Viva la congestion pricing resistance

 

NY Daliy News 

 The knives are out for New York’s congestion pricing plan, and loads of motorists want a carveout.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is moving ahead with the scheme, which aims to toll motorists who drive in Manhattan south of 60th St., not including the West Side Highway and FDR Drive.

Taxi drivers held a protest in Manhattan on Wednesday pushing for exemptions to the tolls, which could cost anywhere from $9 to $23 during the day for most cars.

A group including Uber and Lyft on Thursday sent a letter to Gov. Hochul asking that for-hire vehicles get a break. And trucking industry lobbyists have also called for discounts to the tolls, which could range from $12 to $82 per crossing for the largest carriers.

 Another public pushback against the plan came Thursday evening as droves of drivers jammed an online MTA hearing to rail against the planned tolls. The hearing — held over Zoom — drew 391 attendees, each of whom were given three minutes to speak.

“If you guys tell me that’s $23 every day I need to take my car out of my driveway, that is outrageous,” testified Colette Vogell, who lives on Manhattan’s East Side, within the congestion zone. “People like me are going to move out of Manhattan.”

Exemptions are already planned for emergency vehicles, those transporting people with disabilities, and residents of the congestion zone who earn $60,000 or less annually.

But MTA officials have warned that exemptions for some motorists could lead to higher toll prices for everyone else.

The plan is required by a state law passed in 2019 to raise $1 billion a year for the MTA, enough for the agency to finance $15 billion worth of upgrades to the agency’s dilapidated transit infrastructure.

Thursday’s hearing was the first of six the MTA is to hold on the program over the next week. The hearings come after the agency released a draft environmental assessment on the scheme, a key step to gain federal approval before the tolls can launch, which isn’t expected to happen until 2024.

Other opponents of the program are less concerned about exemptions, and want congestion pricing to be delayed or nixed altogether.

Passengers United has a poll you can take to stop the congestion tax.

 

Parking garage oppressing women's livelihoods

City's betrayal of the green cabs

 

CBS New York 

 Green taxi drivers say their business is on the fast track to failure due to the pandemic and the increase in ride shares.

A longtime green cab driver tells CBS2's Ali Bauman the city is leaving drivers sidelined.

Nancy Reynoso has proudly held the city's first ever green taxi permit for nine years, but now she's hanging up her meter.

"Today I turned in my Taxi and Limousine Commission plates at DMV," she said Wednesday.

Reynoso was first in line to drive a lime-colored car when City Hall introduced them in 2013 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg as an outer-borough alternative to yellow cabs and black cars.

"This is the dream that we were sold for a better perspective, a better future, and I guess the dreams have just fallen," she said.

Ride-sharing apps have been cutting away from business for years, and Reynoso claims the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission has done little to help drivers like her.

"It's just gradually sinking, and I see my drivers leaving every single day and I don't see any change," she said.

"Those drivers are going to lose their jobs. They're going to be on the street," said Javaid Tariq, co-founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

According to TLC data, there were 1,162 green cab drivers working in January. That's an 80% drop from five years ago when there were 5,751 green cab drivers working in a month.

"The yellow cab and green cab industries are under so many rules and regulations," Tariq said.

In 2021, City Hall agreed to cap medallion loans for yellow cabs.

The green drivers don't pay for medallions, but Reynoso says TLC requires they pay higher insurance and get more inspections, and with fewer fares, it's hard to keep up. Unlike yellow cabs, green taxis are not allowed to pick up fares at the airports or below 96th Street.

Taxi to the dark side

  

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, taxi drivers, local elected officials, and their allies gathered outside New York City Hall to announce the beginning of a hunger strike. They are protesting a plan announced last month by the de Blasio administration to help taxi drivers reduce their debt burdens—a plan that the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the 21,000-member group leading the hunger strike, considers insultingly inadequate.

As a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigation established in 2019, lenders, medallion brokers, and city officials spent years taking advantage of a scheme to inflate the prices of the taxi medallions that let New York City drivers operate cabs. The victims were the mostly immigrant cab drivers now left with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. There have been three suicides by owner-drivers in recent years.

I spoke with two of the roughly dozen hunger strikers a few minutes after they stopped eating. Zohran Mamdani, who came to New York from Kampala, Uganda, at age seven, wore two pins on his lapel: the red rose of socialism and another reserved for members of the New York state assembly. He has represented a northwest Queens district since January. 

