We’ve been pretty hard on the yellow cabs for trying to keep their market closed to innovation and competition. But we’re with them on their opposition to the so-called “Taxi of Tomorrow.”
Under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission signed a 10-year deal that made Nissan’s NV200 the exclusive taxicab for the city. The taxi fleets sued. As public advocate, Bill de Blasio sided with the fleets.
Now a Manhattan appellate court judge has ruled the TLC’s deal 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 agency is charged with protecting.”
Perhaps the judge is right. But our opposition was never about legalities. It was about the wisdom of letting bureaucrats impose one and only one taxi on the fleets, which limits choices for taxi owners, smacks of crony capitalism and gives Nissan little incentive to make improvements.
The far better alternative would be for the TLC to set out the specs it wants, on everything from emissions to handicapped seating, and let taxi owners choose any cab that meets those specs.
This way, if some manufacturer found a way to build a better cab — i.e., a taxi that did everything the NV200 did but was cheaper or had lower emissions or some other improvement — taxi owners could take advantage of it.
The best thing Mayor de Blasio could do now is to find a way to get the city out of its contract and let markets rather than bureaucrats decide the real taxi of tomorrow.