Plainly and simply, the numbers did in Mayor de Blasio’s wrongheaded, politically motivated, anti-progress, anti-progressive plan to cap the growth of Uber, the popular cellphone-based car-for-hire service.
The mayor and allies on the City Council, long comrades-in-arms with the yellow cab industry, had planned to pass a law restricting the growth of Uber and similar services for a year while conducting a study of their impact, on the ground that they were adding to traffic congestion.
De Blasio threw around numbers, such as that Uber is adding cars at a rate of 2,000 a month, strongly implying it is to blame for slowing traffic. But his own administration’s Taxi & Limousine Commission had data clearly showing that de Blasio’s contentions were at best misleading.
DE BLASIO HIRED 52 UBER RIDES DURING 2013 MAYORAL CAMPAIGN
Blame it on bad staff work or blame it on carrying water for pals, the result is the same: The release of Uber’s data to the Daily News Tuesday documented that the service had far fewer cars on the road than suggested in the most congested zones and at the most congested hours.
What’s more, the data showed Uber cars were busiest during off-peak hours, with substantial numbers picking up passengers in the boroughs and northern Manhattan, exactly the areas that the yellows have long avoided.
Worse still for de Blasio, his mayoral campaign footed the bill for its workers who hired Uber cars, no doubt because, like thousands of New Yorkers, they found the service more convenient than the traditional ritual of standing on a corner to hail a cab, hoping for the best and eventually taking a trip in a car less comfortable than the typical Uber vehicle.
The irrationality of the mayor’s anti-Uber obsession became only more apparent when Gov. Cuomo came down on the side of the company’s job creation, particularly for minorities, and emphasized that New York must be a home to innovative technologies if it is to boom economically.
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“I don’t think government should be in the business of trying to restrict job growth. You can’t restrict job growth,” said Cuomo, who reportedly did some tough jaw-boning with Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito when the mayor was 35,000 feet over the Atlantic on this way home from an eco-ego trip to Italy.
At the same time, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams attacked de Blasio for seeking to protect the yellow cab industry from competition.
“One of the biggest struggles I had was the fact that many people who were in the yellow cab industry was too yellow to come to Brooklyn,” he said, with celebs like Kate Upton later piling on.
De Blasio’s aides were left to claim they had won a victory because Uber would never have come to the negotiating table without the very real, urgent threat of a cap. A cap, they say, remains on the table and might still become law in four months if the City Council deems it necessary.
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Regardless, the details of the deal will be in dispute until the mayor’s frantic minions produce a written agreement with Uber rather than only a press release.
In fact, Uber did agree to stop running anti-de Blasio ads. And to give the TLC additional location data during the course of the study — namely drop-off locations by zip code to complement pick-up data Uber already shares. The city will also be able to review exact locations of drop-offs so long as the data stays in Uber’s possession.
There will also be long-overdue discussions about how to increase wheelchair accessibility, as well as the good idea of adding a 50-cent tax to Uber rides to support the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. With all that in play, de Blasio has a chance to improve car-for-hire service — as long as he accepts the fact that the yellow industry will never be what it once was.
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Large numbers of New Yorkers are switching from those cabs to Uber because they find the service reliable and within their price range. The movement has decimated the value of the 13,587 medallions that set the number of yellows and give them a monopoly on street hails.
The public is voting with its fares. It’s time for de Blasio to get on the right side of the future.
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