Portland Punts Uber

The city of Portland, Oregon, has filed a lawsuit to block Uber from operating in its city. According to the Guardian, Uber started offering its low-cost Uber-X service, which, it seems, aims to used unlicensed cars and drivers not licensed as tax drivers to operate the service. Passengers would hail the non-taxis with the famed Uber app.

Until now, Portland had been the largest U.S. city without Uber, the Gurdian says. 

“Our main concern is public health and safety,” mayor Charlie Hales is quoted as saying in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Beyond that, though, is the issue of fairness. Taxi cab companies follow rules on public health and safety. So do hotels and restaurants and construction companies and scores of other service providers. Because everyone agrees: good regulations make for a safer community. Uber disagrees, so we’re seeking a court injunction.”

In some cities, such as New York, Uber and other services such as Lyft, has agreed to operate only with licensed car service drivers and licensed cars.   Elsewhere, the app-based services have come into town unregulated. 

The Portland lawsuit asks the court to confirm Uber is subject to the city’s regulations and to halt its operations until it is in compliance. 

Oops! -- TLC seizes hundreds of cars in error

The Taxi and Limousine Commission seizes more than 9000 cars per year-- all without a hearing and without a warrant. The TLC will give the car back to those who quickly plead guilty and pay $600. If you want to plead not guilty, you can get your car back if you pay $2000.

Now it has been revealed by reports in DNAInfo by James Fanelli and others and in the New York Post by Rebecca Harshbarger and Kathleen Cullito that the TLC lost almost 1,500 court hearings in 18 months in which TLC inspectors seized cars and falsely claimed they were illegal cabs. The TLC's own tribunal dismissed 20 percent of the 7,187 cases involving illegal-cab violations, according to a TLC tribunal spokeswoman. The 20 percent figure almost certainly overstates the true error rate because many drivers plead guilty because they are told that doing so is the quickest and easiest way to get their car back.

The increase in rogue seizures, the Post says, came about because chiefs and captains bullied officers to seize as many cabs as possible. Many examples of inspectors making bonehead plays under pressure have been in the news, as have reports of inspectors being hounded to seize cars often on flimsy evidence.

As DNAInfo notes, TLC inspectors often seize cars where the driver or the passenger doesn't speak English and the inspectors don't have a translator to help understand the situation. Often inspectors don't know or can't be bothered with the rules, such as those that allow New Jersey of Long Island cabs to make pick ups outside New York City for trips into the City. Another common mistake is to seize cabs driven by chauffeurs or cars serving a particular business, neither or which need TLC licenses.

Race-Based Seizure?

In another seizure gone awry, TLC inspectors ticketed a black man as an illegal cabbie after spotting him drop off a white passenger. That passenger turned out to be his wife, leading to a lawsuit in a Queens county court, according reports in the Daily News. and in DNAinfo.

The Queens couple, Dan Keys Jr., 66, and Symone Palermo, 53, filed a racial bias action (claiming a whopping $3 million in damages) against the city and the Taxi and Limousine Commission, claiming they were unlawfully targeted on May 2013 by agents who assumed that a black man dropping off a white woman must be a cabdriver, or, in this case an unlicensed cabdriver  providing an illegal ride.

This is the third black eye in a week for the TLC aggressive car seizure program, the first being an claim by one of the TLC's own inspectors that his agency acts recklessly in issuing summons, the second being a summons and car seizure of a driver who gives free rides to cancer patients. 

in the latest case, the husband and wife both received summonses — the wife was ticketed as  the registered owner of the car — and the agents allegedly continued the charade to cover up their mistake, according to court papers.

While the TLC-issued summonses were dismissed, the couple lost use of the car for a week. 

TLC mouthpiece Alan Fromberg, who is rarely at a loss when denouncing drivers, refused comment.

In the past the TLC has boasted that it seizes 8000 cars annually, and that it is looking to increase that number.

Additional links:

Lawsuit: TLC Mistakes Black Man, Bi-Racial Wife For Illegal Livery Cab Driver, Passenger

NYС officials accuse black man of being illegal cabbie for driving wife to work

This Racial Profiling Case Will Have You Shaking Your Head

If your car has been seized, click here.

Taxi of Tomorrow Held Legal

The so-called Taxi of Tomorrow got a legal green light from an intermediate state appeals court today, reversing an earlier trial court decision.  

Read the appeals court decision here.  