At 63, Richard Chow is more than 30 years Mamdani’s senior. After moving to New York in 1987, he bought his taxi medallion for $410,000 in 2006. He still owes almost all of that money because of interest payments and the need to take out further loans to buy new cabs. His brother, Kenny, bought his medallion for more than $750,000 in 2011. Crippled by debt, he died by suicide in 2018.

On Wednesday, taxi drivers, local elected officials, and their allies gathered outside New York City Hall to announce the beginning of a hunger strike. They are protesting a plan announced last month by the de Blasio administration to help taxi drivers reduce their debt burdens—a plan that the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the 21,000-member group leading the hunger strike, considers insultingly inadequate.

As a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigation established in 2019, lenders, medallion brokers, and city officials spent years taking advantage of a scheme to inflate the prices of the taxi medallions that let New York City drivers operate cabs. The victims were the mostly immigrant cab drivers now left with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. There have been three suicides by owner-drivers in recent years.

I spoke with two of the roughly dozen hunger strikers a few minutes after they stopped eating. Zohran Mamdani, who came to New York from Kampala, Uganda, at age seven, wore two pins on his lapel: the red rose of socialism and another reserved for members of the New York state assembly. He has represented a northwest Queens district since January.

At 63, Richard Chow is more than 30 years Mamdani’s senior. After moving to New York in 1987, he bought his taxi medallion for $410,000 in 2006. He still owes almost all of that money because of interest payments and the need to take out further loans to buy new cabs. His brother, Kenny, bought his medallion for more than $750,000 in 2011. Crippled by debt, he died by suicide in 2018. 

 

About how much is the medallion you paid $410,000 for worth today

 

 Richard Chow: Now medallions are only $75,000. We’ve been underwater for so many years. The city created this crisis

 

What are the de Blasio administration and the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) proposing to do about it? 

 

Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani: They have a $65 million plan. It’s one that would provide, for drivers that are eligible, around $20,000. The issue with this plan is that it allows for monthly payments of up to $2,000 a month. It allows for the principal to be up to $330,000. It allows for the conditions of the very crisis it’s supposed to be resolving.

 

 People who haven’t followed this closely might think Uber and Lyft are 100 percent responsible for this problem. That’s not the full story. What happened? 

Mamdani: I used to be one of those people. I used to think that it was Uber and Lyft that drove yellow taxis into the ground, and that they were the true villains. Let’s be clear, they are villains in this story, but they are not the only ones.

In 2001, [then–Mayor Mike] Bloomberg gets into office and has a $3.8 billion shortfall. He identifies taxi medallions as a way to make revenue for the city. The city then makes $855 million off medallion sales, additionally implementing a 5 percent transfer. Then the city sets the opening bid at every auction. The city is artificially inflating the value of these medallions. The city has an internal review that says the cost of the medallion is outstripping the actual value because for decades the medallions cost around $200,000. No change in the market and now it’s four to five times the worth? It’s completely nonsensical. 

“The city created a bubble, then Uber and Lyft came in. We couldn’t survive. That’s why my brother committed suicide.”

As all of this is happening, they also let Lyft and Uber come in with no regulations. The worth of these medallions is predicated on the fact that there is a closed market. Uber and Lyft are only allowed to be villains because the city let them. It’s the culpability of the city again and again and again.

Reckless driver who killed Ozone Park woman on Christmas Day is still on the loose

  

Queens Chronicle

Elected officials, religious leaders and Ozone Park residents gathered outside the 102nd Precinct in Ozone Park last Saturday, over a week after a hit-and-run killed Indo-Caribbean vocalist Ritawantee “Rita” Persaud, to demand that the NYPD find the driver who fled the scene of accident.

“This person’s recklessness caused the death of our dear Auntie Rita and there hasn’t been an arrest since. So today we’re asking to pool all our resources, all our energies to endure that this doesn’t end up being a cold case,” organizer Aminta Kilawan-Narine said at the rally.

Persaud, 54, was taking an Uber ride in a black Toyota Camry Dec. 24 when the 50-year-old driver of the vehicle was hit by a man driving a Lamborghini Urus SUV carrying a passenger from the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Uber driver, the Lamborghini passenger and Persaud were taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where the former two were listed in stable condition and Persaud was declared dead. The Lamborghini driver fled the scene on foot.

The Hindu community in Queens has been shaken by the death of Persaud, who became well-known in New York and Guyana for singing devotional music at various mandirs in New York and her work teaching her art form to young people.

