Judas Maccabeus wrote:
UBER and LYFT has cause the financial collapse of the licensed taxi industry in NYC. Those medallions have declined 90% in value.
J.M.
The taxi monopoly in NYC needed to be broke. I lived there for well over a decade. Kudos to Uber for breaking it. And Uber gave a door in to many locked out of the monopoly.
But killed the cabbies who bought the medallions. Some to the point of suicidal action.
J.M.
That's true...and sad. But also, everyone knew these prices for medallions didn't really represent any real market condition but instead a vast inflation based on
a government monopoly. State capitalism if you will almost never ends well. (I had a friend personally that owned two of them...he was independently wealthy I other ways so I think he is fine.)
Judas Maccabeus wrote:
UBER and LYFT has cause the financial collapse of the licensed taxi industry in NYC. Those medallions have declined 90% in value.
J.M.
The taxi monopoly in NYC needed to be broke. I lived there for well over a decade. Kudos to Uber for breaking it. And Uber gave a door in to many locked out of the monopoly.
But killed the cabbies who bought the medallions. Some to the point of suicidal action.
J.M.
Yea but a look at the back story behind the taxi medallion prices is enough to convince me that the NY City Taxi Commission and the folks who were intentionally distorting the medallion market are a whole lot more to blame for the cabbies' suffering than Uber is.
I'm not fan of Uber. To the contrary. But this was not their doing. From the article:
Over the past year, a spate of suicides by taxi drivers in New York City has highlighted in brutal terms the overwhelming debt and financial plight of medallion owners. All along, officials have blamed the crisis on competition from ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft.
But a New York Times investigation found much of the devastation can be traced to a handful of powerful industry leaders who steadily and artificially drove up the price of taxi medallions, creating a bubble that eventually burst. Over more than a decade, they channeled thousands of drivers into reckless loans and extracted hundreds of millions of dollars before the market collapsed.
These business practices generated huge profits for bankers, brokers, lawyers, investors, fleet owners and debt collectors. The leaders of nonprofit credit unions became multimillionaires. Medallion brokers grew rich enough to buy yachts and waterfront properties. One of the most successful bankers hired the rap star Nicki Minaj to perform at a family party.
But the methods stripped immigrant families of their life savings, crushed drivers under debt they could not repay and engulfed an industry that has long defined New York. More than 950 medallion owners have filed for bankruptcy, according to a Times analysis of court records. Thousands more are barely hanging on.
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