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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

"The threat to medallion owners isn’t that they’ll lose passengers to these services. It’s that they’ll lose drivers — who have been aggressively courted by Uber. “Without the drivers, we’re dead,” "

Oh really? Please tell me again how people were thinking a gimmick that's valuable only because of a government imposed monopoly is a sound investment.

The bubble is popping. And it would be interesting to ask why did the price started going up around the 2000s...

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> a gimmick that's valuable only because of a government imposed monopoly is a sound investment

City streets are a limited public good. Aside from ensuring quality and consumer protection, regulation & limiting the number of taxis ensures that traffic can actually flow. A traffic consultant says that NYC's plan to add 2,000 medallions could slow down all traffic by 12% because taxis don't park -- they roam the streets constantly.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157477611/does-new...

The problem is not the regulation or limiting the available licenses per se, it's rather the ability to transfer or sell them.

If the current license holder can't or won't use it for another year there's absolutely no reason he should be allowed to transfer his permit. The regulator should just keep a list of people interested in it and let the next one have his turn.

If you limit taxis, more people will drive their own cars. To make up some numbers, if you want to take 2000 cars off the road, you might have to eliminate 2500 or 3000 medallions.

Instead, traffic-limiting measures should target all vehicles using congestion tolls, gas taxes, vehicle taxes, or something more innovative.

I don't buy that analysis. In NYC, you don't need a medallion to operate a taxi - you only need one for a yellow taxi that can legally stop when hailed on the street. Having more medallion taxis just means that these taxis will take business away from the "black car" (reservation-driven) companies and from services like Uber (and those cars never park either - if they're not moving, they're not making money). Increasing the number of medallions won't magically increase the usage of taxis - the people who can afford them already use them, but for the vast majority of New Yorkers, the prices are way out of reach and they take public transit.

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