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Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

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Yet another non-bike-related NYC transit reform bites the dust

By

Well that was quick:

Mr. Bloomberg made the so-called “five-borough taxi plan” a centerpiece of his State of the City address in January. The proposal called for creating a new class of livery cabs, with meters and, perhaps, a single color, that would be allowed to pick up passengers on the street outside of Manhattan who hadn’t arranged a ride ahead of time. Currently, such pickups are illegal but widespread. Only yellow taxis—whose numbers are limited to the 13,237 medallions in circulation—can pick up passengers who hail them.

But now talks between the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the taxi industry are focusing on a series of plans that would use yellow cabs—not livery cars—to expand taxi service outside of Manhattan.

“I believe we are completely off the mayor’s original plan,” said one person familiar with the talks. “I would go as far as calling it dead.”

As it stands now, the vast, vast majority of yellow cab pick-ups are in Manhattan or at airports, and it’s pretty much impossible to get a cab in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx to take you anywhere but Manhattan. The silver lining is that the number of medallions might be increased, but it’s not clear by how much.

I’d also like to point out that this is yet another transit failure for the Bloomberg administration, which only seems to be willing to go to the mat for bike lanes in wealthy, white neighborhoods. (To say nothing of transit advocates – I could be wrong, but I don’t think Streetsblog ever found time amidst its daily barrage of bike agitprop to come out in favor of outer borough taxi deregulation.) The private van plan was poorly thought-out and from what I can tell has been forgotten, the physically separated 34th St. Transitway was defeated, and who knows if anyone other than me and Cap’n Transit even realizes that dollar vans exist.

But oh well. At least the transit-starved residents of the outer boroughs can ride the PPW bike lane to their hearts’ content…if they ever manage to get there.

Comments

  2. I was thinking about this angle of the story when I wrote up this news on Second Ave. Sagas. The other part of Bloomberg’s transit “failures” concern his free bus ride campaign. Nothing ever came up that, period. It’s such a joke.

  4. Well, the free bus campaign was an election promise meant to be broken. It was obvious it wouldn’t happen. It’s the livery plan that’s more annoying, since this is about the administration being incompetent rather than brazenly dishonest.

  5. Yeah, at first I thought that he just didn’t want to waste political capital on a taxi dereg scheme that might not have passed the City Council, but if he felt that way, then why did he bother bringing it up in his 10th State of the City?

    He failed at congestion pricing, but at least he tried. With cab dereg and the busway (which, btw, couldn’t JSK just have implemented unilaterally? If she can close streets and add bike lanes at will, why couldn’t she have just pushed 34th St. through the same way?), though, they didn’t even try.

  6. One nitpick I didn’t catch before: the 34th Street Transitway was not grade-separated. It was to be physically separated from car traffic, but all the grade crossings with the avenues would be retained. Grad- separation of a dense city street means elevating it or putting it underground.

  7. It is hard to take you seriously, Stephen. You appear to be a guy who sits behind a computer monitor and bitches about the work that NYC transportation advocates are doing (or not doing). Yet, you yourself appear not to have done any of the boots-on-the-ground organizing and advocacy work that would be necessary to save 34th Street BRT, improve outer borough transit or make any other tangible improvements in NYC.

    You appear to be the classic “advocacy consumer.” As an advocacy consumer you think: “Dammit, I paid my $50 annual membership to Transportation Alternatives. I demand service on the issues that I personally care about the most!” When the advocacy consumer doesn’t see his issues being worked on, he will often go on to complain about his fellow “advocacy activists.” Advocacy activists are people who go out and do the hard organizing and political work necessary to make change happen.

    So, for example, rather than emulating the effective and powerful organizing work that the advocacy activists are doing to beat back the backlash on Prospect Park West, the advocacy consumer whines and complains that no one is doing the work necessary to beat the backlash on 34th Street.

    Your sniveling ultimately leads to the question: Where were you during the 34th Street Transitway debacle? Were you organizing and mobilizing bus riders, Macy’s customers and Empire State Building tenants? Were you making calls to Dan Biederman at the 34th Street Partnership to ask what you could do to help? Were you identifying the opponents of the project and aggressively reaching out to them or, where necessary, counter-attacking their arguments and activities? Were you nagging T.A., Tri-State, RPA and others and urging them to get more engaged in the fight?

    Maybe you see yourself as just a writer and not an activist. OK. That’s fine. But even as a writer were you aggressively promoting your blog posts to Streetsblog, Daily Politics, City Room and other outlets? Were you creating a drumbeat and sense of alarm that we were about to lose a very important project on 34th? Did you pitch an op/ed to the Daily News? Did you offer yourself up as a source to any of the daily beat reporters who cover transportation?

    This is how it works in real life, Stephen. If you guys want to see change happen — the changes that you want to happen — you need to stop complaining about the fact that other people are doing organizing on the issues that they care about. You need to get out from behind the computer and do organizing work on issues you care about. You need to stop inciting conflict with other advocates. You need to treat them as potential allies and get them excited about the issues that you care about.

    Sitting here and complaining that other advocates aren’t doing the organizing and politics for you and your issues is truly just pathetic and divisive.

  8. So, “An Adult” with the email address: [email protected]
    :

    Before you expect Stephen or anyone else to conform to your ideal, you must
    show how you are living up to that ideal and share the success you’ve
    achieved doing that so that we can emulate you. Otherwise, you’re just an
    anonymous, cowardly, verbal abuser.

    Adam

  9. My email address is not the point. I am not asking you and Stephen to conform to my ideal. I am not asking you to emulate me or my advocacy work (which, for the most part, has nothing to do with Prospect Park West). Nothing in my comment qualifies as verbal abuse by any reasonable standard.

    My point is this: If you want to improve NYC transit, sitting behind your keyboards criticizing other advocates is certainly not going to get that job done. If you want to see better advocacy work being done on transit issues there are lots of better ways to make that happen. If you were focused on building alliances and promoting ideas rather than bitching and moaning about fellow advocates, you’d probably find that many of the people and organizations you’re busy complaining about would agree with your critique and would also like to see more done for transit and outer borough bus riders. You’d find that doing this kind of advocacy takes a ton of time, effort and resources. You’d find that it doesn’t get done without an individual or organization functioning as a champion and driving force.

  10. If you want to be taken seriously, please conform to your own standards
    before demanding it from others.

    Let me put it simply: You are writing(!) anonymously(!) in public(!) to
    criticize(!) about how someone who writes about ideas publicly should stop
    criticizing and do things differently. You obviously don’t want to discuss
    ideas, or be taken seriously….

    When you are ready to partake in dialog like “An Adult”, come back and talk
    ideas.

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