Two Views on Taxi Regulations

Taxi regulations are big news these days. In many ways it seems that one of the challenges facing taxi regulators and the public is that it is not clear what taxi regulations are supposed to accomplish. Here are two op-ed pieces, one from taxi industry insiders in the Twin Cities, and one from a graduate student in public policy in Vancouver.

The Twin Cities piece is about entry into the market for Uber and Lyft, while the Vancouver piece is about liberalizing entry into the market. Effectively these op-eds are about the rules that regulate entry and who should be allowed to operate. They are also about maintaining license holder value. Both sides argue they are in the right, but they both cannot be. It is also possible that both sides are wrong. Resolving these regulatory issues is much harder than most people seem to believe.

Big Week in Taxi and Jitney News

There was lots of stuff the past few weeks about taxis and jitneys. Here are a few links to the action with brief comments below each:

"All-Borough Taxis (Like Yellow, But Green) Hit the Streets" NY Times
(Anyone see one of these out in the wild yet? I will post if I see one in northern Manhattan)

"Ending the Jitney Menace" NJ.com
(There are a lot of calls for jitney reform as an 8-month old was killed with one recently. Sounds like the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration may get involved. See next link.)

"Bayonne Police Have Issued Jitney Buses 200-plus Tickets in Last 18 Months" NJ.com
(However, enforcement doesn't seem to be the problem. The driver that crashed and ultimately caused the death of infant was on the phone at the time, it seems. Perhaps this is a problem specific to jitneys, but I suspect the real problem here is with letting people drive.)

"Taxi hailing apps off to slow start in New York, but could still accelerate" The Verge
(This isn't surprising. The apps will allow taxis to find new markets, not serve existing ones, so it will take time to develop. You don't need an app to find a taxi in Midtown, which is where the Yellows are already. People and drivers in areas where Yellows are not pervasive will ultimately benefit.)


These next links are all about ride-sharing and the legal  and economic challenges that must be overcome. There is a lot here. The status quo is untenable but a fully deregulated environment isn't likely to work, either. I think part of the problem facing cities and planners (and entrepreneurs and others) is that few have a firm understanding of the intent of regulations within the taxi/ride-sharing industry. We've been regulating these services so long that the purpose of regulation is not clear. Regulations don't appear in a vacuum. Somebody wants them, designs them and fights for them. Now, many are fighting to keep what we have while others want to tear them down. It seems that this has caught many planners and regulators off guard, and we need new models of how to think about transport supply and regulation. I actually think the California utility model is promising and can maybe be expanded to bus services and conventional transit agencies.

"City Taxi Systems Struggle with Change" Governing.com

"Taxi drivers sue, claim monopoly" Atlanta Business Chronicle

"Proposal Offered for County to Take Over City's Taxi Regulation" Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Seattle's ride-sharing debate reaches it's boiling point" Crosscut.com

"Sharing economy drives into trouble with ride-sharing arrests" Guardian.com

"In California, They're Not Taxis, They'e "Transportation Network Companies"" WNYC

"California's New Rules Could Change Rideshare Game" NPR

Slugging Should Be Legal

The Wall Street Journal has a story about the Port Authority of NY/NJ ticketing drivers who pick up passengers in order to qualify for the cheaper car pool lanes across the George Washington bridge. This practice is known as "slugging" and is pretty common (Washington, D.C. and the Bay Area have lots of slugging) though legally discouraged. The Port Authority claims that they are cracking down due to safety concerns, but there have not been any reported problems. The Port Authority should not put themselves in the position of evaluating the quality of the relationships among the people in a car, which is effectively what they are doing. From the WSJ story:

Leonor Javier was driven to form "the Carpoolers" when she received the first of two tickets last July 4. The woman she picked up, shopkeeper May Chin, has since become a friend and joined the cause. The patrolwoman's reasons for giving Ms. Javier the first citation still anger her: "What she said is 'Do you know this lady? You might get killed.' "

Tickets should not be issued based on how well passengers know each other. This isn't hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere. These are people trying to get to work during rush hour. If the Port Authority doesn't like giving discounts to carpoolers, then stop giving discounts. If the Port Authority wants to use their facilities most efficiently and help provide affordable transit for people, then they should formalize slugging. Set up a stop like a bus stop and let drivers use their empty seats. Congestion will lessen, traffic will flow smoother and people will get where they want to go.