The rally reflected Persaud’s religious passion. The Pandit Manoj Jadubans, the leader of Persaud’s house of worship, Shaanti Bhavan Mandir in Jamaica, led the crowd in a prayer near the beginning of the event.

“We are obviously saddened and hurt and broken but we still have a strong resolve to ensure there’s justice for her — that senseless death and lack of compassion by running away — that’s not a society and ideals we grew up in,” said Persaud’s cousin, speaking on behalf of her family.

Transportation between Brooklyn and Queens is pretty bad

From CityLab:

One might think that getting from Brooklyn to Queens—or vice versa—would be easy.

For one, they’re physically connected to each other; they share the same landmass—the start of Long Island, but not technically Long Island. Secondly, they’re New York’s two biggest population centers. And finally, of the five boroughs, they’re both major drivers of population and job growth in the city right now.

But unless you own a car—which most New Yorkers do not—it’s strangely hard to get from one borough to the other. By subway, residents must seek out train lines at the ends of each borough, before backtracking. Bus routes are notoriously circuitous and slow. Both systems are a result of the spoke-hub model, designed at a time when Queens was comparatively pastoral and Brooklynites largely headed into Manhattan for work. So much so that even in 2018, it’s a common refrain in New York City mass transit that if you’re going between the two boroughs, you’re either going through Manhattan, or not going at all.

That’s what made The Great Cross-Borough Mobility Mode Challenge (that was my name for it, at least) on this steamy Tuesday morning during rush hour a bit more interesting.

Just after 8:30 a.m, seven participants simultaneously left a starting point in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and hopped onto their assigned means of transportation: subway, bus, Citi Bike, Uber, UberPool, taxi, or electric moped. Their goal? Pass this goofy made-up finish line—which had a sign, green tape, and all—outside of the Court Square Diner in Long Island City, Queens, where myself and a handful of other transit-beat reporters were waiting beneath the shadows of rapidly rising condos and subway tracks.

The race was put on by Revel, a shared electric moped company that recently premiered in north Brooklyn. The point of the stunt, beyond snagging some media attention, was to highlight the fact that traveling during rush hour between Brooklyn and Queens sucks. And it only stands to get worse once the L train goes offline for 15 months in April of 2019, dispersing hundreds of thousands of riders onto overburdened stations and roads. The big question: Which of these shared-mobility services, old and new, performs best under pressure?

And they wonder why we own cars here...

Cuomo to introduce modified congestion pricing

From AM-NY:

Congestion pricing was killed the way many policy proposals die in Albany: behind closed doors.

In 2008, Assembly Democrats revolted against the inititive championed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg because it included East River tolls, which critics said would disproptionately affect residents of Brooklyn and Queens.

"It's really, really difficult for people in Brooklyn and Queens at this point to consider something like this. And I think we just need to start from the ground up all over again," Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan of Queens said at the time.

But with the subways in crisis and searching for a dedicated funding source, congestion pricing could be resurrected. Sources say Governor Andrew Cuomo is considering supporting a plan that would charge fees on for-hire vehicles like Uber and Lyft.

But lawmakers outside of Manhattan are still wary.

"Residents in New York want mass transit options. They don't want a financial burden. And they don't want to keep reaching into their pockets," said Assemblywoman Nily Rozic of Queens.

Traffic not Uber's fault

From the Daily News:

New York’s traffic troubles aren’t Uber’s fault.

Instead, Mayor de Blasio's long-awaited $2 million congestion study puts the blame on deliveries, construction and New Yorkers themselves.

“Population and job growth, increased construction activity, growth in the number of deliveries, and record levels of tourism have all contributed to the reductions in vehicle speeds,” the report on Uber and the growing for-hire vehicle industry found.

The popularity of car service apps like Uber was only a “contributor to overall congestion,” not a driver of heavy traffic in the city’s central business district, the report said.

De Blasio’s long-awaited traffic congestion study put the blame on “population and job growth, increased construction activity, growth in the number of deliveries, and record levels of tourism.”
The study also found that the total number of miles traveled by all vehicles in the city stayed flat between 2014 and 2015 — so trips in Uber and Lyft appear to be making up the decline in yellow taxi pick ups.

The conclusions in the report fly in the face of Mayor de Blasio's suggestion last summer that Uber’s explosive growth was slowing down traffic in Manhattan.