Streetsblog New York City

Transportation analyst and Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff is out with a piece in Reuters today that examines the traffic impacts of adding 2,000 new yellow taxis to Manhattan streets, and it’s not pretty.

As part of the grand bargain struck between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo that will create a new class of hail-able livery cabs, NYC will auction off 2,000 new yellow taxi medallions. The city is expected to haul in a billion dollars from the auction, but Komanoff calculates that in the bargain, central Manhattan streets will be overrun with even more traffic:

No one mentioned traffic when the taxi deal was rolled out last month at City Hall and in Albany. After all, with 800,000 motor vehicles already entering the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) each weekday, what difference could a mere 2,000 additional yellow cabs possibly make?

Plenty, it turns out. Yellow cabs spend three-fourths of each shift, around seven hours, plying CBD streets and avenues. (And of course some are active for two shifts a day.) Most private cars driven in Manhattan don’t do so for long. Even at the CBD’s notoriously labored traffic pace — now averaging 9.5 mph, up from 8 mph before the recession — the two to three miles per day logged by the average car below 60th Street occupy 15 to 20 minutes.

Adding one new medallion is thus equivalent to adding 40 private cars. Adding 2,000 of them — as the City now intends to do during the next three years — would be the traffic equivalent of adding 80,000 cars, a 10% increase in volume.

Some form of congestion pricing would be just about the only way to mitigate the impact of all this additional traffic, Komanoff writes. You can see the analysis underlying his conclusions in this PDF.

Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plan to create a new class of taxis allowed to make street hails outside the Manhattan core, most of the coverage has focused on the potential effect on yellow cab medallion owners’ profits or livery drivers’ earnings. Less has been written about the broader effect such a plan would have on the city’s transportation system as a whole (Cap’n Transit being a notable exception).

Taxis, after all, make up a significant component of that system. A 2006 report by Bruce Schaller, a former policy director at the Taxi and Limousine Commission and now a top DOT official, estimated that in 2004, yellow cabs drove 815 million miles each year, while livery cabs drove more than double that, 1.733 billion miles.

Now that the legislature has passed the plan — it still needs Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signature — we checked in with TLC Commissioner David Yassky to see how he views its wider impact. He argued that the outer-borough taxi plan would help reduce car ownership and improve traffic safety.

Though he couldn’t quantify the likely impact of the Bloomberg taxi plan on car ownership or trip mode-share, Yassky said that “I think we can say that we know what direction the numbers go in.”

“A healthy taxi market gives people an alternative to private car ownership,” he said. People currently use illegal street hails “to go home from the supermarket with heavy bags, to go to and from the subway stop if you live a mile from the subway, to go to church or visit friends on a Saturday or Sunday. Those are all things that you need a car to do outside Manhattan if there’s no decent taxi service… That’s the systemic impact.”

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Legislation passed by the State Senate last Friday night could clear the way for Mayor Michael Bloomberg to completely revamp taxi service in large swaths of the city through the introduction of a new class of vehicle authorized to pick up street hails only outside the Manhattan core. The improved service should make it easier to live car-free in the majority of New York City. It also would provide a small source of revenue to the MTA.

Under the plan, the city can issue 30,000 new permits to livery cabs, each of which will allow the holder to pick up street hails. In exchange, the permit holders will pay a $1,500 fee and submit to a slew of regulations intended to make the new class of livery vehicles more like yellow cabs.

Those regulations should be a boon to many riders: a uniform paint scheme and taxi lights so that the taxis can be identified without honking, a meter and rate card to eliminate the need to haggle over the price of a trip, credit card machines to enable more payment methods, and GPS tracking.

As taxis often serve as complements to public transit — especially true in outer-borough neighborhoods where many people live outside of walking distance to a subway station — improving their utility can advance progressive transportation policy. Taxis are already a major component of the city’s transportation system, with yellow cabs alone moving over 600,000 people a day.

So that the new borough taxis don’t simply join yellow cabs in the profitable center of Manhattan — 97 percent of yellow cab trips start there or at an airport, according to GPS data — their permits would only be valid for the other four boroughs and above E. 96th Street and W. 110th Street.

The plan was passed through the state legislature in an end-run around the yellow taxi industry’s decades-long sway over the City Council. In the Assembly, it passed by a wide margin of 110-28; the idea to take the vote to Albany instead of the council came from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver in addition to Bloomberg, according to the New York Times. In the Senate, the plan passed by 40-21, with a strange coalition of support that divided Democrats, Republicans, the New York City delegation, and the upstate delegation.

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Mayor Bloomberg delivered his tenth State of the City address this afternoon, laying out what he believed to be the city’s accomplishments, challenges, and priorities for the future. And if the speech is any indication, taxis and ferries are at the top of his transportation agenda.

