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.

The problems with the current taxi system as it is

A couple weeks ago, I observed that taxis can help us with our goals of reducing pollution, carnage and obesity and increasing efficiency, fairness and social connections. But they can only do that by making it easy for people not to own a car, and they can only accomplish that by being available and reliable. I would add that they need to be affordable - cheaper than a car, when used in combination with transit, cycling and walking.

The yellow cab system in Manhattan serves our goals. My father is an example: he ran a successful small business for twenty years without a driver's license, using taxis when he needed to transport moderately heavy equipment. Thousands of Manhattanites rely on yellow cabs for all kinds of trips where they feel that buses and subways are inadequate.

The de facto gypsy cab system in the "inner boroughs" (roughly, Manhattan north of 96th Street, the Bronx west of the Bronx River, Queens west of Flushing Meadows and Forest Park, Brooklyn west of Kings Highway, and Staten Island north of the Staten Island Expressway) is also pretty successful at integrating with transit to provide an alternative to car ownership. To the extent it succeeds, it does so because it's available (the gypsy cabs cruise the streets and respond to hails) and affordable (the rates are often lower than yellow cab fares for comparable trips).

Reliability is the big question in the "inner boroughs." "The Changeling" on the Bed-Stuy Blog gives a list of shortcomings: (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.

In the true outer boroughs (the South Shore of Staten Island and the eastern parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens), the problem is availability. The car services simply don't cruise. And honestly, there's also 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.

In essence, there are three problems, then: availability problems in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, and reliability problems in the "inner boroughs." So what can we do about these problems? I'll take a look at some of the Bloomberg administration's proposals in future posts.

The problem with "demand response"

As I mentioned in my previous posts about New York taxis, the system is set up so that legally, the only vehicles that are allowed to respond to street hails are the yellow cabs. The "livery cabs" are legally required to pick up passengers only if they've arranged the service in advance, by contacting the "base." In practice, no matter how many times the city cracks down on livery cabs waiting at informal stands and picking up street hails, they still do it and people still ride.

I've heard allegations that livery cab drivers are less safe than yellow cab drivers. Anecdotally, I've heard about as many horror stories about both and had as many negative experiences with both. I have no idea if anyone's studied crash rates or anything like that with a more systematic method. Even if the livery cabs are less safe, people still ride.

Why do people still ride? Because we want convenience. I regularly travel to a destination that's about twenty minutes by car and forty-five by transit. If I'm short on time I'll take a taxi, but I won't call a car service. The one time I did call a car service, it took fifteen minutes for the car to show up, so I might as well have taken the train. Now I walk five minutes to Queens Boulevard and hail the first taxi that comes along, yellow cab or livery.

This is the reason why every time a functioning transit system has been replaced with one of those "demand response" travesties, demand has gone down. A captive audience like lower and middle-income disabled people have no choice but to arrange their schedules around a ride arranged a day in advance. Anyone else will bike, walk or buy a car. That's what happened in Montgomery, and that's what happens in the "two fare zones" in the outer boroughs that don't have enough carfree households to support a taxi system.

In this age of ubiquitous connections, I could imagine something like the "thumb" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that would signal your availability to the nearest car service. That might cut down on cruising, but in practical terms all it would do would be to make hailing a livery cab legal.

In the "inner boroughs," where owning a car is expensive in both time and money, many people will simply risk violating the law by hailing a livery cab, and the drivers will take the greater risk in picking them up. As long as the current system is in place that will continue, unless the city floods the streets with TLC enforcement officers, and we all know they won't spend that kind of money.

New York yellow cabs in practice

Regular commenter Helen "Trainstar" Bushnell's reaction to my post about taxis made me realize that I hadn't been entirely clear. The medallion "yellow cabs" are allowed to pick up street hails anywhere in the city, but they normally don't cruise anywhere other than Manhattan below 96th Street or the airports.

