometimes the traffic pattern induces a large number of cars through a road that isn't built to handle them, while other times it's a whole bunch of low-priority vehicles that block the higher-priority vehicles.

For a concrete example, we can turn to Mike Grynbaum's report from last year about the large number of off-duty taxis heading from Manhattan to Queens and back at 4PM for the change of shift. Just as it's more important for air to flow through our noses and lungs into our bloodstream and back out than for mucus to flow out, it's more important for buses, cars and trucks to get to Queens and back than taxis.

It's not that you don't need to drain mucus from your sinuses, and it's not that the taxis don't need to get to get out to Queens for their change of shift. It's just that the mucus could drain slower and leave more room for you to breathe, and the taxis could travel slower and leave more room for other vehicles. The same is true for all the entitled drivers who could be taking the train or traveling at less congested times.

So there you have it: off-duty taxis and discretionary car trips are the snot of New York's roads. Parking pricing is the Sudafed for that snot, and congestion pricing is Mucinex.

Independent Medallion Driver Option

Here's an email I got from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which is stuck in the Internet of 2002 with Corey Bearak:

To All Interested Parties:
Industry Notice #11-31                                                           November 21, 2011
For Immediate Release

 Owner Must Drive Rules &
the Independent Medallion Driver Option

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) recently modified its Owner Must Drive Rules to allow a Medallion owner to designate, under an Independent Medallion Driver Option, an Independent Medallion Driver for a one year period beginning on January 1 of each calendar year. The designation form MUST be submitted to the TLC by November 1 of the current year for the upcoming year (for example, a designation for Calendar Year 2013 must be submitted to the TLC no later than November 1, 2012).

The Independent Medallion Driver selected would be responsible for satisfying the owner’s service requirement. One change of the designated driver will be allowed during the calendar year period. If the designated driver does not cover the required shifts, the owner of the medallion MUST drive the vehicle themselves to make up the difference.

The form that will need to be completed by both the Medallion Owner and the selected Driver can be found at the following locations on our website:
 http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/ind_med_driver_desig_removal_app.pdf ,
 http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/licenses/medallion_main.shtml.

The form lists the documents and the payment amount that are required by the TLC for this option to be selected. Failure to complete the form in its entirety and to provide all required documents and payment will result in the request being denied.

The standard annual filing deadline of November 1, 2011 for the upcoming year has been extended to December 23, 2011 for those medallion owners seeking to designate a driver under the Owner Must Drive Option for Calendar Year 2012. This is a one-time extension of the deadline. Future selection documents, beginning with the 2012 submissions for Calendar Year 2013, must be filed by November 1 of the current year for the following calendar year. Late filed documents will NOT be accepted.

Forbidden Taxi Apps

I got an interesting email today from the Taxi and Limousine Commission:

To All Interested Parties:

Industry Notice #11-15
July 1, 2011
For Immediate Release

Attention: For-Hire Vehicle drivers
receiving dispatches via smartphone apps

There has been a recent increase in the development and use of smartphone applications (or apps) for purposes of requesting and dispatching for-hire vehicle trips. While the use of these apps by for-hire vehicles and for-hire vehicle bases is permitted, this use must be in compliance with TLC regulations.

What's this all about? It's about apps like Uber, Taxi Magic and Mobile Dispatch. The first two allow users to reserve cars from any of several car services, while Mobile Dispatch is customized for a particular base. That can be tricky, because the bases all use different dispatching software, not all compatible.

This means that for-hire vehicle owners and drivers may NOT contract directly with a smartphone app developer, without the approval and involvement of their bases. If you are accepting dispatches via a smartphone app that is not authorized by the base you are affiliated with, you are doing so in violation of TLC regulations.

It looks like some car service drivers are going straight to the app managers for calls, bypassing the bases. Of course, this is exactly what they've been doing with street hails as well. When you think about it, Uber and Taxi Magic are really running their own dispatch service, which makes you wonder why a driver would need a base. Why don't the app developers register as bases themselves? I'm guessing they don't want a turf war. But because they're not registered as bases, it's a violation of TLC regulations to get calls from them directly.

