Supreme Court torpedoes NYC’s hybrid taxi plan

A hybrid taxi roams the streets of New York City in 2007. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

My first true exposure to the politics and economics of transportation came during my junior year in college when I took a course on the automobile. For my final project, I wrote a detailed treatment of New York City’s taxicab industry and explored why it should be an aggressive first-mover in the environmental space by hybridizing its entire fleet. If you care to read it, it’s right here as a Word Document.

The city obliged my early transportation whims when it became to implement such a policy, but as with any change, cab drivers threw a few. The hybrids didn’t have enough trunk space; they were too expensive to maintain; they can’t withstand the abuse of daily work on the pothole-laden streets of New York. Yadda yadda yadda.

Eventually, a lawyer figured out a way to challenge the city’s move by highlighting a preemption argument under the Clean Air Act. The city, said a federal judge, was precluded from enforcing gas mileage standards because Congress had preempted the field via federal legislation. It seems crazy to think that a federal court would find the Clean Air Act a preemption of New York City’s efforts at regulating the taxi industry, but there go.

The city tried to enforce a different policy — offering cab drivers financial incentives to switch to hybrids. That effort too was deemed a “de facto mandate” in violation of the city’s inability to regulate vehicle emissions standards, and while New York could license hybrid taxis and include them on the allowable list of vehicles, the city could not mandate them. Of course, an appeal to the Supreme Court followed.

Yesterday, the high court declined to hear the case, thus ending an important environmental effort for now. City officials were upset. “I am bitterly disappointed,” Taxi and Limousine Commission Chair David S. Yassky said. “New York City is trying to reduce literally millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and the Supreme Court has told us we can’t do it. I cannot imagine when Congress wrote the Clean Air Act that they intended to handcuff states and cities trying to clean their own air.”

Michael Bloomberg too expressed his displeasure with the ruling, and he appealed, off-handedly, to a theory of federalism in which states server as laboratories for federal policy in a democracy. The cities are those that are addressing real-world problems like climate change and energy policy,” the Mayor said. “The federal government seems unable to address those issues.”

So what’s next? Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is on the case. Via Twitter, she said she would again pursue an effort to gain Congressional approval of her Green Taxis Act. She attempted to usher in this piece of legislation in 2009, but the Senate did not act on it. The bill would “authorize States or political subdivisions thereof to regulate fuel economy and emissions standards for taxicabs,” and the full text is available online. Hopefully, this measure can gain approval in DC.

Meanwhile, the city is moving forward with its plans for the Taxi of Tomorrow. The Karsan design has been chosen as the people’s favorite, and the city will soon make its determination from one of the finalists. If the winner is fuel efficient and offers a more sustainable ride, perhaps all of this litigation will have been for naught. Still, the city should be able to mandate its own fuel standards for its taxi fleet, and this non-decision by the Supreme Court is both unsurprising and dismaying.

The Karsan taxi, designed specifically for the Taxi of Tomorrow project, won the support of the public.