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.
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.