Sunday, July 8, 2018

How the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission Flim Flammed Just About Everyone.

LEARN MORE HERE How the Taxi Commission may be helping Uber scam the public and vulnerable desperate people it tends to recruit as drivers.

I came into the taxi game in 1983, just as the good old days for taxi drivers were coming to an end.


For decades there had been around 12,000 licensed, legal for street hail taxis in the Big Apple. The license itself was and still is a tin medallion bolted to the hood of each taxi. Around half of the taxis and medallions were owned by fleets and the other half were owned by taxi drivers. The fleet owners were persecuting drivers who held out against leasing. Leasing had been an unlawful practice  because it was and is an abusive labor practice. The holdouts clung to their commission driver status but by 1984 that battle was lost.

The fleets sold off most of their medallions to drivers and to investors like Michael Cohen. They came to regret this, as the New York taxi medallion turned out to be possibly the best long term investment one could have made. 

Incidentally there was a rule that limited drivers to 12 hours behind the wheel in any 24 hour period.

Fast forward to 2016: Driving for a living had become a brutal low reward  gig for drivers who hadn't owned medallions for years  being crushed by medallion mortgage payments. Drivers who leased increasingly were and are leasing round the clock. 

Inevitably an overworked septuagenarian taxi driver drove onto a sidewalk and killed an even older pedestrian on a slow news day.

There was an uproar. The Taxi and Limousine Commissioners played for time and announced a return to the twelve hour shift with a mandatory 8 hour break between shifts - coming soon.

Taxi drivers who are supporting families in New York City cannot do so under those conditions. Likewise Uber, Lyft, Gett or Black car drivers must push themselves beyond the 12 hour daily cap. The twelve hour rule was quietly shelved before it came into force. The media, the public, pedestrian and bicycle safety activists were sold a bill of goods: the ten hour shift. These ten hours exclusively pertain to the number of hours the taxi is carrying a passenger. Most drivers spend more than half their time behind the wheel looking for or waiting for passengers.


Check out @eugeneprojectil’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/eugeneprojectil/status/1015665809497182208?s=09







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