NYC taxi drivers rallied on Nov. 15, 2023 against the city lifting the ride-share cap, allowing for Uber and Lyft to add more vehicles to the city streets.
Photo by Max Parrott
New York City’s taxi drivers have had a bumpy ride the last several weeks.
After the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) abruptly lifted a cap last month on the number of electric Uber and Lyft vehicles on its streets, drivers with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) gathered Wednesday to protest a policy that the union drivers say will drive down their bottom line.
“The [TLC’s] plan to oversaturate the streets with new vehicles is going to be disastrous,” said NYTWA Executive Director Bhairavi Desai.
The Alliance has argued that the city’s decision last month to lift the cap on TLC license plates for electric vehicles would flood the roads with an “unlimited” number ride-share drivers in a move that would end up hurting both the Uber and Lyft drivers as well as yellow taxi drivers it represents.
“You work 12 hours in a night, you barely make $300. You barely make $200. How can you afford your bills with that? And on top of that, these people wanna come and flood the street,” said Malang Gassama.
The NYTWA has since filed a lawsuit that the TLC violated city rules by not holding adequate public hearings around the policy, and last week a Manhattan state judge ordered a temporary restraining order against New York the issuance of new licenses to for-hire vehicles.
The city is claiming the pause in applications caused by NYTWA’s lawsuit ended up having the opposite of its intended effect by motivating a last-minute surge of applicants for the electric vehicle licenses.
“As a result of NYTWA’s lawsuit and the TRO, we received a surge of applications for EV licenses in a short period of time,” said TLC Commissioner David Do. “We will be doing everything we can to support these new small business owners as they get on the road towards a cleaner,…
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