The Taxi and Limousine Commission has proposed imposing a 30-cent per ride charge on taxi passengers to help offset the costs of introducing wheelchair-accessible vehicles for half the fleet.
This sounds like a tiny bit of money. It’s not.
Let’s do the math. On average, the yellow-cab fleet picks up 485,000 fares a day. At 30 cents a pop over 365 days, the payoff comes out to $ 53,107,500 a year, every year, forever.
Now we’re talking big bucks.
The lords of the taxi industry — the medallion owners — will reap the bonanza. Key among the beneficiaries will be the fleet owners, a politically wired group that was a particularly important election supporter of Mayor de Blasio.
After a valiant court battle, advocates for people with disabilities won a settlement with the Bloomberg administration that requires phasing in 7,500 wheelchair-accessible cabs.
Because these vehicles are more expensive than regular cabs, the fleets demanded a subsidy.
The request took nerve, considering that the people who own the city’s 13,637 medallions are making lots of money — as proven by the stunning rise in the value of medallions.
From 2004 to 2012, their price rose to more than $ 1 million, producing an annualized investment return of 20% — five times the return of the stock market. On Tuesday, it peaked even higher, at $ 1.2 million.
Now, the TLC plans to distribute $ 44 million of its annual pot of money by giving medallion owners $ 14,000 to compensate for the cost of each wheelchair-accessible vehicle, plus $ 16,000 for maintenance. Together, the $ 30,000 gift works out almost to the price of a car.
Drivers will get 5 cents of the surcharge or $ 8.8 million a year. How generous!
No one advocated more strongly than this editorial page for building a taxi fleet that can accommodate persons using wheelchairs.
As drafted in the waning days of the Bloomberg administration, the plan included no subsidies for the fleets or drivers. The de Blasio City Hall cancelled that scheme in January and then added the 30-cent surcharge.
The mayor’s aides say the fee accounts for the higher expenses of accessible vehicles. They and the TLC need to reexamine that proposition, because $ 53 million a year, forever, is a huge amount of money to gift to a prosperous industry.
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