Bloomberg’s plan to create a new class of taxi for the outer boroughs was included in a list of programs intended to make city government more efficient. “Why shouldn’t someone in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island be able to hail a legal cab on the street?” asked the mayor. Under the plan, livery cabs would be allowed to legally pick up street hails so long as they met a set of taxi-style requirements, including metered rates, credit card readers, standard markings, and GPS. A memo by TLC Commissioner David Yassky and Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith argues that expanding cab service in the boroughs would make a car-free lifestyle there easier; currently, 97.5 percent of yellow cab hails are in Manhattan or at the airports.

Bloomberg also discussed his administration’s continued redevelopment of the city’s waterfront. He touted plans to institute city-subsidized ferry service along the East River, the only other mention of transportation policy in the speech. Bus service, walking and cycling didn’t make it into the speech.

More than 13,000 yellow cabs ply NYC streets, carrying more than 600,000 passengers each day. That’s a lot of chances for a familiar risk to city cyclists — car doors opening in traffic.

The city’s Taxi of Tomorrow competition promises to select a single design for the entire yellow cab fleet. In the process, the cab door threat could be standardized out of existence (or at least drastically reduced). The competition is down to three finalists, and if you ride in the city, there’s one feature in particular that you may want to weigh in on: Whether the passenger doors slide open or open on a hinge.

The Design Trust for Public Space and the Taxi and Limousine Commission are asking New Yorkers to fill out a quick survey about what you want out of the next-gen taxi, which you can fill out here.

We checked in with the TLC, and two of the three designs — from Nissan and Ford — have sliding doors. The third finalist, from Turkish manufacturer Karsan, is the only vehicle designed specifically for the competition and has the aura of a plucky underdog, but the current design features hinged doors. A spokesman for the TLC said that the companies have yet to submit their best and final offers for the competition, so it’s possible the Karsan design can change before all is said and done.

The winning proposal will be announced in early 2011 and the new vehicle is scheduled to be on the road no later than the fall of 2014.

The federal appeals court verdict this week barring New York City from mandating that new taxicabs be fuel-efficient hybrids has left the mayor fuming and other New Yorkers scratching their heads. Why should Washington pre-empt the city from tripling the fuel-efficiency of our nearly 13,000 yellow cabs, a step that would materially reduce petroleum use, given that three to four percent of all vehicle-miles traveled in the five boroughs are by medallion taxis?

Why, indeed? Yet the recent subway and bus cuts and the next round of fare hikes unveiled yesterday by the MTA raise similar questions about oil impacts. These moves too will drive up gasoline use, not by blocking deployment of greener taxis but by deterring some use of transit due to higher fares, longer walks or waits, and less comfortable service.

Not every “disappeared” bus or subway trip will materialize as a car trip, of course. Some trips will be made on foot, by bike or by sharing a car, and some others won’t happen at all. But the number of additional car trips caused by the cuts and hikes will be significant, as will the increase in gasoline to fuel them.

I’ve estimated the impacts, using the BTA spreadsheet that has been written about here and was profiled recently in Wired magazine. I inputted an average 7.5 percent bus and subway fare hike along with a five percent increase in the time required to complete an average transit trip. (That's a rough "proxy" for the effects of increased crowding and unsanitary conditions as well as of longer waits between buses and trains and longer walks caused by eliminating some lines.)

The result: by inducing additional car trips as well as reducing the fuel-efficiency of all vehicles due to worsened traffic congestion, the transit cuts and hikes will lead New Yorkers to use an extra 13.5 million gallons of gasoline per year.

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With Albany lawmakers unwilling to properly fund the MTA, transportation planners are looking to plug the gaps that have opened up in the transit network and expand New Yorkers' travel options using existing resources. That's certainly a big part of the thinking behind the Bloomberg Administration's recent decision to expand private van service where bus lines were cut. One of the other ways New York will try to wring more value out of the infrastructure we already have is cab-sharing.

Can the city's 50,000 licensed livery vehicles better serve New Yorkers stranded by service cuts and help keep streets from getting more clogged with private motor vehicles? Both the city government and at least one start-up business are trying to find out.

Since February, the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission has been operating a handful of group-ride stands, where multiple passengers can jump into a cab together. They pay a flat fare and each can be dropped off at different locations, along a route that is loosely defined by the TLC. 

For example, the newest group-ride stand is located on York Avenue, between 70th and 71st Streets [PDF]. After each passenger pays $6, the cab drives all the way downtown on the FDR and then lets riders off at locations of their choice between Pearl Street and the World Financial Center. That particular route replaces the MTA's discontinued X90 express bus. 

"The goal," said TLC Commissioner David Yassky, "is to expand the capacity of the cab fleet by opening up seats that otherwise would be unoccupied." Group rides have the added benefit, he argued, of providing cheaper rides for passengers while offering more revenue for drivers.

The TLC isn't the only one trying to figure out how to get New Yorkers to share cabs, though. David Mahfouda is the founder of Weeels, a smartphone application that allows New Yorkers to order livery cabs electronically and share rides with other Weeels users. "Sharing offers users a big discount," explained Mahfouda, "and it's also a way to save energy and gasoline."