If you are unsure whether a smartphone app you may be using is going through your base, you should contact your base immediately. If you have further questions about whether an app conforms to TLC regulations, you can contact TLC at the following email address: DispatchApps@tlc.nyc.gov.

Note that this is a big enough deal for the TLC to create a special email account. In case you're wondering why bases have to exist at all, my feeling is that it provides some accountability. Good base operators police their drivers, with various discipline measures against drivers who don't follow the rules. The TLC in turn polices the bases. Of course, the TLC directly polices many of the yellow cabs, so it's not impossible to arrange it that way.

Attention: Yellow Medallion Taxicab Drivers

This is a reminder that you are NOT permitted to use smartphone apps for dispatch. As a yellow medallion taxi driver, you may only pick up passengers that hail you.

It's funny, I just assumed that if you wanted to you could get the number of a yellow cab company and call it, but apparently not. It seems like smartphones would be useful for yellow cabs as well; I don't really see a reason for the TLC to ban them. Hopefully they'll get over they're bureaucratic inertia.

These players are all clearly jockeying for position. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Will the market be dominated by one app, or will there be fragmentation? Will it be regulated by the TLC?

It seems like one factor that could help things along would be an open standard for taxi dispatch. What if all the apps and dispatching software spoke the same language, and then bases could join up with different app providers as they chose? What if all taxis spoke the same language, so that they could communicate with different bases electronically? I'd be interested to hear from people at the Open Planning Project about this.

If I had 10,000,000,000...

... I would buy out John Aston and every one of the current taxi medallion owners who believe they've made an investment in "the American dream," but don't understand or care that investments are gambles, and that the government has no responsibility to guarantee their investment.

All you taxi rentiers, please take your $800,000 and get out. Anyone who is willing to hold the city hostage to ensure their rate of return does not deserve to do business here. I don't want you paying people like Ethan Gerber, Fernando Mateo or Lew Fidler to stand in front of City Hall and spew garbage about killing jobs, community service and local control. You want a guaranteed investment? Put $250,000 in a savings account, or buy Treasury bills.

Contrast this attitude with Bhairavi Desai, who simply negotiated some measures to mitigate the impact of these changes on her members. Let's hope that the other groups are bluffing too, and that over the next few days they'll take their concessions and quietly walk away.

Fernando Mateo actually told the Times, "It’s better that we keep the status quo as it is. Why create change? It’s not right. I don’t understand what the mentality at City Hall really is right now."

Well, Mr. Mateo, it's really pretty simple. As "the Changeling" in Bed-Stuy writes, (1) from a distance it's hard to tell whether a car is a livery cab and whether it's already taken, (2) the honking that substitutes for availability lights is annoying, (3) haggling is difficult, and some passengers resort to flirting, (4) some cars and drivers are unlicensed and some dispatchers are unprofessional.

That's why we want to create change: to replace the messed-up system of illegal street hails with a professional service that people in the outer boroughs can rely on so that they don't feel as much pressure to blow their hard-earned money on a private car. That's better for New Yorkers and better for the environment. That's what the mentality at City Hall is right now.

According to the Times, Matteo also "said that he feared that if livery cars began picking up passengers on the streets, fewer of those cars would be available to respond to radio calls and pick up people who do not live near major thoroughfares." Well, no. If there's demand for radio calls and the current drivers aren't fulfilling it, then new drivers can come in to fill the gap. After all, there's no cap on the number of people who can respond to radio calls. Is a successful entrepreneur like him really so ignorant of basic issues of supply and demand, or is he bullshitting?

When taxis are too cheap

As I wrote last month, taxi service has "an availability problem in Manhattan at peak periods. During rush hour in the rain you can stand for a long time, and fights over taxis are not uncommon." Whenever you have a set price for something regardless of supply and demand, you're going to get gluts and shortages, and there are shortages at peak times in Manhattan.

It's not always your typical rush hour. Back in the 90s, the Tuesday Night Skate would often ride up Sixth Avenue around 10-11PM, and when we got to the Rockefeller Center area there were always people standing with their hands raised. At first I thought they were giving us high fives, but they ignored me when I got closer. Eventually I realized that they were hailing cabs. There were quite a few of them, and I think they had just gotten out of Broadway theaters or Radio City Music Hall. You see the same scene on Bleecker Street, or anywhere there's evening entertainment.