The Fort Lee carpoolers have been trying to win this battle for a while. Here is a story from last fall that nicely describes how counterproductive the PA carpooling plan is.

Will Doig on Chinatown Buses

Salon's Will Doig has a piece on the intercity Chinatown buses that were recently shut down by the feds.  Rutgers' Nick Klein's work is featured quite a bit. Here is a bit from Klein:

But perhaps even more extraordinary is that, even amid the new upscale competition, the Chinatown bus ridership has continued to surge as well, a phenomenon so strange that Rutgers doctoral student Nicholas Klein co-authored a study to try to figure out why. Klein discovered that, among other things, grabbing a seat on the Fung Wah still provides a ping of urban cred. “The reasons [the Chinatown buses] are appealing are both operational — they’re cheap, frequent and easy to access — and emotional, because they provide what people describe as an authentic urban experience,” Klein learned.

... 

“By staging operations outside the bus terminal, they created a psychological distance between the old model of bus travel and this new idea,” says Klein. “If you and I were to start an intercity bus company, all we’d need is a bus, and if it didn’t work out we could pull up stakes and try somewhere else. It’s in line with the economic entrepreneurialism that we associate with the Internet era.” 

I am quoted regarding some of the work I have been doing with Columbia PhD student Eric Goldwyn on a Group Ride Vehicle project in New York and a one sentence summary of the academic literature on the subject:

“There was this expectation that these vans would be a perfect substitute for conventional transit,” says Columbia University assistant professor of urban planning David King. But, “There are a lot of real problems when you try to formalize informal transit.” 

And the exciting conclusion with quotes from Nick and me:

All those little problems are annoying — it’s more fun to think big, to ponder how the Chinatown buses that ultimately improved intercity travel could be replicated elsewhere in our cities. “I think the Chinatown buses are sort of a blank slate,” says Klein. “People don’t know much about how they work, and they can draw their hopes and desires onto them for how they can solve urban problems. We think to ourselves, They’re so great, why not have them everywhere?” But in a city with buses, taxis, ferries, bike share and a 24-hour subway system, are we absolutely sure we need to add dollar vans? “It ends up being technological fetishism, which is rampant within transportation,” says King, “with less thought toward actually getting people around.”

My comment about technological fetishism was aimed more broadly at transport planning, not specifically at vans. I actually think the vans should be incorporated into conventional transit provision, but am not sure how to do so. Nick is right, we just don't know much about these modes at all, and we absolutely need to. We do not know the optimal types and amount of regulations for these services, the role of niche markets, how people ride, safety issues, etc.

Cap'n Transit makes related points about whether some of these non-traditional services can even be supplied by conventional transit agencies here as he discusses a new Korean van service.

Designated Driver Services Sprout in Chinese Cities

China recently increased the severity of drunken driving penalties. As intended, people are less interested in driving around after drinking and there are fewer drunken driving cases than before. However, a new market for designated driver services has sprung up and is realizing tremendous growth according to this China Daily article. From the story:

According to the Ministry of Public Security's Traffic Management Bureau, from May 1 last year to April 20, traffic police handled 354,000 cases of driving under the influence of alcohol nationwide, down by 41.7 percent compared with the same period in the previous year. Drunken driving cases totaled 54,000, registering a 44.1 percent drop.
Instead, the designated driver business is booming in big cities.
"There are about 50 companies registered that provide designated driver service in Chengdu (capital of Sichuan province), and most of these were set up in the past year," said Chen Xu, vice-president of Chengdu Designated Driver Service Association.
"We received about 80 orders to chauffeur drunken passengers every day in the first four months of this year, an increase of more than 40 percent compared with the same period last year," said Wang Wei, manager of Beijing Luantai, which provides driver training, car rental and designated driving services.
Many hotels and entertainment venues have also cooperated with companies that provide designated driver service for the convenience of customers who consume alcohol.
"At least seven or eight of our customers ask us to call the designated driver company to arrange drivers for them every night," said Wang Jianbin, service director of a branch of Partyworld in Beijing's Chaoyang district.

