NYC Lawmakers Take Aim At Uber — Again

NEW YORK, NY — The City Council is gearing up for round two with Uber. Lawmakers are considering more than half a dozen bills that would tighten the city's regulatory grip on app-based car services such as Uber and Lyft three years after similar legislation fizzled.

At a Monday hearing, the Council's new Committee on For-Hire Vehicles weighed seven bills that supporters say would level the playing field between the apps and traditional taxi companies.

Among them are a new set of proposed strict rules specific to app-based services, a temporary cap on new for-hire vehicle licenses and bill limiting each dispatch base to 1,000 vehicles.

"There’s opportunity for anyone in this industry to do fine," said Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Manhattan), who chairs the Transporation Committee. "However, we cannot destroy the traditional livery taxi industry, the yellow taxi industry, in order for the new one to do well."

Officials reportedly dropped an effort to cap Uber's growth in 2015 after the firm launched a public-relations assault against the move. But the exploding industry has drawn renewed scrutiny after the suicides of four taxi and for-hire drivers in as many months. Cab drivers have blamed the deaths on intense competition from the apps.

The popular app-based services are fully regulated in New York City, unlike anywhere else in the U.S. But their unabated expansion, lamakers and taxi industry advocates argue, has left cab and livery drivers struggling to compete and worsened traffic congestion in Manhattan.

Drivers for Uber and Lyft, though, say one of the Council's bills would make them suffer too.

While the Taxi and Limousine Commission already regulates Uber and Lyft cars as black cars, Councilman Ruben Diaz Sr. wants to create a slew of rules specific to the app-based vehicle sector. One bill he proposed would require each service to get $20,000-a-year license to operate, force drivers to work with a single app and make them pay $2,000 a year to license their vehicles, among other regulations.

The Independent Drivers Guild, a union of drivers for several ride-hailing apps, protested the bill outside City Hall on Monday. The group says the legislation could more than triple drivers' up-front costs and subject them to a "one-master rule" that would limit their income and threaten their job security.

It might also create a monopoly, the Guild argues — more than 80 percent of all app-based drivers work with Uber and would likely stay with the firm if they had to choose just one.

"(I)nstead of dealing with a crisis on the merits, this legislation disingenuously pits one sector of the industry against another," the Guild wrote in a memo opposing Diaz's bill.

TLC Chairwoman Meera Joshi also cautioned against the one-app-per-driver proposal, saying it would would limit "the drivers' flexibility that the current crowded market has rendered necessary." More than half of all for-hire drivers get trip assignments from more than one base, she said.

But Joshi agreed that there should be regulations specific to the app-based industry, which provides 600,000 trips a day. The TLC has licensed about 3,000 new drivers each month over the last four years as the industry has boomed, she said.

"We generally support the spirit (of Diaz's bill) to revise the current regulatory system that governs the large app-based market that currently operates in this city," Joshi said.

The Council is also considering bills that would guarantee drivers a minimum payment for their services; require half of all black cars to be accessible to disabled riders by 2025; waive licensing fees for accessible cars; and require the TLC to weigh environmental impacts when considering applications for new bases.

Uber isn't a fan of any of the bills. The company says they'd end up harming drivers, small businesses and New Yorkers in transit-starved parts of the outer boroughs, where the majority of Uber trips originate and where the company is seeing its fastest growth.

"Uber is serving a need in communities outside Manhattan such as Brownsville and Parkchester that are underserved by public transit and where taxis refuse to go," Uber said in written testimony to the Council committee. "If these policies were enacted as written, these are the very communities that would be the hardest hit by the resulting reduction in service."

Asked for comment on the legislation, a Lyft spokesperson said the company also serves many outer-borough residents and has worked to improve conditions for drivers.

"We are in ongoing conversations to find solutions to complex challenges in New York in order to provide the best transportation for passengers and earning opportunity for those who drive with Lyft," the spokesperson said in a statement.

Diaz, a Bronx Democrat, said Monday's hearing was only the start of a conversation about how to make the car industry fairer. He no longer plans to pursue the $2,000 per-driver licensing fee, he said.

"This is not final. This is not a vote," he said. "This is just introduced to start negotiating, and at the end, then we will have a bill that will benefit fully to everyone."

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairwoman Meera Joshi's remarks about the number of new drivers the TLC has licensed each month in the time that app-based car services have expanded.

(Lead image: Uber and Lyft drivers protested outside City Hall Monday to oppose a bill that they say would increase their costs and threaten job security. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)