Yellow cab drivers are also known to refuse to take passengers outside of this zone, even though they are required to by law. There's an old joke about a guy who hails a cab in Midtown and asks to be taken to London. The cab driver says, "sure, why not?" and drives onto a cargo ship bound for Southampton. After a few days at sea they disembark and drive to Trafalgar Square, where the passenger pays and leaves. A few minutes later someone flags down the taxi and says, "Boy am I glad to see you! Can you take me back to New York?" The cab driver says, "What address?" and the woman says, "Eight Prospect Park West." The cab driver's face turns sour and he says, "Lady, I don't go to Brooklyn."

I usually get in the cab before I tell the driver where I'm going, but that doesn't always work. So why don't yellow cab drivers want to serve these areas?

Some say that there is too much crime in those areas, and there's definitely some truth to that (but not in places like Park Slope). The main reason is that they make a lot more money in Manhattan below 96th Street. The density of people without cars is much higher, and the people tend to be wealthier.

Okay, you may be thinking, but then why aren't there other yellow cab drivers to cruise the outer boroughs? Surely there's still money to be made there? The problem is that there are no other yellow cab drivers. The city limits the total number of medallions, and rarely increases that number. The medallions are also mostly owned by absentee rentiers who lease them to drivers, and these leases skim off a large percentage of the income.

The drivers could charge more to serve the outer boroughs, but they are forbidden by law from charging anything other than the meter rate. That leaves a vacuum in the outer boroughs, which has been filled by the car services. Because the number of car service licenses is virtually unlimited, there is not the same problem with rent-seeking that you find with medallion owners. This brings the cost of a trip to the individual driver way down, allowing him or her to charge a lower rate to reflect the lower demand in the outer boroughs, and still make a profit.

Sounds like a good system. What's the problem? We'll see...

New York City taxis as they are, and as people want them to be

If you've been a little puzzled by recent coverage of various taxi-related issues in the media lately, don't feel bad. It's not your fault. For some reason, the news organizations and blogs seem more interested in talking about the way someone wants to see the system work, or the way someone says the system works, or the way the law says the system works, and not much interested in describing how the system actually works.

For example, you may have noticed that the Bloomberg administration is trying to get taxis to pick up passengers outside of Manhattan. Then you read that the Bloomberg administration is punishing taxi drivers that pick up passengers outside of Manhattan. Nobody points out the inconsistencies.

In this post I'll try to give you my understanding of how for-hire passenger transportation works in the city, as actually practiced. And yes, I'll call them all taxis.

First, you have the "medallion cabs," which number a little over 13,000. These are all painted yellow by law with lights on top to indicate availability. By law they charge set fees based on distance and time, as measured by meters. They are allowed to pick up passengers by being hailed on the street, but they mostly pick up in Manhattan below 96th Street and to the airports. They are often based in Queens, and may pick up passengers between their bases and Manhattan.

Then you have the "livery cabs," also called "car services" or "gypsy cabs." The vehicles are usually Lincoln Town Cars with license plates that read "T" followed by a long string of digits. They can be any color but yellow, and almost never have lights on top. Livery cars are all associated with a "base" with a dedicated dispatcher, and they may display stickers identifying their base. The fees may be posted on the base's website, but are often negotiable.

Most passengers hire a livery cab by calling the dispatcher or walking into the base. Some services can be reserved by email or text message. Many accept corporate accounts. By law, drivers are forbidden to pick up passengers who hail them on the street. In practice, they cruise any street with reasonably heavy pedestrian traffic north of 96th Street or outside Manhattan. Because they have no lights on top, they indicate their availability by tapping their horns at passing pedestrians.

"Black cars" are the highest-quality, best-maintained livery cabs, usually painted black. The black car services only accept corporate accounts, and often have standing arrangements to bring employees to work and back. Many companies have a "guaranteed ride home" policy where any employee who works later than a certain time (such as 9PM) is entitled to a black car ride home at the company's expense.

Every once in a while you'll also see a plan to create taxi stands in the outer boroughs. For some reason they never mention that there are already taxi stands in several locations near major transit hubs. There are two near me in Queens. Of course they're completely illegal: the drivers feed the meters in commercial parking spaces. But they're there.

In practice, then, you can hail a yellow cab in Manhattan below 96th Street. You can hail a livery cab or find a taxi stand in the rest of Manhattan or in the subway-accessible outer boroughs. In the rest of the city, the former "two fare zone," you can typically only get a ride by calling a car service.

