Responding in part to the specious claims that ride hailing is increasing urban congestion, New York’s city council voted last week to limit the number of ride-hailing drivers. The council also voted to impose minimum-wage requirements on Uber, Lyft, and other companies even though they contend that their drivers are contractors, not employees.
The Antiplanner is sympathetic to taxi companies who feel their industry has a competitive disadvantage because it is more heavily regulated than Uber and Lyft. I’m not at all sympathetic to the transit industry that gets $50 billion a year in subsidies — that’s around $5 per trip.
The solution for taxi drivers is to deregulate the taxis, not to more heavily regulate ride hailing. The minimum-wage requirement is particularly objectionable because, as near as I can tell, minimum-wage laws don’t apply to taxi drivers because they, too, are independent contractors.
Ultimately, the people we should care about are not the taxi drivers, the Uber and Lyft drivers, or transit agencies, but consumers. New York has a long history of stifling competition in order to protect transportation companies, at the expense of transportation consumers. Yet it is really the consumers who count, and they end up collectively paying a lot more so that a few people can get a little more. It turns out that even the socialist politicians who run New York City appear to care more about the few than the many.
I’m not sympathetic to the taxi industry, They instigated this…. 60-70 years ago, anyone could buy a car, paint the word taxi on it and he was in business for himself. New York hyper-regulated taxi industry now requires 900,000 dollars for a license taxi medallion just to operate…. they can no longer be in business for themselves. Then the industry lobbied govt to keep the number of taxi’s available to a minimum.
I must comment on “… even the socialist politicians who run New York City appear to care more about the few than the many.”
In everywhere that socialism has been in power, it has always cared about the few and oppressed the many. The USSR, Cuba, Venezuela and Communist China always ended up with the party leaders living like kings and the peasants living worse than when they were actually peasants.