http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/don-big-bill-article-1.14... FROM ARTICLE "A review of all contributions to de Blasio raised by or made by taxi lawyers, owners and other associates in the 2013 campaign tallies $254,451, making them de Blasio’s biggest backers by far. Fleet owner Ron Sherman is the most powerful taxi leader, just as his father Donald was in the 1980s before he was convicted in a federal felony case, and he orchestrated the de Blasio deluge of support."
By 2014 it was over half a million dollars [1]. This bill's proponents on the City Council were similarly endowed.
[1] https://nypost.com/2014/05/17/taxi-industry-gave-de-blasio-o...
The bulk of Uber's ~$2 million/year of political spending in New York goes towards ad campaigns [1]. The taxi lobby bought the mayor and City Council; Uber created a grassroots backlash. This was the balance. Then Uber burned off its teflon coating.
Since Lyft never bothered with politics and Juno/Gett is so young, the balance broke and we got this mess.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/uber-spent-1-2m-lob...
I think we come away with quite different reactions to the same facts: I view it as telling that Uber spent roughly four times what the taxi lobby spent, but most of the conversational focus regarding spending targets the taxi lobby - one of many widespread biases in which some bits of the for-hire transportation debate get more frequently talked about and others usually overlooked.
The (legitimately real) rank and file support and skewed discussion focus which Uber's ad/lobbying money has bought them isn't my idea of grassroots backlash, even if it unwittingly enlists the grassroots in their PR campaign.
No doubt the taxi lobby is pushing their interests just like Uber pushes theirs. Neither set of industry lobbyists is truly looking out for the citizens.
But when the conversation they've shaped pairs "bought the mayor and City Council" for the less-spending party with "created a grassroots backlash" for the more-spending party, I can only marvel impressed and saddened at Uber PR's effectiveness.
In most cities, the local taxi lobby plus the citizens who oppose Uber/Lyft/Juno/Gett for normal public policy reasons are even more outclassed against a major VC-funded global would-be monopolist like Uber than NYC managed. I'm impressed at de Blasio and City Council for holding firm.
(As you can tell, I'm no fan of these companies for several reasons, but explaining those reasons substantively would be a huge tangent.)
Uber spent four times as the taxi lobby spent on a single politician. I don't know what the taxi industry's total is. Given they shower tens of thousands of dollars on even state senators [1], I'd wager it's comparable to Uber's.
[1] https://nypost.com/2018/01/27/taxi-committee-head-got-thousa...
(Big apples to big apples, maybe, given the city in question?)
I can no longer edit my grandparent comment to account for your correction, so this will have to do.
But if public opinion is mobilized as a weapon through very selective presentation of the issues in ads, in a disproportionate way that leaves the public with a skewed picture of the pros and cons, it has the same indirect effect of pressuring the politicians to act in the company's interests. The public can't react in their own interests if they don't have the right facts, so then polls will legitimately show what the company wants, by and large.
Roughly the same problem arises if they fund a heavy "lobby your elected officials" campaign, targeted only at their supporters, with no equivalent resources mobilizing those who disagree - and indeed they did this.
Then the other side has to also fund public campaigns, instead of just lining the politician's pockets.
> it has the same indirect effect of pressuring the politicians to act in the company's interests.
Yeah but one thing is lobbying and a very different one is "I fund your campaign if you benefit me economically". That's a soft version of bribery. Can't put it in the same level as propaganda ads that change public opinion on a topic.
Public versus private view, public versus private benefit. Ads put me--the voter--in the equation. A campaign donation removes me from it.
Not sure where bribery entered the conversation. The person I was replying to said that Uber spent $2 million / year on legal expenditures to affect the debate in NY, mostly through advertising.
I have no reason to assume that this was any more bribery than PR campaigns and lobbying generally are, and indeed I presume it didn't go beyond that.
The mention of the taxi lobby having "bought" de Blasio and the City Council was from the comment I was replying to, which I quoted to marvel at the tone of the conversation which Uber has managed to shape so favorably.
And the public support which I said Uber has "bought" is, as I noted, "legitimately real" - they just fed skewed information to the public, which is not a bribe.
(They do give lots of loss-leader promotional incentives to make people use and like their service, but we usually categorize that as marketing and not bribery without elements that are absent here.)
For example, I see HSBC's ads incessantly at airports about how they value customer service, but 5+ personal interactions with the bank proved otherwise and no amount of ad spending can get me to suddenly get on message boards and support HSBC. They could spend 10x for all I care and I still wouldnt use their bank...and certainly would never get on message boards to support their product.