According to BloombergBusinessweek report, the Appellate Division ruled that the Taxi of Tomorrow program is a “legally appropriate response to the agency’s statutory obligation to produce a 21st-century taxicab consistent with the broad interests and perspectives that the agency is charged with protecting.” Judge David B. Saxe wrote the majority opinion. That there was a dissent by Judge Acosta makes an appeal to the New York Court of Appeals more likely.

Nissan won a contract with the city in May 2011 that allowed it to be the sole maker of NYC taxis, a deal valued at $1 billion over 10 years. 

Taxi fleet operators sued the city in December 2012 on the ground that the TLC had the authority to issue standards, but not to designate a particular vehicle. A judge halted the program five months later.  The city subsequently revised its rules to allow for more hybrid vehicles, something the TLC had previously advocated. The Nissan vehicle is not a hybrid, yet the TLC made it mandatory.

But in today's ruling, the court wrote: "Where an agency has been endowed with broad power to regulate in the public interest, we have not hesitated to uphold reasonable acts on its part designed to further the regulatory scheme. Here ... far-reaching control has been delegated to a commission charged with implementing a pervasive regulatory program. This far-reaching control granted to the TLC by the New York City Charter gave the agency full authority for its actions. 

Judge Acosta said in dissent that the commission exceeded its authority, “regardless of whether the Taxi of Tomorrow project is rational and consistent” with its objectives, because it mandated the exclusive use of a specific make, model and manufacturer.

The T o T was a darling of the Bloomberg administration. The new mayor, Bill De Blasio, has decidedly different views about the taxi industry so it remains to be seen whether the city and the TLC will seek to revive the program.

  

Taxi of Tomorrow remains (at least) a day away

As has been widely noted by now, the TLC's "Taxi of Tomorrow" regulation has been invalidated by a New York State Supreme Court justice with the improbable name of Shlomo Hagler. Article on the ruling are here, here, and here.

The case is called Greater New York Taxi Ass’n, et al. v. New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission Limousine Commission, et al., 101083/2013 (October 8, 2013). The ruling invalidated the “Taxi of Tomorrow” program on the grounds that the regulation exceeded the TLC’s statutory authority and that in enacting the regulation the TLC violated the separation of powers doctrine. 

The Taxi of Tomorrow regulation would have mandated that medallions owners purchase a specific make and model of automobile (the Nissan NV200) that had been designated by the TLC as the Official Taxicab Vehicle. It was enacted after substantial public discussion, an online poll as to the public's preference and formal notice and comment in September 2012. After an earlier ruling invalidated part of the rule on the ground that it did not permit the use of hybrid taxis, the rule was amended.  Now the the entire program has been thrown out.

The court analyzed whether the TLC had been delegated authority to enact such a rule by its enabling statute, the City Charter. In its review, the court found that “the purpose of the TLC was clearly defined” and that the Charter “enumerated authority to set ‘standards of service, standards of insurance and minimum coverage; standards for driver safety and design; standards for noise and air pollution control; and to set standards and criteria for the licensing of vehicles, drivers and chauffeurs, owners and operators engaged in such services.’” The court then concluded that the power to compel medallion owners to purchase a specific automobile does not exist in the City Charter.

The court further found that the TLC rule unlawfully impinged on the authority of the City Council to mandate the type of cars that could be used as taxis (if there was to be such a mandate at all). The TLC was not exercising a “typical administrative ‘interstitial’ rule-making function” such as its historical role of setting technical standards for taxicabs. Instead, it wrote on a clean slate, “creating its own comprehensive set of rules without benefit of legislative guidance.”

This is just the latest effort by Mayor Bloomberg and his (theoretically independent taxi commissioners) to dictate the type of vehicle that taxi owners might purchase. First, the mayor tried to force the industry to buy hybrid vehicles, not in so many words by through a minimum gas-mileage regulation. That ruling was held invalid on the grounds that only the Congress could dictate gas mileage.  Then Bloomberg pushed through the Taxi of Tomorrow, which ironically would have prevented the use of hybrids. 

The city has said it will immediately appeal. But for now, we are back to the traditional regime, where, in Justice Hagler's words the New York City taxi fleet "comprised various makes and models of

vehicles made by different automobile manufacturers. These makes and models were then modified or 'hacked-up' for use as taxis."  The TLC set the specific standards for cars that could be employed as taxis and the medallion owners were given the freedom to purchase any make or model of vehicle from any manufacturer who met those standards.

Only recently has the TLC decided it was smart enough to design cars. But it seems it was too smart by half. Nissan, meanwhile, says it will still roll out the NV200, and that it's a great car. Maybe so, but without its state-mandated monopoly, it will be a tougher sell.