Yet these services are unregulated and have difficulty buying insurance:

Designated driver service is a new sector in China and laws and regulations are absent, Chen said. "There is no government department in charge of the service."
Liu Jing, the manager of Changyinwuyou in Beijing, holds a similar opinion.
"Many problems still exist in the sector," said Liu. "For example, we cannot buy insurance for our designated drivers as there is no such type of insurance in China. So things become thorny, if a car accident happens."

Auto insurance is a bit weird in China anyway, and many (most?) crashes are settled for cash at the time of the event.

These types of one-way taxi services are critical for cities. Hopefully Chinese cities will figure out how to support the services and other cities will adopt similar measures.

Legal Challenges to New NYC Livery Rules

The New York Taxi and Limousine Commission is voting today on the proposed rules for outer borough livery cabs. Just in time, the yellow cab medallion owners have filed suit to block the program. From the NY Times:

A group representing owners of New York City’s signature yellow cabs filed suit on Wednesday over plans to allow livery cars to pick up passengers on the street outside the heart of Manhattan.
The State Legislature authorized the change in February, and the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission is expected to vote Thursday on whether to enact it.
City lawyers said they were confident that the plan, proposed by the Bloomberg administration last year, met legal requirements. It would allow 18,000 livery drivers buy permits to collect passengers when hailed in Upper Manhattan and the four other boroughs. Advocates of the plan say it would benefit millions of people in areas where yellow cabs are not common.
But the taxi owners’ group, the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, said the plan violated the rights of yellow cab owners who paid hefty fees for what has been an exclusive citywide right. It is seeking an injunction.

The proposal will also add 2,000 new yellow cab medallions. One of the issues here is that the medallions are worth about $1 million each, so the owners of the medallions seek to protect their economic rents and maintain the NYC taxi industry as a capital intensive industry with high barriers to entry. However, the goals of the taxi medallion owners do not perfectly align with broader social goals of mobility and access to transportation choices.

Perhaps more to the point, the new livery program is designed to legitimize activity that is already happening. It remains to be seen if it will work, but it is an attempt to provide a regulatory structure that will allow the market for street hails in New York City to expand beyond parts of Manhattan and the airports.

...........

Here is a bonus link about regulating New York City's Green Carts and food vending. From the Washington Post:

Fruit-and-vegetable carts might seem like an idea that everyone can get behind in a city where some areas only have one supermarket per 60,000 residents. But New York’s Green Cart initiative was hotly debated here when it was proposed. City planners worried about congestion on the sidewalks and by busy subway stations. Small grocers objected to new, non-bricks-and-mortar competitors, especially those who didn’t have to pay high rents and utilities. But legislation ultimately passed in June 2008, granting up to 1,000 permits to vendors to sell fresh produce in underserved areas.

Open questions about these local regulations involve  what should the regulatory priorities be. Safety? Competition? Wages? Health? Traffic? The optimal number of bananas? These are all good issues deserving policy interventions, but regulating all of them simultaneously is next to impossible. What is most important to one actor in the process is not necessarily the highest priority for another actor.

Why do people advertise illegal activities in the New York Times? An Ongoing Series

Lots of people do illegal things. I get that. Lots of the people in New York City doing illegal things seek out attention by telling their story to the New York Times. I don't get that. In previous editions of this series, I wondered about illegal food operations. More recently, some artists took over a closed subway station for a large installation. The secret was out about this illegal gallery, and the results were predictable. The latest edition of dumb promotion involves twins who like to camp in the trees of Central Park. The story was in today's paper, and I'm sure we will read about their arrests soon enough.

Unlike dummies who promote their illegal behavior, Google's Street View has become quite adept at catching people in the act of committing crimes and aren't smart enough to recognize a giant camera on top of a slow moving Prius coming down the street. Here a thief was spotted, here some heroin dealers were caught, and here the Google car just missed catching a murder. There are lots more. Are criminals more brazen or are they dumber?