What ride hailing apps did is make rides available to a giant sector of the population who didn't previously have any reasonable alternative. That makes me (both through my experience, and that of my mother) spend my valuable time on message boards arguing in favor of ride hailing apps.
A one line summary of my mom's very limited anecdote: for a frail elderly POC frequenting hospital trips in Manhattan and traveling back to Brooklyn -- there was life before Uber and life after Uber. For excited consumers, it has to do with the product, not ads.
NYC has traditionally used that for the same purpose as Uber, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are underserved areas or racial discrimination by the dispatchers.
The biggest example of skewed information in PR (whether ads or official statements) is when they promote how much cheaper they are than the traditional alternatives. While it's often completely true, that's only the case because of their huge VC-funded warchest.
This is a major omission from many people's public policy opinion-forming: They're subsidizing rides and losing money in a way that local customer-funded competitors can't match, moving market share toward either a monopoly (as they'd prefer) or an oligopoly (including Lyft etc). Previously NYC taxi and car service companies were diverse small competitors.
Once they get enough of a collective stranglehold, or once VC funding gets sick of them waiting for self-driving cars to greatly reduce their cost of goods sold (drivers aren't cheap) in the rough and tumble real world, they'll raise prices and there will be either a captive audience or another rough societal readjustment period.
People might still think the speculative future pain is worth the tradeoff, but "cheaper" is a skewers truth without the context. The context lets them consider the full picture when forming their opinion.
But yeah, a frail elderly POC woman who needs a better way to go to the hospital has very different priorities than anyone thinking about long term economic and urban planning impacts, and I completely see why it's good for her. :) Glad her needs are better met now than they once were, even if through Uber.
I should note that most of my drivers for Uber/Lyft were not cost-driven but feature-driven. Cost is a factor, of course, and note that my mom almost always uses the pool option to save money -- something Yellow cabs dont/cannot offer.
Drivers:
- Dispatch services work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but not the other way. You'd have to know the local dispatch service, they would need to know your mobile phone number (they usually dont ask) to coordinate with you, etc. The only dispatch services that seem to work well in Manhattan are black car services, which is way out of the conversation here -- she needs a ride home, not a Lincoln Towncar :-)
- Dispatch services DO work going from Brooklyn to Manhattan give you a blanket "be ready in 5min" regardless of demand and you end up waiting and waiting -- sometimes at the worst times. I've known people to call 2 or 3 dispatch services, take the first car, and leave the other drivers hanging (unethical...but it happens.)
- Dispatch services are hard to get ahold of when you really need them, often in bad weather etc.
- Dispatch services do price in the dead-head ride back, so there is a legitimate cost issue there on both supply and demand side. Uber/Lyft mostly solve the dead-head ride back issue, so legitimately lower cost by better utilization.
A personal issue when i travel for business:
- Dispatch services mysteriously dont keep receipts or have broken credit card machines (not sure why? to hid tax revenue?) -- so I am left with a ride for work (e.g., to airport) with no receipt and thus i have to pay work expenses out of pocket and they wont be reimbursed without a receipt.
- Dispath services mysteriously "dont have change" so you're paying $80 for a $62 ride
- I'm arriving at Delta Terminal late night in LGA and all the yellow cabs are at the other terminals. You wait and wait. There isnt a good way to "hail" them. I understand the Arro app tries to solve this, but that came years too late.
Without that we can’t know if a person deserves to hold a position, or even if they are eligible.
I think the idea is that being able to track the flow of monies is supposed to lead to changes that nudge us in the direction of political donation reform.
I remember on my first trip to NYC many years ago, I wanted to go to the airport during rush hour. No cab would stop and take me, because I looked like someone who wanted to go to the airport, which is out of their way. Apparently this is a known problem, so you're supposed to kind of hide your bag so they don't notice, then get in the cab, close the door, and THEN declare that you want to go to the airport, at which point they are legally obligated to take you. (Having used this option on subsequent trips... it consists of 45 minutes of whining.)
Meanwhile, with Uber you just press a button and they take you to the airport, bags and all.
This is why the taxi industry is dying; these little "hustles" add up and people don't trust yellow cabs anymore. Meanwhile, the app-based cars just take you where you want to go without the complaining. (I suppose they now have the ability to just not accept your trip if they don't feel like going there, which I think is fair. I don't want to listen to an adult whine about how annoying it is to go a particular place, I just want to go there.)