Some people have opted out of the system entirely. At the Trump luxury condos on Riverside Boulevard, the city is considering setting aside curb space for the black cars that the residents have hired because taxis won't cruise that part of town.

These shortages are bad for the city. As anyone who's ever waited for a cab knows, they're a special kind of pain in the ass because you have to be constantly alert. If you go into the newsstand to get some Altoids, a cab could go right by and you wouldn't see it. If you get too wrapped up in that tweet you're sending, that jerk in the suit could grab your taxi. Meanwhile, you and that jerk in the suit, and everyone else with their hands in the air on Columbus Avenue, are standing around waiting when you could be doing something productive with your time, or at least something fun or relaxing.

The low prices are bad for cab drivers. If the fares could rise to meet demand, the drivers could potentially make enough during rush hours to pay their rent for the day. Then they could go take a nap or work on their novels instead of cruising the island like madmen. That would work for a while, at least until the medallion owners figure out what's up and jack up their rent.

Of course, the combination of low set fares and artificially scarce supply is particularly moronic.

The ideal would be a dynamic pricing system. I've mentioned "the thumb" before - the device that Douglas Adams invented for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that allows a user to flag down a passing spaceship. In the comments, Nathan H. linked to a review of Uber, which is essentially a new car service "base" that works via text message or iPhone or Android app.

Uber's price system is also fixed, a bit higher than the yellow cabs, but their Twitter feed is full of apologies for shortages. That may be good marketing strategy during the product launch, but people will abandon the system if it's not reliable over the long run.

With a Thumb system like this, you could vary the price depending on the number of hails from a particular area at a given time. It could be a $7 drop charge at 3PM on a Tuesday, a $2 drop charge at 10AM on a Saturday, and a $20 drop charge at 11PM on a Friday. You could probably even build price discrimination into it, offering loyalty fares and allowing customers to set price ceilings. You could even allow competitive bidding, so that you could outbid that jerk in the suit.

Even without this kind of dynamic pricing, though, you could still vary prices by time of day. The original Bloomberg congestion pricing plan included a $1 congestion surcharge for taxis between 6AM and 6PM. The Carl Kruger plan that was eventually adopted kept the taxi surcharge (reduced to 50 cents), but imposed it 24/7.

For the sake of cab drivers and customers, the city should adopt a pricing plan with at least three tiers, with the top tier high enough to discourage waiting and the low tier low enough to make it worthwhile to cruise the "inner boroughs" at some times of day. And of course they should remove limits on the overall supply of yellow cabs.

Vested interests

On Friday, I quoted Ruben Diaz, Jr. ("the Reasonable") about the City's borough taxi proposal: "We want to find a way to decriminalize street hails and at the same time not devalue the yellow medallions that so many people have invested so much in." In a comment on my last post, longtime reader NY Taxi Photo echoed this, "paying for a medallion is paying for such permissions, and shouldn't be limited after such a contract is purchased."

These quotes really encapsulate everything that I've been fighting against for the entire existence of this blog, and everything that Streetsblog has been fighting against. Brooklyn Spoke found a great quote from "Senior for Safety," Jasmine Meltzer back in 1984: "All we wanted was what we had." Meltzer was talking about the right to double-park without being subject to the penalties specified by the law, but Doug observed that she could just as well be talking about the ability to double-park on Prospect Park West without being uncomfortably close to the speeding cars.

All Meltzer wants is what she had. That's all that the taxi medallion owners want too. That's all America's drivers and politicians want, too - the cheap gas and open roads that they had. All East 57th Street business owners want is the parking they had. All Tim Hughes wants is the right he had to drop off his bottled water and Goya beans at his curb on 34th Street. All Kvetch Greenfield wants is clear streets after a snowfall, which he had.

You can say that about almost every post I've ever written, every Streetsblog post, every post by Larry Littlefield. People fight for safety, they fight for fairness, they fight for clean air, they fight to keep our energy supply from being used up. They come up with an idea that will make a contribution towards one of these things. Sometimes it's a small idea, sometimes it's a big idea.

