New thoughts about a topic I have written about often. But also new things I learned. And many new experiences, and hardships.
Recently needing two consecutive days in New York City – where I resided for 23 years prior to COVID – I chose to skip the two days of $70 to $90 parking (if I chose to plant my car in one spot and rely on walking, taxis and buses during those days), the $14.05 bridge fee (over the GW Bridge) and the now moderate $9.00 congestion parking fee for peak-hour usage of streets below 60th Street , and the $2.25/day bargain for not using these streets for only off-peak hours.
After alighting from my motorcoach, I planted myself in a cheap but decent hotel only a few blocks from the Port Authority Terminal and relied on my knowledge of Manhattan’s public transportation system to get my appointments, errands and tasks done. Of course, if my origin and destination combinations lay near subway stations, and congestion pricing had had any impact on traffic, I could have saved lots of money. Of course, this was not the case, and the even spaced-out times of my schedule (no appointments were closer together than 90 minutes) would have worked out well. So during the whole two days, I took one subway ride. The rest of my trips to which I could not walk (a few worked out well) involved taxi rides – usually about $50 a ride (with a humane trip) – although I would have encountered the same situation, with a few additional hassles, had I driven over the GW Bridge and stashed my car at Broadway & 184th Street, where parking was only $40/day – my normal practice when I cannot stay with my niece in Queens (who upset my usual schedule by giving birth a week ago).
Regrettably, during my decades in Manhattan, I did not spend time in every nook and cranny of it. So I got a lot of exercise walking to Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, as I soon learned that at a certain point (near Astor Place), 3rd Avenue and 8th Avenue lay only a single block apart, and finding Fifth Avenue a chore. But not part of my otherwise frantic schedule, this was not much of a problem, and as long as it did not hinder my schedule, walking was not a problem.
In contrast, on some parts of this trip my destinations lay 50 or more blocks away from one another. As few origin and destination combinations made “subway sense,” I relied largely on taxis. Most of this travel was midday, not during the most congested period of the day. Just the same, the taxis crawled in bumper-to-bumper traffic, as I quickly realized that congestion pricing was largely a failure.
My own definition for “woke” is changes constantly. Last week, it was “trying to be nice while having no knowledge and no ability to think clearly.” This is pretty much the story of public transportation in the United States. And while it hurts me to concede to certain political opinions, there really is a “Deep State” in America. Unfortunately it is in public transportation, where I estimate about $2TR/year is stolen or wasted by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Department of Health and Human Service in their provision of mostly public transit, complementary paratransit and (from HHS) non-emergency medical transportation.
Fortunately because of fine health for an old guy, I did not need any of the latter two during my short stay in the City. But the fixed route transit system was bad enough.
What would have helped greatly would have been less traffic. A $50 taxi ride covering 50 blocks typically took more than 50 minutes. So I was able to make most of my appointments spread 90 minutes apart just in time. (Nearing my destinations, I sometimes found it faster to leave the taxi early and walk the rest of the way.)
Not to be overly negative about New York City, which despite deteriorating noticeably between visits, is the enormous amount of information an otherwise expert in transportation can learn about a city from a half dozen long taxi rides. Over-educated as I am from attending college and graduate school, there is no remote way I ever learned as much about a subject as I did from five hour-long taxi rides with smart, articulate drivers.
One thing I learned more about was the misery that the former DeBlasio Administration did to taxi driver-owners as it began decimating the industry in the mid-1920 after former Mayor Bloomberg began allowing Ubers into the city, in 2011, without paying medallion fees. Focusing mostly on ruination of several thousand drivers and their extended families, the NYTimes printed a vacuous article on the subject on May19, 2019, titled, “They were Conned: How Reckless Loans Devasted a Generation of Taxi Drivers.” As the NYTimes always seems to do for me – especially in articles in my field – that article indeed cited the tragedy of thousands of drivers – often immigrants who invested their life savings, and that of their families, to purchase a taxi medallion – whose market value lay between $1.1M and $1.2M per vehicle round 2014, when the Ubers began pouring into the City, with the Taxi & Limousine Commission chaired, from 2014 to 2019, by attorney Meera Joshi, clogging the streets with unneeded vehicles whose company advertised it as a terrific “side hustle” – another recognition that more and more Americans could not survive on a single full-time job. But that NYTimes article focused on the schemes of con men manipulating potential buyers and deluding them about the value of medallions – during the vehicle time their values were decreasing by the induction of tens of thousands of unneeded Ubers into the City. Nothing was attributed to the enormous infusion of Ubers themselves – mostly during Ms. Joshi’s five-year tenure as Chairwoman of the City’s TLC (Ms. Joshi’s incompetence was rewarded when former President Biden appointed her to head USDOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration – the body in charge of trucking regulations – in the heart of COVID-19.) Among my personal experiences last week:
- One taxi driver told me he bought a medallion more than a decade ago when the market value for it was only about $650,000. Now, of course with the value hovering around $150,000, this driver is doomed to operate it for six 12-hour days a week, for the rest of his life. At this rate, of course it will take him a lifetime to repay multiple members of his family who loaned him the initial money.
- Another driver whose logic was a bit mysterious purchased his medallion only about a year ago. Yet he drove only eight hours a day and had no interest in hiring others to operate the vehicle the other 16 hours, which most taxi drivers did (usually an alternating 12-hour shift, with each shift encompassing one of the two rush hours). He we just sick of it, sick of the traffic, sick of the superior response times of the much larger Uber fleet, whose vehicles were rarely more than a few minutes away from anyone summon one through their app. So he decided that whatever the cost – and his loss was atypically small – he planned to simply sell his medallion for what it would be worth at the time, and “walk away.”
Not taking notes or recording these conversions with my phone (as I could have), I had other things to think about, although I listened to these tales of woe with deep sadness. Of course, having realized decades ago about the corruption, indifference and incompetence in the transportation sector from my occupation as an expert witness, plus my former experiences with the taxi industry going back to my days in Washington, D.C., and, more enlightening, from my 17 years in Los Angeles, none of this was a surprise. And one can find thousands of articles about Uber’s rise to power and its crushing of the taxi industry in the United States (I know far less about this dynamic in the more than 150 other countries foolish enough to allow this corporate bandit into their transportation environments). So I won’t provide a history lesson now. Ironically, one can learn the least about Uber from the best-selling book about it, by Mike Issac, titled, Super Pumped The Battle for Uber – almost entirely about the internal battles of former CEO Travis Kalanick and others, with perhaps two sentences in the entire book about transportation.
Finally, one fascinating thing I learned from several taxi drivers is that they, too, paid for the Congestion Pricing experiment. Taxis appear to be paying about $4.50 a day toward this fee – and much of it was provided by the passengers, as this fee was used to hike the fares. (I was told that Uber passengers pay even a higher percentage of this fee, per ride.) Such fees might have been worth it to the drivers and passengers if the program could have sped up traffic. Yet frankly, from hours of bumper-to-bumper taxi rides throughout Manhattan, the traffic seemed worse than the last time I had taken a taxi in NYC – before the congestion pricing swindle of the City’s drivers, passengers and motorists had left the drawing boards.
But as noted several posts ago, New York City will become significantly unlivable in within a few short years: Mayor-to-be Mamdani has stated that he intends to pay for the estimated $6B a year in subsidizing rent control by “building.” Just what New York Needs – more buildings, bigger buildings, more traffic, worse air quality and more noise.
New York City stopped becoming “The City that Never Sleeps” years ago. Now it is “The City that Never Rests.”
#publictransitexpert #congestionpricing #ubersandtaxies #transalt #localtravelinNYC