>> Congestion pricing with a fee on all yellow & black car rides for origin and destination within CBD
If the goal was to reduce congestion in CBD, I'd support that goal...and zone-based pricing fixes that. CBD has extensive and frequent subway service, so that makes sense, esp since congestion pricing can be turned off on non-peak hours when subways dont seem to work.
However, what the city actually did was put a blanket cap on all Uber/Lyft across all boroughs at all times of the day/week -- seems like a move to intentionally hurt Uber/Lyft while not directly solving the above goal (reducing congestion) ...and plus...applying a regressive cost on poorer people.
Further, yellow cabs are much worse than Uber/Lyft pool services w/r/t congestion.
DeBlasio loves regressive taxes. His entire Vision Zero policy is nothing more than an excuse for the NYPD to issue more tickets to poor and middle class drivers.
Car ownership varies widely by borough with fewer than 1/5 in Manhattan, more than half in Queens, and over 85% in Staten Island. Ironically this correlates inversely with where live the richest New Yorkers. The vast majority of car owning New Yorkers are squarely middle class and Vision Zero is unquestionably a regressive tax on those citizens in the name of “safety”. A big target of Vision Zero is also Uber drivers who are mostly poor. DeBlasio has specifically said he won’t support scaling traffic fines to income. The real beneficiary here are the blood sucking NYPD who can point to their new stacks of summonses as proof that they care about the community when all they care about is padding their retirement accounts with assets from civil forfeiture.
As far as the cap applying to all boroughs; that is because no one would sign up for a license that only went to the outer boroughs. The yellow/green cab experiment failed; introducing a similar dichotomy to black cabs would probably have the same results.
The yellow/green cab experiment failed because it happened before the magic of smartphone ubiquity. The problem with yellow/green cabs was density -- the density outside Manhattan is thin and the area is enormous. The chances of a yellow/green taxi just passing by when you need one is close to zero.
Uber/Lyft solved this issue with beaconing. Uber/Lyft further reduce cost if you pool, which is great all around.
If the goal was to reduce congestion in CBD, I'd support that goal...and zone-based pricing fixes that. CBD has extensive and frequent subway service, so that makes sense, esp since congestion pricing can be turned off on non-peak hours when subways dont seem to work.
However, what the city actually did was put a blanket cap on all Uber/Lyft across all boroughs at all times of the day/week -- seems like a move to intentionally hurt Uber/Lyft while not directly solving the above goal (reducing congestion) ...and plus...applying a regressive cost on poorer people.
Further, yellow cabs are much worse than Uber/Lyft pool services w/r/t congestion.