That's the way it is. Some people would like it to be different, and they have various plans to bring that about. In future posts I'll talk about some of these complaints and proposals.

Manhattan - and Long Island City - parking maxima

Today I tweeted about a plot of land for sale in Long Island City, right on top of the ditch for the Long Island Railroad East Side Access project. It's around the corner from the Queens Plaza subway station (E, M and R trains) and a couple blocks from the Queensboro Plaza el station (N, Q and 7 trains). It wraps around "Clock Tower Plaza," the very nice 1927 Art Deco Bank of Manhattan building; you can see in this Forgotten NY page that there used to be a very forgettable modern three-story building at that location. And if you made the April 1st bid deadline, that land can be yours for only $9,500,000!

What got Stephen Smith interested (I'm assuming it was him tweeting @MarketUrbanism) was when I mentioned that there is no parking required for this land. Stephen didn't know that most of Long Island City has no parking minimum, and asked about other parking minima and maxima in the area. If Stephen doesn't know about it, a lot of other people probably don't. You can look it up in the Zoning Resolution (PDF), but a lot of people get intimidated by zoning documents, so I figure I'll read it for you and put it all down here for handy reference.

First of all, there is an area (is it the only area in the United States?) where there are no parking minima (except for public housing projects). This includes Manhattan Community Districts 1 through 8, meaning everything south of 110th Street on the West Side and 96th Street on the East Side (except Roosevelt Island, which is its own beast). It also includes the "Long Island City Subject Area," in the core of LIC, essentially everything in Queens west of 29th Street and south of 41st Avenue.

As Stephen asked, there are in fact parking maxima for these areas. In Manhattan south of 60th Street it's one space for 20% of the new dwellings. North of 60th Street it's one space for 35% of new dwellings. In the part of LIC northwest of the Sunnyside Yards it's one per 50%, and in the rest of LIC it's one per dwelling unit.

In practice, in Long Island City the developers always seem to want to build more apartments than they're allowed as of right, so they keep going to the community board for variances, and the community board demands lots of parking. I'm pretty sure that's how all the parking along Fifth Street got built. And of course there was the recent freak-out over the size of parking to be built at the new building on the south side of the plaza.

All things considered, though, I think this zoning has been very good for LIC. I'm surprised we haven't seen similar districts in other high-density, transit-rich areas outside Manhattan, like Downtown Brooklyn, Jamaica or the Bronx Hub, or north of 96th Street like 181st Street in Washington Heights.

Taxi networks and car ownership

As I wrote in my last post, taxi networks help us the most with our goals when they help people to renounce car ownership, or to avoid it altogether. If people are already paying $8000 a year to own a car, a few twenty dollar cab rides are just an added expense, but if those cab rides can save them the $8000 a year, that's a good deal.

There are always going to be some people who say, "This is really frustrating. I'm selling my car and taking buses and taxis!" and others who say "This is really frustrating. I'm buying a car so I don't have to take buses and taxis any more!" Our goal is to see the car sellers outnumber the car buyers. To be attractive as an alternative to owning a car, taxis have to be everywhere and they have to be reliable. Let me give you an example.

A few weeks ago I was doing some business out in Eastern Queens, and I wanted to get back home quick. Normally I would take a bus and two subways, which can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour and a quarter. I knew that a taxi could get me home in 20-30 minutes. So I went to look for a taxi. No taxi. Taxis don't cruise the streets of Eastern Queens.

Normally, I have the numbers of a few car services in my phone, but they're all out of the neighborhood, so it would have taken them at least twenty minutes to pick me up. That would have defeated the purpose of saving time. So I wound up taking transit. On a later visit I got the number of a local car service, and that worked well.

I could have looked up "taxi" in Google Maps and called the closest one, but there are some car services that you really need to avoid. Many companies are great, but some have dangerous drivers, bad service or dirty cars.

This is why people can't rely on taxis to replace a car in many parts of the city. In these specific cases, a private car was more convenient, and would have given me more freedom and independence than a taxi. This is the problem that Bloomberg and Yassky are trying to solve with their "Borough taxi" plans. I wish I thought that any of those plans would work.