
Philadelphia taxi medallions fetch less than 17% of asking price - davidf18
http://observer.com/2015/05/the-taxi-industry-is-in-total-collapse/
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bandrami
Taxi medallions are the biggest cartel racket out there, and they're
inordinately powerful in city politics.

You want to regulate taxis? Great. I'm a liberal. I love that. Regulate the
everloving #$%& out of them. Require absurd safety and environmental features.
And then _let the market decide_ how many taxi cabs the city can support.

Even a bleeding heart leftist like me will say there are things the market is
really, really good at, and deciding how many service providers a sector
should have is absolutely one of them. Set standards -- set them high, for
that matter -- but for God's sake _let anyone who meets them participate in
the market_. Otherwise you're just a protection racket.

~~~
jahewson
I'm with you on the cartel bit but I think you're confused about what
racketeering is.

~~~
bandrami
That was hyperbole; it's not racketeering in the legal sense, since it's based
on lobbying to change laws. Fair point.

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DrStalker
I have trouble finding sympathy for someone who over-leveraged to buy a
billion dollars worth of taxi medallions on the assumption they would only
ever go up in value.

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brazzy
> ...those individuals who have invested for decades in yellow medallions. So
> I believe it is important that we see the devaluation of the medallions as a
> crisis. [...] I believe we have to step up and help those individuals ... to
> give value to those medallions.

WTF? That's the most blatant public admission of being in the pocket of
moneyed interests that I've ever heard from a politician. It's as if Ydanis
Rodriguez has never even realized that having value as an investment was never
the intended purpose of taxi medallions.

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afsina
Taxi medallion owners can cry me a river. Hell, whole idea of holly "yellow
taxi" concept can go to drain.

Here in Turkey, especially in İstanbul, taxis and private mini-bus
transportation business is a big racket as well. Taxis are over priced and
medallion (here they call it "plate") prices are extremely high. Taxi drivers
are not the owners and they must pay a big sum of what they earn to medallion
owners daily basis (A single taxi can bring $5-10k revenue a month to
medallion owner in a busy district). As expected, this created illegal taxi
business and taxi unions are trying to destroy them.

Mini-bus racket forbids nice inter-city buses carrying passengers to mid-
length distances so that people are forced to take their shitty over crowded
mini buses.

We need high tech, easily taxed, easy entrance taxi business here badly.

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al2o3cr
"Those efforts have found surprising receptiveness in a city that has made a
point of terrorizing billionaires."

Wait, did they start killing them without a trial just for walking down the
street? This surely can't be describing saying mean things about billionaires
as "terrorizing".

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InclinedPlane
The internet's main power is in disintermediation, and in that regard it is an
incredibly potent force. At this point it's not an adequate excuse to say you
didn't notice or didn't understand what was happening, the internet is in a
billion pockets across the world, maybe more, and there's no shortage of
examples of industries that have been disrupted by it.

Doubling down on the old ways, especially when they have been propped up
through corruption or regulatory capture will gain you no pity from me. Adapt
and move on, if you can't compete, good riddance.

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epc
This is a poorly written article.

If Philadelphia truly needs more cabs, then Uber can't be blamed for the
collapse in medallion prices since it's clearly NOT filling a market need.

In New York City, where the medallion owners are demanding some sort of
bailout from City taxpayers, all Uber drivers are regulated under the existing
TLC system. I'm no fan of Uber, but they've operated and grown in NYC within
existing restrictions.

Tried to comment on the article itself but their goofy Facebook bound
commenting system failed with any of the accounts I tried to use.

~~~
vijayr
I can't understand this bailout thing at all. If my job gets outsourced or if
I get replaced by a computer/robot, do I get a "bailout"? Why is it that
industries who were monopolies for so long, who had decades upon decades to
innovate but didn't, feel entitled to help from taxpayers? Not all bailouts
are bad of course, but this is ridiculous, isn't it?

EDIT: _New York City, for example, auctioned 368 medallions between November
2013 and February 2014. Trading for around $1.2 million each, that injected
almost half a billion dollars into the city’s coffers._

Jeez! Half a billion for driving taxis!

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Jgrubb
> The Observer already wrote about New York City’s biggest medallion owner,
> Evgeny “Gene” Freidman, and his efforts to secure some sort of bailout as he
> watched the value of his 900-plus medallions shrivel. Those efforts have
> found surprising receptiveness in a city that has made a point of
> terrorizing billionaires.

I think you meant "made a point of bailing out billionaires".

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davidf18
Even UberX rates in NYC are ridiculous:

Philadelphia: $1.25 base fare 0.18 / min + $1.25 / mile Chicago: $1.70 0.20 /
min + $0.90 / mile

NYC: $3.00 0.40 / min + $2.15 / mile

[https://www.uber.com/cities/philadelphia](https://www.uber.com/cities/philadelphia)
[https://www.uber.com/cities/chicago](https://www.uber.com/cities/chicago)
[https://www.uber.com/cities/new-york](https://www.uber.com/cities/new-york)

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dec0dedab0de
The cover article in the Philadelphia City Paper this week was about Uber. I
didn't read it to see what opinions were being handed out, but I wonder if
someone on either side of this is paying a PR firm.

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ck425
The one complaint I can understand from authorities is that many app drivers
don't have adequate insurance. I think there's a legitimate worry that if an
accident happens while drivers are working their insurance won't cover it.
Beyond that I agree the whole medallion idea is out of date.

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alexnewman
gasp the market is working

~~~
bandrami
Yep. But medallions themselves are a deliberate market distortion. And I'm not
a Milton Friedman "market distortions are always bad" person, but this
distortion is definitely bad. Artificial scarcity is a stupid way to achieve
whatever goal you have.

Set regulatory standards. Set them as high as you want. But then _let anyone
who meets them_ participate in the regulated activity.

~~~
joncrocks
The other argument is one of shared resource. 'The roads' in a city can only
'support' a certain level of traffic/automobiles.

Allowing the market select for how many taxis it can support could have
unintended consequences for other industries/anything that makes shared use of
the same limited resource.

~~~
sveiss
The shared resource argument is a good one, but why are only taxis limited?

There are other approaches (for example, congestion charging as used in
London) which can be more closely tailored to whatever outcome the regulator
is trying to improve, be it reducing overall traffic volumes, reducing
pollution, or restricting certain kinds of traffic at certain times of day.

A congestion charge scheme akin to London would be a better approach, as it
can be more easily tweaked for whatever goals you're trying to achieve
(overall reduction in traffic, prioritizing environmentally-friendly vehicles,
keeping goods vehicles out of the city during rush out, etc).

~~~
CaptainZapp
Other European cities, a good example being Zurich, limit the number of
available public parking spaces. If you may have a potentially hard time to
find relatively expensive parking this could be a big incentive to bike, or
use (excellent) public transport.

I'd be all for a congestion charge, but politically this is probably a non-
starter.

