Don’t Slam the Brakes on Progress in the Outer Boroughs

Several weeks ago, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, was visiting our city and hailed a cab in Greenwich Village to take her to her hotel in the Bronx. The cab driver refused to drive her there, kicking her and her colleagues back out onto the street. When she was finally able to get a yellow taxi to take her to the Bronx, the driver grumbled all the way there.

Despite it being illegal for cabs to deny service, this is pretty commonplace for us residents of the Bronx. It’s not the driver’s fault—it’s the nature of the medallion system. Yellow cab drivers stay in Manhattan because they know they can’t afford to pay over $130 a day to rent a medallion unless they can pick up a passenger every few minutes.

Over the last four years, Bronx residents and visitors have finally been able to get a reliable ride through app-based transportation options like Uber and Lyft. Using GPS technology, these apps connect riders and drivers with just a few taps on a smartphone. The discrimination riders in the outer boroughs often face with yellow taxis is never an issue with these app-based transportation options, and unsurprisingly outer-borough residents are picking Uber to get home a third of the time, compared with only 6 percent of the time for taxis.

On top of enabling access to safe rides that arrive in minutes, this technology is creating well-paying job opportunities for New Yorkers. Thousands of local drivers partner with app-based transportation options. In fact, over 97 percent of Uber’s partners live in the outer boroughs or north of Central Park in Manhattan. Uber alone plans to partner with 10,000 more New York City drivers by the end of the year, with over 1,100 of these job opportunities going to Bronx residents. With the growth and popularity of these technologies, there is no doubt that other app-based transportation options like Carmel and Dial 7 plan to add more drivers to their platforms, too.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio and some members of the City Council are advancing legislation that would destroy the reliability of outer-borough rides and kill jobs overnight. Bill 842 would cap the number of vehicles affiliated with app-based transportation options to as little as 1 percent while the city studies the impact of for-hire vehicles on congestion. That means more than 10,000 jobs would be gone—jobs for New Yorkers in my district, jobs for people who need them most.

While the Bronx has experienced a resurgence in the past few decades—rising above the once-decrepit buildings, limited job opportunities and deteriorating population—the unfortunate reality is that it still has a long way to go.

The Bronx continues to have the highest level of impoverished residents in New York City, with more than 30 percent living below the federal poverty line. It also has an 8.3 percent unemployment rate, which is higher than the unemployment rates in every other borough, and almost 3 percent higher than neighboring Manhattan and Queens.

In addition to dragging down the employment rate (and specifically the employment rate in my district), this senseless legislation would also undo the improvements we have made when it comes to accessible transportation in the outer boroughs. Wait times for rides will surely double, triple, and possibly leave residents with no rides available at all.

As evidenced by Cruz’s experience with yellow cabs, any cap on the number of vehicles for hire will likely lead to drivers serving areas where demand is densest, and leave the Bronx—and the other outer boroughs—behind. We can’t let de Blasio and the City Council make the yellow taxi experience the status quo for vehicles for hire.

This legislation favors a handful of wealthy taxi medallion owners who donate generously to politicians and ignores the needs of millions of New Yorkers. This legislation does not remotely reflect the progressive ideals that the supposedly most progressive mayor and City Council represent. Simply put, it is wrong and discriminatory, and we are better than that.

Instead, we should be championing policies that enable hardworking New Yorkers to be paid more money and that make transportation options more equitable throughout the entire city. I urge my fellow City Council members to vote no on Bill 842, and hope de Blasio realizes that supporting this legislation undermines his campaign promise to lift up overlooked communities.

Annabel Palma is a New York City councilwoman representing parts of the Bronx.