Inisfallen

As you say, yes and no. Yes, Uber and Lyft drivers are picking up passengers who called them, like the more old-fashioned car services. But on the other hand, there's not much difference between just thumbing an icon on your phone and hailing a cab. So they're not quite the same as a car service, and they've taken a huge amount of business from the yellow cabs.

The city really shafted yellow cab medallion owners (not so much the fleet owners, but the individual owners). For so many of them, they borrowed huge amounts of money to purchase their medallion (not to mention the car), worked twelve and more hours a day to keep up the payments and make a living, and planned to sell the medallion when it came time to retire.

With the stroke of a pen, the city reduced the value of their medallions to next to nothing. And that's after they permitted speculators to drive up the price of medallions. It's instructive that the infamous Michael Cohen owned, I think, about thirty medallions. You think he was getting behind the wheel?

The going price, once Uber and Lyft were allowed to essentially pick up passengers off the street, went from over a million bucks to around $200,000. Of course, the owner/drivers' debt didn't decrease proportionately, nor are they permitted to raise rates.

Only recently (and after a spate of suicides) has the city begun to offer some relief from the crushing, underwater debt that so many owner/drivers fell into.

Inisfallen

You clearly lived in some wonderful utopia. I wish I lived there...

Inisfallen

I'm extremely familiar with the TLC, having driven a yellow cab back in the bad old days of the early eighties in NYC. I didn't own the medallion -- I leased the medallion and car from an owner -- but yes, the TLC existed mostly to suck fines and fees out of us.

I don't know if we were "contractors," strictly speaking - the way it worked was that drivers would lease the car for various periods of time, ranging from twelve hours to a week, from the owners -- but we were certainly subject to exploitation, by both the TLC and the owners.

UniChris

My main point was that legally they're car service vehicles under the TLC - not personal use cars as those apps try to get away with elsewhere.

Yes - it wasn't a free-for-all in the sense of continuing to allow the misuse of personal vehicles, but very convenient cut-rate car service with open entry not subject to the numeric limits of taxi medallions both deflated their former at-auction value, and increased traffic volumes.

livedarklions

He seemed pretty happy to be doing it, and apparently, it's a co-op. I have no idea what you think was "indecent" here, I thought it was interesting to see someone doing something I would've thought was eminently impractical (Amherst is kind of hilly, BTW).

livedarklions

Contractors and lessees are essentially the same thing here, the only difference between Uber and a taxi in this regard is that the Uber driver probably owns the car they're driving.

Thanks! My knowledge of the TLC is from reading, it's great to have the input of someone who actually had to deal with it.

livedarklions

Are you actually claiming that volume of cases will have no impact on the enforcement?

Getting back to the issue of deliver riders/drivers, the city would have to create a whole new system and bureaucracy for this, wouldn't it?

UniChris

My argument is that a municipality needs an agency with sufficient staff to pay attention to worker exploitation and public safety issues, no matter if it's involved in the everyday business transactions, or if it's trying to figure out what's going on from the perspective of an outside observer only rarely contacted by an aggrieved party.

Being routinely involved - seeing all the actual order sources and destinations and payments to workers - might prove a lot more efficient, for both exploitation and safety concerns.

Many issues could be characterized as "enforcement" for a 3rd party agency or as "customer service" for an involved party. I think the later is probably preferable.

What pretty clearly doesn't work is leaving a profit-motivated industry to chose its own norms of roadway behavior and expected worker productivity.