The latest MTA funding package put forward by the Senate has a taxi problem. With taxi advocates agitating against the plan and practical collection problems cropping up, this reliance on a new taxi surcharge might just be enough to sink the whole thing.
The new plan — outlined here — is centered around a new taxi surcharge. The Senate will soon vote on whether or not to institute a $1 drop-off fee for all New York City taxi rides. This fee will lead to at least $190 million — and probably well over $200 million — in revenue. Half of that money will go to fund upstate roads and bridges, a point with which transit advocates have taken issue.
The eventual destination for those funds, though, is besides the point. Just how will the city collect this money to siphon off to the MTA and the upstate transportation infrastructure fund? Crain’s delved into the issue, and many aren’t sure it’s possible. “We can’t figure that out,” Ethan Gerber, a taxi lobbyist, said to the New York-based business journal. “Most people still pay by cash.”
Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith and his office punted on the issue. “I don’t think that has been worked out,” a spokesman for his office said. “There’s of course a technical aspect, just as there was for the collecting tolls.” That is, of course, a false argument as the collecting of tolls would have required the simple installation of high-speed tolling technology. Toll problem solved.
Daniel Massey and Erik Engquist have more from a taxi industry intent on protesting this hearty fee:
Taxi drivers said the $1 fee would eat into their already slim profit margins. “This is a wage cut on taxi drivers,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents 12,000 drivers. “Drivers would really suffer for a long time if this were to pass.”
Ms. Desai was leading a delegation of drivers to Albany on Tuesday to give legislators an earful. Thousands more are expected to participate in a phone-in campaign to legislators’ offices. “Who has ever heard of a private industry bailing out a government agency?” she asked…
The Alliance also agrees there would be no easy way for the state to collect the surcharge and charges that lawmakers lack a fundamental understanding of the industry. “There is an underlying assumption here that the money will just be deducted from paychecks and easily collected by the state,” Ms. Desai wrote in a letter to Gov. David Paterson, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Mr. Smith. “This is absolutely false.”
As anyone with any inkling of a clue about the taxi industry knows, cab drivers rent their cars for a flat fee each day and keep all of the cash they make. Instituting a $1-per-ride fee will either lead to more off-the-books rides or rampantly inefficiently collecting practices. Yet again the Senate has shown an inability to understand how transportation works in New York City.
Outside of these practical concerns, cab drivers are concerned about their bottom lines. Some taxi driver advocates believed rides could drop as much as 33 percent, and it’s nearly undeniable that tips will continue to drop as they do every time taxi fares go up.
For its faults, the Ravitch Plan got it right. It penalized the people taking advantage of the free roads and did so in a way that would have benefited the MTA specifically and New York City on the whole. This latest plan is just a mess, and while it may have enough votes to pass, it’s just another bad political compromise from the Senate.
20 comments
Every road I have been on with high speed tolling also has cash lanes as well. There is no way this can work on many of the Harlem River bridges. There is no space for cash toll lanes. Also, the state would be sending people invoices for tolls a month after the fact. Good luck with collections.
The lack of thought in the bridge toll plan resurfaces with the cab tax plan. S**t flows downhill so lets stick it to the cab drivers. Why not a stretch limo tax or a car service tax?
The bottom line is the system has been bled dry and Albany is scrambling in the only way they know how. More taxes.
This is truly not hard to understand. Did you ignore my response to you yesterday? This isn’t E-ZPass tolling. It’s a high-speed system that photographs your car’s license plate and bills you. There’s no need for cash toll lanes, and at no point did the plan every have one. It made perfect sense. So stop it with your uninformed snark collections. It’s just flat-out wrong.
As far as I know, the type of toll collection you describe is not used anywhere in NY State. Please provide examples of where it is currenly used.
The tolls still do not make sense because the same price is charged to get into Midtown as Inwood.
The fact that you pay a subway fare to go over the same bridge with no toll for autos does not justify placing a toll on a bridge. For one subway fare, I can ride from the Bronx to Rockaway and cross 3 bridges/tunnels. Should I have to pay 3 subway fares for this ride?
As shocking as this is to believe, there is life beyond New York State. This technology is in place elsewhere. Here is one website describing the E-ZPass way to high-speed tolling. Here is another company that can do what I’m saying.
Anyway, if the Spuyten Duyvil on the HHP is tolled, so should the Broadway Bridge. It only makes no sense to you because you are falling to understand that the tolls to get into Midtown are higher on the already-tolled crossings. If you choose to drive down Broadway, thus eschewing the 1 train, pay for it.
The fact that you pay a subway fare to go over the same bridge with no toll for autos does not justify placing a toll on a bridge.
Yes it does. If you’re subjecting society to the environmental, social, political and infrastructure costs of driving over a route amply served by public transit, you should have to pay for it. I pay for a subway ride; why should you get a free auto ride?
“Anyway, if the Spuyten Duyvil on the HHP is tolled, so should the Broadway Bridge. It only makes no sense to you because you are falling to understand that the tolls to get into Midtown are higher on the already-tolled crossings. If you choose to drive down Broadway, thus eschewing the 1 train, pay for it.”