Sometimes it's not an idea at all, or not an idea about carnage or global warming or access. Sometimes it's just a change in something else, like the size of the snowfall, or the number of snowfalls, or the size of the new subway stationhouse. But whatever it is, it can't get in the way of what "we" had.

The law is irrelevant to "what we had." Sometimes it is explicitly respected by the law, like the "right" to free bridges paid for by income and sales taxes. Sometimes the law says nothing about it, like the "right" to own a house or a taxi medallion that never goes down in value. Sometimes it is actually forbidden by the law, like the "right" to double park without being ticketed. Legal or illegal, if "we" had it, it must continue.

Notice the "we" there. Because "we" doesn't mean the people who have had nice wide sidewalks on Broadway. It doesn't mean the people who've (sorta) had crosswalks clear of snow. It doesn't mean the livery cab drivers who've had the right to pick up street hails in the outer boroughs without too much enforcement. It means the powerful: the drivers on Broadway, the drivers on the snowy streets of Queens, the yellow cab medallion owners.

Sometimes it's important to realize that what "we" had hurts other people. What "we" had contributes to hundreds of deaths every year. What "we" had is causing crazy tornadoes in Massachusetts. What you had is causing oil wars. What "we" had is stifling the economy of the United States.

Sometimes we need to give up some of what we had so that others can have a little more. Now we need to give up some of what we had so that our grandchildren can have anything. There's a word for that: community.

Screwing the livery cab drivers

Before I say anything more about taxis in New York, I should point out that I have a financial interest in this issue. I have a business relationship with a livery car service, and another business relationship with an insurance agent for livery cars. If they go out of business it could affect my income.

I should also point out that they're not very reliable customers, they're a small part of my income, and I don't feel much loyalty towards them. If I felt it were necessary to achieve my goals (listed above), I wouldn't hesitate to promote policies that could reduce or eliminate their ability to pay me. But I do know them, and I think that's something you should know.

The fact is, as I wrote a month ago, the availability of taxis does contribute towards our goals, as it complements the public transit system to provide a complete transportation solution. This is supported by a recent guest piece for the Urbanophile showing maps of taxi hail density in Boston. However, in order to be really convincing that map would have to show taxi hails per capita and per workstation, to control for population density.

In the comments to my last post, Stephen Smith asked, "But would legalizing outer borough livery hail really affect the price of medallions? If the numbers that I common hear recited are true – that only 3% of all medallion fares come from outside Manhattan below 96th and the airports – then they should experience a 3% drop in value, at most."

This is an excellent question, and it seems pretty clear that Stephen is right - the livery cabs are not a threat to the medallion owners. The other explanation is that the outer borough taxi hails are perceived by the medallion owners as a potential revenue source that the livery drivers are squatting on. The city is essentially asking for a $300 million bribe, and promising in return to drive the livery cabs out of the street-hail business so that the medallion cabs can take over.

The livery cab owners (and their insurance agents) are pretty mad about this, and are planning a rally for Monday. The plan needs to be approved by the State Legislature, and the livery owners are trying to get it modified. Will they succeed? Maybe, if it comes down to fairness. The livery cab owners have put in years of "sweat equity" picking up lower-income passengers. Why should the medallion owners get to muscle in, just because they have some extra cash?

The livery drivers will probably not succeed if it comes down to raw power: 22,000 middle-class Latinos and Pakistanis against the politically connected, financially endowed owners of 13,000 medallions. The outer-borough populist politicians have generally not bothered to say anything in support of the livery cab owners. The main exception is the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Some of them, like Assemblymember José Rivera, have actually driven livery cabs in the past.

Why not just expand the yellow cabs?

Last week I discussed the City's plan to add 1,500 new citywide taxi medallions and 6,000 new "borough taxi" medallions that would only allow the driver to pick up passengers outside of Manhattan (and presumably in Manhattan north of 96th Street). I mentioned two alternate proposals that would be much simpler: to just add citywide medallions until drivers started cruising the boroughs, and to simply convert all the existing livery cabs to "borough taxis" with the right to pick up street hails. Why didn't the City choose one of those?