Right now, NYC faces a big problem. There is no viable method of transportation. There is too much traffic to drive anywhere quickly. The subways are overcrowded and broken. You can bike, but there probably won't be a citibike dock at your destination, and the bike lanes will be blocked with parked cars on the way there. It's kind of a nightmare that's going to become a crisis. Does limiting the number of Uber vehicles on the road fix any of this? Nope! But it's the only thing that's politically feasible, I guess. (We can't have congestion charging, because people in New Jersey and upstate will whine about having to pay to get to work. We can't expand the subway, because the MTA is controlled by the state and it only benefits NYC, so the governor and the legislature won't fund it. We can't enforce traffic laws to prevent people from parking in bike lanes because the NYPD is lazy and incompetent. So we're basically screwed. Eventually it will melt down completely, but we're doing an OK job of keeping the city on life support right now.)
Not necessarily. Ubers don't want to go to the airport for the same reason that cabs don't. I've had ride shares cancel on me once the driver's gotten close enough to see that the destination is an airport. Granted it doesn't happen as often as with cabs whose meter is conveniently not working once you mention the airport, but it does still happen.
Illegal parking in bike lanes is a huge problem though. This morning there were several vehicles parked in the bike lane across two consecutive blocks, so I had to ride in the travel lane the whole while. Some asshole unsafely passed me at speed by going into the bike lane, then swerving back into the travel lane at the next parked vehicle, then we got into a yelling match at the next light about when cyclists are allowed to depart the bike lane (hint: you don't have to use it when you're literally unable to because it's blocked).
Enforcement is an absolute joke, and sometimes it's even cop cars that are blocking bike lanes. Bike lanes that aren't physically protected from people parking in them are oftentimes not worth anything, and unfortunately, we don't have any cross-town bike lanes in Manhattan! (They're on the verge of opening the first one, but it's well out of the way of my commute.)
I'm not understanding this. If you're using the app correctly then the driver knows the destination before they even accept the ride. If you're setting an address near an airport in an attempt to be duplicitous I would be equally discouraged as a driver.
I'm in NYC, and I use taxis 99% of the time because of this phenomenon: Uber/Lyft drivers rapidly accept your ride, then cancel (or slow-play the pickup, so that you cancel, to protect their driver rating) as soon as they see it's a place they don't want to go.
It's so bad here that I just won't deal with Lyft and Uber unless they're throwing serious discounts my way, and I have time to burn.
That really depends on your neighborhood. In the outer burroughs, you can walk some ways before you reach a busy enough street to find cabs.
If you have bags, small children, or are disabled, that walk is basically a non-starter.
"Ubers don't want to go to the airport for the same reason that cabs don't."
I thought the driver couldn't see the destination until they started the ride after you get in. Although I've encountered drivers starting a ride as soon as they see me on the street (which I contested and got money back for).
Yep, or they even just call you and ask you to cancel.
And yes, I'm using the app correctly -- not sure why you're jumping to some conclusion that I must be being duplicitous. There's no convenient "nearby" drop-off points near airports here anyway.
So the simple solution is to eliminate all of the free parking and replace it with paid parking and loading zones. And raise the price high enough so that there's always spots free close enough to where you're going so that vehicles have a place to park themselves for short periods of time that's outside of the travel and bike lanes.
There's free parking in Midtown?
Yes there is. We've just zoned it for streetside parking.
I live on 26th Street. We have a bike lane, a traffic lane, and two sides of street side parking. This is the case across a large faction of Manhattan, the avenues exempted. For Exhibit A in stupid parking lanes, I present Broadway.
Just pull up satellite imagery on Google Maps and it'll all be obvious.
You see the sea of red lines? Those are all places you cannot park.
The best way to make delivery drop-off points available is to get rid of all the free parking and make it all paid, and keep raising prices on a block-by-block basis until there's typically spots free on any given block. It'll be a minor marginal cost for someone making a delivery to pay, say, $5/30 minutes (this will probably actually be cheaper if it means they can find a nearby spot, thus saving time driving around and time shuttling things from a farther spot). But $5/30 minutes works out to $240/day, which will easily discourage long-term parkers who shouldn't be using the scarce resource of on-street parking in busy areas anyway.
In less busy (i.e. purely residential) areas, it might make sense to move to a permit model, with permits costing several hundred dollars per month. There'd of course be parking meters mixed in with all that for people who are driving to the area and don't have permits.
As someone who doesn’t live in the USA it’s difficult for me to determine if your comment refers to some context I’m unfamiliar with.
Are you implying electric push scooters are a solution for people who live 20 kilometres out of the city but work there?
I’ve never been, but doesn’t it snow in NYC?