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On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg announced a new pilot program to provide livery van service for transit-starved neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, a proposal stemming from his 2009 campaign transit platform. The push to provide more mobility options in the wake of MTA service cuts is to be applauded, as is the administration's willingness to experiment with something new. But the jury is still out on this one. In particular, how livery vans will be integrated with the transit system remains a big question mark. 

To clarify what's in the works, livery vans are going to be a completely new service, not an expansion of the existing commuter van program. Currently-licensed commuter vans operate within specific geographic areas, but lack defined routes, according to a spokesperson for the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Livery vans, in contrast, would travel between fixed pick-up and drop-off spots, though drivers would be able to take any route they choose between them. Drivers would also be allowed to drop off passengers at locations of their choice, he said, not just at fixed stops. 

The fares are likely to be $2, with longer rides costing up to $4, according to media reports, and there won't be free transfers to MTA subways and buses. "The issue here is not whether it’s more expensive or less expensive; it’s whether the service exists or not," said Bloomberg at Tuesday's press conference.

Transit advocates expressed guarded praise for the plan, noting that a detailed proposal was still forthcoming. "Providing new options like this is part of providing for a car-free lifestyle," said Transportation Alternatives' Noah Budnick. The Straphangers Campaign's Gene Russianoff also believed that livery vans could help improve mobility for New Yorkers, if implemented appropriately. 

In order to make the livery van pilot successful, it's being accompanied by a major enforcement push. The TLC will target unlicensed vans, unlicensed drivers, and licensed vehicles working outside the the bounds of authorized activities, said the agency spokesperson. The idea is that illegal vans, not subject to safety and insurance requirements, would undercut the more tightly regulated livery service. 

But from there, the picture becomes less clear. Read more...

When New York City installed GPS units in its taxi fleet in 2007, it began an ambitious initiative to gather information about how traffic functions. Over the last couple of weeks, the reams of taxi GPS data collected by NYCDOT received some major play from the Times, which ran stories on the intersections with the most cab hails, the days with the worst traffic, and cabbies overcharging their fares. The data is so rich, you could probably mine it for a few dozen more stories. 

So we wondered, how can this trove of information be used to help pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders?

We know that the city has already used this resource to measure the effects of street transformations. Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Sadik-Khan cited average vehicle speeds calculated from the GPS data when they announced the new pedestrian plazas Broadway would be permanent.

What else can this information do? We asked some of our local transportation experts and advocates about their ideas. Here's what they told us.

"Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, former deputy DOT commish
"One possible use of the taxi data is to identify clusters of origins and destinations where it can be demonstrated that walking travel times are competitive or can be made competitive to taxi travel times. Then the city can try to make those walking trips more inviting with street designs, lighting, policing, changing signal timing to speed the walking trip, etc. Next, the city should publicize the competitiveness of walking for these trips."

Jessie Singer, Transportation Alternatives Traffic Safety Campaign Manager
The data could be used to find out how street infrastructure affects vehicle speeds. For instance, measuring "average travel speed on streets with bike lanes versus streets without."

Charles Komanoff, transportation analyst
"For some future refinements, it would be really helpful from a social standpoint to be able to measure instantaneous taxi speeds, not just averages, to be able to see in which parts of the city and at which times of day, taxis are exceeding the 30 mph speed limits and therefore endangering other people on the road."

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The first thing I noticed was a blur of yellow to my left, and a split second later a bump on my arm and something brushing my leg. I had just crossed Fifth Avenue, heading east on 72nd Street on my bike. I was riding, as is my custom, as close to the parked cars as I could while minimizing the hazard of getting doored. It was about 10:10 on a lovely March morning and traffic was light.

I managed to stay upright as the cab swept by me. Alarmed and shaken, I screamed and the driver hit the brakes. Adrenaline pumping, I banged on the front passenger-side window and yelled that he had just hit me. He raised his arms in a "What am I supposed to do?" gesture of helplessness. His fare in the back seat leaned forward to say something and the driver pulled away. I made a mental note of the plate number. Catching the cab at the next light, I loudly proclaimed my intention of reporting the incident to the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). The driver appeared unconcerned.

I deliberated long and hard about whether to press my case. The driver was probably just trying to make ends meet and save up a little by working grueling 12-hour shifts. Hell, I used to drive a cab myself. But I also thought of my responsibility to other cyclists. If the driver had swiped me on a four-lane boulevard in broad daylight, couldn't he do the same to someone else, with perhaps a devastating outcome? I decided to file a complaint.

The hearing took place several weeks later. I had a choice to testify by phone or in person in Queens (I live and work in Manhattan). Not wanting to take a half-day away from work, I opted for the surreal experience of being sworn in by a judge while sitting at my own desk. The driver, through his lawyer, did not dispute that he had hit me. His only defense was that he hadn't realized he had done so. To me, it seemed an open-and-shut case: Driver admits hitting cyclist, driver will face some consequences.

The judge's ruling came in the mail a few days later.

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