Ireland deregulated taxis a few years back. Prior to deregulation a taxi licence was worth something like $100,000. Taxi-drivers could work any hours they chose and many made a small fortune from the trade. Now there are far more taxis and it’s harder for drivers to make money. I don’t think the supply part of the supply/demand has settled down yet. There are now more cabs than ever and fewer people than in recent decades who are willing to take cabs (because of the recession). I do feel a bit sorry for some of them, many would have paid a huge amount for their licence to find it virtually worthless only a few years later, but the situation in Dublin at least was insane with too few taxis for peak times.
Just to reiterate: no lack of cabs can create higher fares. The fares are set by NYC.
Also I’de like to point something out
. A medallion is a license to operate a taxi; it is not a license to drive a taxi. A Taxi Driver-License (known colloquially as a hack license) is not transferrable and can be revoked for all the usual reasons, such as bad behavior, positive drug test, overcharges.
A medallion owner can have 3+ drivers working for him on shifts, so that the car is “working” 24/7.
I guess you could say the same thing about zoning. That doesn’t make it a bad thing. It’s a matter of bringing organization to an area of dense population. Regulations for taxis are different depending on the population density. As Hello Again pointed out, they may allow black cars to be “hailed” in the outer boroughs.
Again, the cabs are an integral part of the NYC mass transit system. It helps to keep things in balance.
(Right now the Mods are thinking, “should this be kicked into GD?”).
How can there ever not be a traffic congestion issue in Manhattan? Seems to me it would be no worse if every wheeled thing on the streets were either a taxi or a truck.
But the supply side of that equation is purely artificial.
The notion that you can regulate cabbie behaviour without necessarily regulating the number of cabs is difficult. In an environment where cab numbers are unrestricted, downward price pressure invites corrupt and coercive practices by those seeking some income security that are very difficult to regulate.
Taxi drivers forming intimidating cartels and forcing out competitors through fear is very difficult to police, precisely because people are intimidated.
In Malaysia, taxis are particularly run down and decrepit, taxi touts rampant, and price manipulation at the expense of the customer is the norm. Although all taxis are fitted with meters, almost no drivers will turn them on, instead insisting on negotiating a fee plucked out of the air based on where you want to go. Even locals can be ripped off easily.
I don’t know what the drivers of these problems are in Malaysia. But it is clear that they are, as a general proposition, the sorts of problems to be expected in an environment where there are no capital entry barriers to the trade, and unstable fluctuations in supply and demand could be expected to cause dramatic and difficult to manage price shifts. The free market does not solve all problems perfectly, good though it is at most of them.
That may be true in Malaysia, and it may have been true in the United States in the 1930’s, when racketeering was poorly policed and epidemic. I don’t believe that it’s true today.
Many American cities such as Indianapolis, Washington DC, and Minneapolis have removed medallion caps–as have foreign countries such as New Zealand and Ireland (pdf). No epidemic of drivers shooting each other in the streets followed.
The Crown Vic is a beautiful car. That Nissan is ugly as sin.
The Crown Vic is an abomination. It’s over-sized, has horrible fuel economy, for it’s size it has an extremely small passenger compartment and is outdated. Because it’s so heavy the shocks are almost always worn out and the ride is terrible. When waiting in the cab line at JFK or LaGuardia you count the people ahead of you and the cabs that roll up and pray that you get something other than the Crown Vic. I swear, I think that these guys haul dirt in the Crown Vic’s trunk as a side business. How can a vehicle that’s purpose is to haul passengers be so filthy? About a third of the Crown Vic’s in the taxi fleet were police cars that the city dumped.
If I never see a Crown Vic again I will be a much happier person. They are rolling junk.
That puzzles me.
The last time I read the NYC TLC rules, a cab had a maximum age of 3 years and a maximum mileage of 60,000 miles.
Does the NYPD actually retire vehicles before they hit that age?
Did I read the TLC’s website incorrectly?
Missed the edit window:
Okay. Just noted here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/specrules.pdf
that the maximum mileage when a vehicle is ‘hacked-up’ (converted into a taxi) is 500 miles.
Sounds like the NYPD is really, really retiring their vehicles early…
IIRC, these are fairly recent regulations and a lot of Crown Vics were grandfathered. Bloomberg has tried to get the cab fleet upgraded with a lot of new regulations and movement towards natural gas, hybrid vehicles and mini-vans.
It used to be that almost the entire fleet was Crown Vics and about 1/3 of them were old police vehicles. The number of Crown Vics is slowly diminishing but it is still possible that 1/3 of them were cop cars at one time.
Where did you come up with 3 years and 60k miles? In the rules you cited it says 60 months which in some circumstances is extended to 84 month. If it was 60k miles all the cabs would be less than two years old.
I suspect I was misremembering things.
I first looked that rule up a few years ago.
So, cartels are bad so we should institute a legal cartel through a limited suply of permits?
Supply and demand affecting price-signals and then price-signals affecting supply and demand is how the free market works. If you’ve got something against that, I don’t see how you can think the free market is good at most problems.
I don’t need to think the free market solves all problems perfectly* to be against supply management of goods which are both rival and excludable.
RC Murphy talked about wildlife management earlier. This is one instance where the State should intervene because the goods in question are non-excludable. Non-excludable goods result in overproduction because the private marginal cost is significantly lower than the social marginal cost.
Cab rides are excludable. Supply management in that case makes it so that some of the goods (in this case, rides) whose social marginal gain is above their social marginal cost go unproduced.
*This is an argument I often hear used. Usually, when someone is against one particular gov’t intervention or type of gov’t intervention, someone will come in and say that the free market is not perfect. That’s a pertinent argument if you’re arguing against an Ayn Rand/Murray Rothbard type, but why presume that someone who is against a particular intervention or type of intervention is against all intervention? I understand that it makes rhetorical sense to try to paint all those who disagree with you in the least generous way possible, but that doesn’t make for productive discussion.