Having sat through and listened to hundreds of hours of NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission (NYC TLC), City Council and MTA hearings over the last several years, we understand it can be overwhelming to make sense of what is being discussed and the practical impacts of policy. We’ve done our best to simplify this for our readers.
Many don’t have the time or patience to spend hours participating in, or even sitting through, government public hearings. While we can’t fully blame the government, or a regulator, for an individual’s lack of civic mindedness, we do think the way these institutions often communicate what is being discussed and how it might practically impact someone, is generally poor. This poor communication, in turn, discourages greater public participation.
For example, consider the latest TLC rule changes ("amendments") related to the driver minimum pay formula. These amendments aim to prevent future app driver access restrictions in NYC, commonly referred to as “lockouts”.
This is one paragraph from an 11 page PDF. We don’t think most City Council Members or the Mayor—let alone a TLC-licensed driver working 10+ hours per day—would be able to decipher what is actually being proposed and why, without investing unreasonable time and effort. What’s more, many of the same bureaucrats and academics who created these previously flawed and complicated rules are now tasked with amending them? 🤔
If someone were to ask, 'How does the yellow cab industry protect driver wages?' the answer is straightforward: by limiting the number of yellow cabs, current driver earnings are safeguarded. There is only so much “supply” that can service a finite number of trips (a/k/a “demand”).
While the TLC continues to use the medallion system to protect taxi driver earnings, it relies on a complicated formula—using a “utilization rate (UR)”—to not only protect NYC Uber and Lyft driver earnings, but prevent TLC-licensed drivers from being unable to work when and where they want. Lockouts don’t exist anywhere else Uber and Lyft operate. Why only in NYC? 🤔
Why not simply (stick) with limiting the number of for-hire vehicles (FHVs) and (reasonably) assume that driver earnings and utilization will be protected? This approach is easy enough to understand and worked for decades before the rise of Uber and Lyft. Isn’t reducing traffic congestion (i.e., congestion pricing) also a priority?
Does this mean we believe there is always malicious intent when the TLC or City makes certain rule changes or regulatory proposals? No, not necessarily. However, we do believe incompetence should have consequences—not for the governed, but for those who govern. Conversely, political and regulatory competence should be rewarded (i.e., winning elections, receiving more funding).
TLC Chair David Do deserves credit for statements like the one below, and we believe that publications like ours can help make his job—and that of the TLC Board of Commissioners—a bit easier by encouraging as many people as possible to provide public testimony.
“A great deal of detail and analysis goes into rule making along with a lot of back and forth with stakeholders. We take public comments incredibly seriously and the hearing reflects that. We held a public hearing on the proposed rules for interior advertising back in August. Got a lot of feedback, and we went back to the drawing board to incorporate a lot of your comments. We're going to do that again today.”
- NYC TLC Chair & Commissioner David Do Opening Remarks (Intro)
However, if the same public hearing concludes like this, one might wonder what the point of the hearing was.
“At the core of this, it's a solvency issue. It's an issue that is rearing its ugly head to all of us in the near future, as you saw through [TLC's] presentation. This is something that…is hard to do, but a must do…we'll go through…all the comments today and make some adjustments…I don't want to raise the expectations that we'll make drastic changes to this because every change that we do make will involve an additional cost…”
- NYC TLC Chair & Commissioner David Do Closing Remarks (1:23:02)
The TLC claims there’s not much they can do, and we understand that. However, they were directly responsible for ensuring that the TIF remained solvent. To be clear, much of the problem originates from before Chair Do’s tenure, leaving him to clean up the mess and perhaps unfairly shoulder more blame than he deserves. That said, it certainly didn’t help when he allowed the release of over 10,000 FHV licenses in 2023 alone. How does he think that impacted the TIF? Does he even grasp the point we’re trying to make?
Being academically smart, which Do undoubtedly is, requires a different skill set from understanding how an industry operates. Many drivers or local mom-and-pop business owners may not have a college degree, but they understand the NYC TLC industry in ways that very few academics or regulators can. Decision-makers need to explain their choices in much simpler terms. Hiding behind pages of PDFs and legalese represents a failure.
If the TLC failed to ensure that the TIF program remained solvent, we should be hearing about how such a failure occurred. 🤷 This cannot be swept under the rug, especially when such concessions are being requested. Additionally, a much more detailed TIF operating budget should now be published on a quarterly basis, with the goal of restarting driver incentive payments once the TIF becomes solvent again. Just as TLC drivers must manage their finances, the regulator should be held to the same standard.
Doing Our Part
We know our readers expect us to call this all out and be assertive, as drivers and other industry stakeholders continue to suffer from gross regulatory incompetence. The ongoing American Transit debacle serves as a real-life case study of government and regulatory failure. Why are multiple, important TLC-specific entities, that are supposed to be under strict regulatory oversight, insolvent?!
If the regulator or City is uninterested in making things easier to understand or explaining themselves, it’s incumbent upon publications like ours to help industry stakeholders navigate these issues. While our previous summaries have received positive feedback, we want to take things a step further.
Using Substack creator tools, AutoMarketplace can now make NYC TLC public hearing testimony easily and interactively searchable (YouTube also auto-generates transcripts, but it’s not as interactive). This not only creates a permanent, easily navigable public record of all TLC hearings but will also, we believe, encourage greater public participation in hearings.
As you can see from the example below, the tool doesn’t transcribe videos perfectly but does a relatively good job. With time, we’re confident it will only improve.
Also available on YouTube ⬇️
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 NYC TLC Chair & Commissioner David Do Opening Remarks
6:06 TLC Deputy Commissioner Evan Hines – Taxi Improvement Fund (TIF) presentation 11:30 TLC Board of Commissioners Q&A
13:36 Public testimony on In-Vehicle (FHV) Advertising Tablet rules
Michael Chow, DART Technologies (15:00)
Andrew Greenblatt, Independent Drivers Guild -- IDG (17:20)
Brad Saylor, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, Octopus Interactive (20:21)
22:40 Public testimony on new Taxi Improvement Fund (TIF) payouts and rules
Peter Mazer, Taxicab Metropolitan Board of Trade – MTBOT (22:58)
Michael Simon, Taxi Medallion Owner (26:11)
Anna Humphrey, Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York -- CIDNY (29:37)
Jean Ryan, Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York -- DIA (31:23)
Sharon Shapiro, Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled -- BCID (33:15)
Richard Chow, Taxi Medallion Owner-Driver, NYTWA (36:30)
Richard Chipman, Westway Taxi (39:40)
Giuseppe Floccari, TLC Accessible Dispatcher (43:44)
Eman Rimawi-Doster, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (46:31)
Bhairavi Desai, New York Taxi Workers Alliance -- NYTWA (47:30)
Max Greenbaum, All Taxi Management (51:01)
Vinod Malhotra, Taxi Medallion Owner-Driver (54:18)
Rasheta Bunting, One Heart, One Vision, National Federation of the Blind of New York (58:11)
Evan Yankey, BCID (59:55)
Wain Chin, NYTWA (1:03:05)
Kathleen Collins, Disability Advocate (1:06:18)
Bhupinder Baidwan, Taxi Medallion Owner-Driver (1:09:42)
Joe Rappaport, BCID (1:11:26)
Nina Godashi, Taxi Medallion Owner-Driver (1:14:35)
Manjinder Singh, Taxi Medallion Owner-Driver (1:18:02)
Kuber Sancho-Persaud, Taxi Medallion Owner-Driver[?] (1:20:42)
1:23:02 NYC TLC Chair & Commissioner David Do Closing Remarks
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