After issuing thousands of new licenses to cabbies for electric vehicles, the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission says it is hitting the brakes.
TLC officials declared in a new review of driver permits, which was quietly published on its website early this month, that “additional for-hire vehicle licenses are not needed at this time.” The determination sides with the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance, which opposes additional electric vehicle licenses for Uber, Lyft and other fleet drivers; a TWA lawsuit to block new electric vehicle plates is now essentially moot.
“The rush on EV licenses generated by the opening and subsequent pause on applications led to rapid growth in the number of EVs across the TLC fleet,” the TLC report states. As of early February, TLC data shows that the city has more than 9,500 licensed electric for-hire vehicles — roughly 7,800 of which, or 82%, were issued over the last year.
Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, argues that “the TLC has already done damage to the drivers by allowing so many new vehicles.”
Desai pointed to TLC data showing that in December 2023 the number of Uber and Lyft vehicles active daily increased by roughly 13% year-over-year. In December 2023 individual drivers had 7% fewer trips compared to December 2022, she said.
“The fact that drivers are earning less trips means that they have to work longer hours,” Desai told Crain’s. “We would like to see legislation so that the TLC can never just lift the cap like this, where they have to come up with a process to ensure that we will not return to oversaturation.”
Drivers’ gross earnings have hovered between $1,000 and $1,300 per week, between February 2023 and January 2024, the TLC report said.
In October, taxi officials began accepting an unrestricted number of new license plates for electric vehicles. The new permits were intended to support the city’s Green Rides Initiative, which requires New York’s fleet of roughly 81,000 Uber and Lyft vehicles to convert to zero-emission or wheelchair-accessible rides by 2030.
The policy shift, however, reversed part of a cap on for-hire vehicle licenses first enacted in 2018 to prevent market oversaturation and gridlock. Driver advocates with the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance filed a lawsuit seeking to keep the cap in place, and in November, a judge temporarily blocked the TLC from accepting new applications that remains in place.
Desai said the TWA’s attorneys plan to submit a response in court based on the TLC report. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Machelle Sweeting said in February that she intended to wait for the TLC to issue the annual report on the for-hire vehicle market before making a ruling.
City taxi officials blame the TWA lawsuit for bringing about “a much more rapid expansion of EVs in the FHV fleet than TLC had anticipated when conducting its license review.”
Between February 2023 to February 2024, the TLC report says the number of licensed for-hire vehicles rose from 95,396 to 107,636. The new total includes 12,564 new licenses issued in the past year, of which more than 7,800 are new electric vehicle-only licenses. TLC acknowledged in the report that the growth “far outpaces” recent years, but that the city’s number of for-hire vehicles is still lower than the 120,000 licensed when TLC extended the cap on plates in 2019.
The agency still has hundreds more applications left to process. Drivers still interested in obtaining a license for a for-hire vehicle may continue to apply for permits restricted to wheelchair-accessible rides.
In a statement, TLC Commissioner David Do praised the city’s boom of green for-hire vehicles.
“In less than five months, we now have the largest zero-emissions rideshare fleet in the nation,” Do told Crain’s. “We’re two years ahead of schedule on the Green Rides Initiative, and in January, for the first time New York City rideshare drivers completed more than a million zero-emission rideshare trips in a single month.”
Do added that the “private and public sectors are eagerly responding to the call for more charging infrastructure.” Among those companies is Revel. Company spokesman Bobby Familiar said, in recent months, their charging infrastructure has seen a spike in use.
“Since the Green Rides Initiative went into effect in October, we’ve seen public use at our three fast charging stations increase tenfold,” Familiar told Crain’s. He added that over the last month, Revel has provided an average of 396 daily public charging sessions across its sites with a peak of 495 on Feb. 17.
“There’s no question the new EV-only licenses led to this immediate uptick in charging demand,” Familiar added. “The Green Rides Initiative has made our charging network expansion essential to help thousands more rideshare drivers access emission-eliminating EVs.”
Caroline Spivack , 2024-03-04 20:58:18
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