There are three reasons I can think of. One is that the medallions would be auctioned off. As Joel put it in the comments, "I estimate the value of outerborough medallions at $50,000 each. $50,000 x 6,000 is a lot of money." $300 million to be exact. The City is looking at budget shortfalls, and would love to be able to plug $300 million of those holes without raising taxes.

Another reason for this two-tier approach was articulated by the Administration's designated mediator with the livery cabs, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. (also known as "the reasonable Ruben Diaz"). Diaz said, "We want to find a way to decriminalize street hails and at the same time not devalue the yellow medallions that so many people have invested so much in." That last part is the key.

The idea that the government has a responsibility to maintain the "value" - that's resale value, mind you - of medallions. makes me so hopping mad. We've got enough investor value to prop up, including FDIC-insured bank accounts and the various types of government bonds. We really didn't need another one, but that's what we set up in the 1930s - essentially a backdoor bond system.

The Master Cabbie has an interesting introduction to the economics of taxi medallions. He claims that they are a good investment because their values are countercyclical - that they go up when the rest of the economy goes down, because the supply of taxi drivers increases. This makes them a good hedge against cyclical investments like the stock market.

Selling bonds can benefit a city in two ways. First, they bring in money. Second, they turn the bondholders into allies on the project, because the bondholders want to recoup their investment. So the taxi medallions bring in money, but they also attract powerful champions for the taxi system.

In return, the city has to repay the bonds when they come due - except they don't buy back taxi medallions, and the medallions never mature. They also need to keep the bond market up - but that's so that they can sell more bonds when they need to. People like Ruben Diaz Jr. want to keep the value of taxi medallions high only because the medallion owners are wealthy and powerful, and nobody wants to piss them off. Which is not really a good reason.

Basically, the taxi system in New York is being held hostage by a small group of powerful investors who don't want to see their investment diluted. And Bloomberg, Goldsmith and Yassky don't seem interested in doing anything about it.

Why new medallions?

We've seen the problems with the taxi system as it is. The Bloomberg administration's "Borough taxi" proposal is pretty complicated. The City will auction off 1,500 new citywide taxi medallions, and the bidders will get 6,000 new "borough only" medallions. The details are hazy, but it sounds like if you buy one citywide medallion, you get four "borough only" medallions free.

Why such a complicated proposal? Let's look at some other possibilities. First, what if the city got rid of the medallion system and simply charged a nominal fee to every taxi driver? Yellow cabs are already charged $550 per year, and livery cabs pay $275 per year. So $550 a year and you can operate a yellow cab anywhere in the city.

I would imagine that most of the livery cabs would convert to yellow cabs as soon as they could. You'd see a lot more taxis in Manhattan at rush hour, and less in the "inner boroughs." On off-hours, though, you'd see a lot more taxis in the boroughs because there just wouldn't be enough demand in Manhattan for all the cruising cars. Would the quality of driving in Manhattan decrease? I'm not convinced. Certainly, reliability in the inner boroughs would go way up. Would there be taxis cruising outer neighborhoods like Bellerose and Throgs Neck? Doubtful. So this would help the availability problem in Manhattan and solve the reliability problem in the inner boroughs, but it might reduce availability in the inner boroughs.

What if instead we added some yellow cabs, and then converted all the livery cabs to "borough taxis"? The borough taxis would be painted a uniform color scheme and outfitted with meters and availability lights, and allowed to pick up street hails and set up legal taxi stands - but only outside of Manhattan below 96th Street. There would be a fee, but it would be lower than that for yellow cabs. The additional yellow cabs would take care of the availability problem in Manhattan, and the standard color, lights and meters would take care of the reliability problem in the boroughs. The availability problem in the outer boroughs would remain unaddressed.

So why make it so complicated? There are people who claim that yellow taxis are safer, but the medallion system only reduces the pool of drivers, it doesn't come with any additional safety requirements. In fact, Bruce Schaller found that livery cabs have 3.7 livery crashes per million miles traveled, as opposed to 4.6 yellow taxi crashes. You could argue that taxis cause congestion, so we want to keep the overall number of taxis down, but the medallion system just winds up concentrating them in the area with the most congestion - Manhattan below 96th Street. A congestion pricing system - even one just for taxis - would be a more effective solution.

Stay tuned for the answer.