The city has only lifted the ban on electric bikes a few months ago[1], but still bans electric scooters[2][3] because screw you, that's why. (They have reasons now, just like they've had reasons for banning e-bikes for over a decade after the technology provided a really viable mode of transportation at a reasonable price point).
That's the context you're missing.
[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/why-does-new-...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/nyregion/new-york-today-a...
[3]https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/07/19/nyc-s-do...
Allowing electric bicycles and push scooters solves the last mile problem for many people.
The argument the city has made is that electric bicycles are too dangerous and will cause injury to pedestrians. This is a bad faith argument, because it's already illegal to cycle on the sidewalk, and if the city actually cared about non driver safety, it would push to enforce bicycle lane safety. It also failed to provide sufficient, to me, evidence that electric bicycles and push scooters pose a threat to pedestrians.
If better transit options existed, including last mile (push scooter) and ~3mile solutions (electric rentable bicycles), perhaps people wouldn't Uber as much.
Kind of because you can go 20+mph on a regular bike without pedal assist. It seems like e-bikes are still banned statewide. Eh.
[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/new-york-city...
With the ranks of uber cars in the city growing as much as they have the downtown traffic has become insane and I'm for anything that would relieve that congestion. I've been living along the Prince/Spring corridor for ~10 years now and the change in bumper-to-bumper traffic, particularly on summer Fridays is outrageous.
However it's sliced, though there's a problem with the city being full of too many idling/circling cars. ~10 yellow cabs at 330k rides per day vs Uber's 60k cars at ~200k rides per day, as per the article. That means Yellow cabs are actually driving people somewhere most of the time they are on the road whereas Uber drivers are spending a lot of time idling and/or driving to or from a pickup/dropoff.
All of that said I've been looking everywhere for good supportable numbers on how Uber has been affecting Manhattan traffic and it has been impossible to get anything other than the total number of Ubers on the road which isn't very helpful.
But I agree with you that the congestion pricing would be a better idea.
Anyway quick googling for 2017 numbers: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/10/13/16468716/uber-yellow-cab-ny...
So we have 10k medallion holders and ~60k uber drivers giving the same number of rides per day. No, there's not enough there to give a rigorous analysis but that is a vast difference in the amount of rides offered per car.
Maybe most of those Uber rides are in the boroughs and that accounts for the difference in ratio, but I'd be very surprised if that was the whole story.
It's pretty typical for any given cab to have three different drivers running in 12 hour shifts. That way you keep it on the road all 168 hours of every week. An Uber just requires a relatively inexpesive TLC license plate, not a taxi medallion, so it's typically only driven by one driver, say an average of 40 hours per week.
Also, uber drivers don't work 5 days a week, for example some only work on the week end or on peak hours, it can be additional income rather than a full time job.
* Thera are 6x the number of uber drivers on the road. * A significant portion of those are new traffic * Substantially fewer rides are given per uber/ride for hire car
There's (much) more traffic and I have a hard time seeing what has changed in the city over the last ten years to make traffic so horrid other than Uber/hire cars. Maybe the decay of the subways? Still, ridership numbers aren't down and population hasn't grown much. If you've got any ideas I'd love to hear 'em.
Listen, I love not dealing with Yellow Cabs. They're a pack of assholes and Uber is far more convenient but you're bending over backward to justify a marginal magnitude difference in rides per car.
FWIW I think a hard cap on the number of hire cars is stupid but we are stuck with De Blasio and even Bloomberg couldn't get congestion pricing passed. Capping new ubers at 100k (the current total) is not really that onerous all considered. It's not like it's gonna make it 2010 again.
Make more protected bike lanes so that vehicle congestion doesn't impact bike travel, and add a congestion tax on all vehicles so that people only drive into the busiest areas if it's really necessary, and will otherwise consider alternative forms of transportation. I don't just want a cap on rideshares; a privately owned vehicle takes up just as much space on the road as an Uber, so why only target the latter? And what's to say that if you target Ubers you won't just get a corresponding increase in private drivers to pick up the slack, with the end result being the same amount of congestion?
Unfortunately I'm not joking -- a lot of the protected bike lanes we've gotten recently have been along stretches where cyclists (sometimesore than one) have died. That's what it takes to override the nimbyists in the local Community Boards.
But for a less morbid suggestion, you should join Transportation Alternatives (and its mailing lists!) and go to the Community Board meetings they send notices about where bike lanes will be debated. Every voice in favor helps. I've spoken at a bunch of em.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bicycle_pedestrian/fund...
