(Dan Brinzac)
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Everyone in the city should be allowed to legally hail a taxi, said Mayor Bloomberg, who will announce today his ambitious plan to permit street pickups for livery cabs in the outer boroughs.
In his State of the City speech, the mayor will urge the City Council to toss out widely ignored rules that say livery cabbies can only pick up fares by pre-arrangement.
“And why shouldn’t someone in Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx or Staten Island be able to hail a legal cab on the street?” Bloomberg said in an advance of his speech released yesterday.
Officials in the yellow cab industry — where a medallion sells for at least $624,000 — said they were “very alarmed” and “stunned” by the mayor’s proposal.
Michael Woloz, spokesman for the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, said his group fears liveries will pick up fares in the outer boroughs, drop them in Manhattan and then stay to steal fares from yellow cabs.
Woloz, whose group represents 31 fleets with 3,500 cabs, said the city doesn’t have enough inspectors to monitor liveries. “How the city thinks they can regulate and enforce another set of vehicles [roaming the streets] is incomprehensible,” he said.
According to Taxi and Limousine Commission figures, 97.5 percent of yellow taxi trips originate in Manhattan or at the airports. In the outer boroughs, where 80 percent of the city’s population lives, yellow cabs almost never cruise, the TLC said.
Illegal livery pickups are as common as one per minute at peak periods at locations such as subway stations and shopping centers, the TLC said.
Under the legislation Bloomberg will propose, livery taxis will continue to be barred from making “street-hails” in Manhattan but could make them in the four other boroughs.
To qualify, they would have to have meters, credit-card readers, GPS locators and recognizable markings, such as a single uniform color.
Officials haven’t determined whether they would have the same fare structure as yellow cabs.
Asked if the mayor’s proposal would be approved by the City Council, Councilman James Vacca (D-Bronx), chairman of the Transportation Committee. said, “There are a lot of questions — a lot of questions.”