This does not address the flaw in the proposed plan; the toll on the Queensboro and Brooklyn Bridge would be the same as the Broadway Bridge. There is no logic to this and it can not be justified.
If every bridge is going to have a toll, the subway fare should become distance based, not a flat fare with free bus transfers.
Your logic of paying a toll where there is an exisiting subway line should work both ways. If I have to pay 2 or 3 tolls to get to Rockaway from the Bronx, the subway rider should pay 2 or 3 fares.
Your logic is utterly illogical though. You don’t want tolls because, for those rare times when you make trips from the Bronx to the Rockaways via three tolled crossing, you don’t to pay. Great, but realistically, who does that?
Anyway, in an ideal world, the tolls on the major crossings would all be at Triborough levels, but you try selling that politically and see where it gets you.
You can continue to set up unlikely hypotheticals of people who drive around every day crossing multiple bridges every one-way ride, but that’s just an excuse for you to be anti-tolling. Your Bronx/Rockaway example is an outlier, not the norm, and the truth is that infrastructure costs should be born by those who use it. That’s what a tolling plan does.
“truth is that infrastructure costs should be born by those who use it. That’s what a tolling plan does.”
Fair enough but then subway fares should be distance based and no free subway/bus transfers.
I agree with that, and I’ve written about it before. It seems like a political non-starter as well though.
I’d venture a guess that half the people opposed to tolls on the East River bridges are opposed on the false premise that there will be toll booths. Thanks to people like Jon, who obviously never even bothered to read the Ravitch Plan, we’re going to be stuck with a substandard transportation system for the people who need it the most.
Of course NY politicians don’t have a clue how the taxi industry is organized, that would require them to have an actual conversation with a member of the unclean masses.
I seriously believe that the tax structure in this country needs to return to where it was in the 1950’s, with huge taxing of corporate profits and the income of the wealthy (i.e. the top 5% of income earners). This would reduce the burden on lower and middle income families, and reduce government debt. The government used to tax corporate profits at a rate of 45%, now most big corporations get so many tax breaks they’re paid to stick around. The income of the rich used to be taxed at a rate of up to 90%, which still allowed for the luxury lifestyles.
Instead, now days, our government borrows that money, at interest, in order to pay for the basic services our society needs in order to function. New York City is the economic heart of the global economy. Those firms have to be here if they want to do business. If they want their employees to be able to get to work so that the company can make a profit, the companies need to realize that they have to kick in toward funding the system that helps make their profits.
There’s a direct correlation between the changes in the tax structure over the years away from taxation and the increasing need for the MTA to borrow money to just be able to fund even basic long term maintenance. Without the huge tax revenues, most of the great public works projects this country used to do have gone away.
The problem with returning to 1950’s taxes is that it’s not the 1950’s any more. People and businesses can and do move their money all over the world, looking for the lowest taxes and/or the cheapest labor.
It’s still the 1950’s in France. Sure, it has its own problems, but it’s still a first-world country with high taxes, little debt, and ongoing public works projects.
Any chance at becoming “more like France” was destroyed by two words: Freedom Fries.
No, France has about the same debt ratio as the US (pre-stimulus), the same deficit, and substantially lower economic growth. If you want a place with high taxes and a working economy you’ll have to go to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland; in that case, you also have to explain what it is that Scandinavia does right that France, Germany, and Italy don’t.
Bit confused about the difficulty of collecting another $1 on the fare. Didn’t they already win a $0.50 “night surcharge”? I imagine they’ll collect the new $1 in the same manner, i.e. increase all fares by $1.
But yes, it will surely drive away business. The last fare increase and surcharge sure caused me to take a lot fewer cabs: it quite pricey already.
That’s true of every revenue mechanism you can think of. Raise subway fares, and fewer people take subways. Raise taxi fares and taxi-riding goes down. Raise cigarette taxes and fewer cigarettes are bought. Raise gas taxes and less gas is bought.
Bit confused about the difficulty of collecting another $1 on the fare. Didn’t they already win a $0.50 “night surcharge”? I imagine they’ll collect the new $1 in the same manner, i.e. increase all fares by $1.
That $0.50 night surcharge goes right into the pockets of the cab driver. That’s why there’s no collection issue. This would be the first time the city would be collecting fees from cab drivers based on the number of fares they pick up. The record-keeping on that alone may be too overwhelming to justify the costs.
I see. Well, I won’t give them any ideas; I’m totally against the idea anyway. Why should taxis be singled out for a double whammy? They pay registration fees too, I presume. Or a triple whammy if you include the payroll tax. I’m beginning to think the payroll tax–and only the payroll tax–is the way to go. If the payroll tax applies to everyone, other forms of nickling and diming are in effect double- and triple-taxing. And none of this “gradation” silliness either. It costs MORE to provide service to the outskirts, not less.
I have an idea for reliably collecting funds from many taxi trips: nondiscriminatory bridge tolls.
[…] « The taxi surcharge problem Apr […]