This explained a number of dumb bike lanes (which lead to nowhere) in my 'hood.
This is a bill for bail out medallion owners, not cab drivers. Most NYC taxi medallions are corporate owned.
It’s an anti-competition decision disguised as if city hall is doing something for the people.
Now Uber just has to lobby to have its cap raised or be allocated a greater portion, and steadily push others out.
This way Uber can get the transit monopoly it wants but without having to do the hard work of making the product profitable at a price point that drivers and riders actually value, which it currently papers over with VC funding and distraction stories about branching into other lines of business that are clearly not significant.
EDIT: congestion tax = more expensive mobility (incl taxis and ride sharing) = less affordability
It's similar to local sales taxes: the 1% aren't affected by the cost of basic items, but the 99% are.
As a driver and pedestrian, I can spot an uber car immediately without even seeing the sticker. I like to play this guessing game in my head, and 9 times out of 10 I see the uber sticker, "T L & C" license plate, and/or a single passenger in the back seat staring at their phone.
Here the limited resource is traffic bandwidth. Without congestion tolling, arbitrary regulations are the next best thing to helping to regulate usage.
This isn't the motivation for this regulation. If it was, the same City Councilman who proposed this cap wouldn't have shot down a minimum-wage proposal for cab drivers. Remember: most medallions aren't owned by cab drivers. And cab drivers don't donate.
Uber and Lyft were largely operating illegally when they started in most cities. They ignored expensive licensing requirements. They ignored safety regulations. They ignored insurance requirements. They ignored price controls on fares. They ignored requirements to accommodate disabled people.
Taxi companies who were obeying all these rules (which all imposed costs on the taxi companies that Uber and Lyft did not have) had a reasonable expectation, perhaps even a right, to expect the city would force Uber and Lyft to follow those rules too, or would shut them down. But the cities didn't, so I think a good case can be made that the cities owe the taxi drivers a bailout.
Uber and Lyft beat NYC taxis fair and square - they used the existing TLC regulations (with the overhead required) and won out because of being a better product.
[1] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/pos...
Immigrants from Romania, the couple had bought their New York City taxi medallion nearly three decades ago. Lately, it had been difficult to find fares. Her husband worked 12-hour shifts, but brought home less money. He was worried about the plunging value of their once-lucrative medallion and frustrated about Uber’s takeover of the industry.
On a cold day in March, Mr. Ochisor hanged himself in his garage in Queens. His family blames the growing hopelessness he felt over his fortunes as a taxi driver.
It's a broken system. Could you imagine if you had to put up $1.3 million to be a factory worker? Money that you're still on the hook for if the factory ends up closing due to lack of demand? Charging people for the privilege of working, and somehow its Uber's fault for not protecting this corrupt and manipulative system.
In this case, Mr. Ochisor's customers were so desperate for an alternative to his three-decade-old business that they turned to a startup company that works by (literally) dodging taxi regulators. Is that really Uber's fault? The regulators'? The customers? Just how far do we want to take this whole idea of being reponsible for our competitors' mental health, or that of our vendors?
What recourse did he have? To this day government response to Uber's incursions has been mostly toothless.
I'm no friend of the taxi lobby but the guy was just trying to do right by his family up until he killed himself. While I don't see how Uber could realistically be held responsible for this guy's suicide, their undercutting his business certainly contributed to it, and you're being needlessly callous.
Your beef is with the taxi cartels and their click-hungry sympathizers in the media, not with me. They started it.
And I don’t have “beefs” with fictional boogie man cooked up by Uber, however bought in you are to that narrative. I certainly don’t remember “taxi cartels” stealing and passing around the medical records of rape victims, but that was probably a conspiracy by their “click-hungry sympathizers in the media.”
Uber is not responsible for pushing people to suicide at the end of a 30-year taxi-driving career. If you disagree, I respectfully suggest there are other sites where such opinions are more in line with the underlying ethos.
If you mod me down and send me into an emotional crisis, are you responsible for what I do as a result? No? Why not?
If the problem they are trying to solve is "drivers aren't making enough" then they should impose a minimum wage on drivers or force an actual employee relationship.
If the problem they are trying to solve is a bail out of the failed and corrupt taxi medallion system, then maybe this will succeed. The real issue here is the cab drivers who are hurting because they provide an inferior service to a clientele who now have better options. I avoid cabs for all but the shortest trips because of the large percentage of bad driving experiences. Some solutions to improve yellow cabs like having a simple feedback mechanism for drivers could go a long way to leveling the playing field between Uber and Taxi.