CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Taxi medallions have been the best investment in America for years. Now Uber may be changing that.  Fri Nov 28, 2014 1:16 am | |
| When Uber first launched as a fledgling ride-for-hire service in San Francisco four years ago, it was a tech and transportation curiosity, a niche company for the kind of people who travel in black town cars. Since then, the company has transformed from yet another app to a billion-dollar behemoth with major public policy implications.
Lately, Uber has gotten itself embroiled in a new policy front over technology and privacy. All the while, it continues its city-by-city war with the cab industry over how best to regulate local transportation. Earlier this year, we took a closer look at what's at stake in that fight, and exactly why the data that many worry that Uber could now abuse is so central to the company's plan to remake the economics of transportation.
CHICAGO — A taxicab is a car remade by government, modified dozens of ways by edicts within subsections of articles of the city’s taxi code.
“Everywhere on this car has been regulated,” John Henry Assabill says. “Look at it!”
He throws up his arms in the direction of his gold-colored 2012 Ford Transit Connect. The car’s medallion number — 813 — is painted in black plain gothic figures (must be black plain gothic figures) on the driver’s-side hood, on both passenger doors and, for good measure, on the rear. Inside, there is a camera mounted over the rear-view mirror, a dispatch radio bolted to the console, a credit-card reader snapped to the passenger headrest.
From the back of Assabill’s seat hangs a sign — lamination required — spelling out the city’s fare structure: $3.25 for the base rate, $2 for the airport departure/arrival tax, $50 vomit cleanup fee. Everywhere, there are mandatory stickers. “That one costs a dollar,” Assabill says of a window decal reminding passengers to LOOK! before opening the door into the possible path of cyclists and pedestrians. “The fine for not having it is $100.”
Then there are the holes. Several have been drilled into the roof to mount the top light that distinguishes cabs from other cars at a distance. Another has been punched right into the hood, bolting down the palm-size metal plate — the “medallion” itself — that gives Assabill the right to operate this cab, one of 6,904 in Chicago.
Every one of these requirements is a point of contention in the escalating battle between the cab industry and tech start-ups such as Uber and Lyft, which threaten to upend a pact that has long existed in Chicago and other cities: In exchange for all of this regulation, taxis have for decades held a government-backed monopoly. At the center of that bargain — and the debate over what form of transportation best serves the public — is the medallion.
Assabill, a 62-year-old immigrant from Ghana, and his wife own four. Each one grants him a license, which he’s free to sell, to operate a single cab among the limited supply in the city. As of last summer, a medallion in Chicago fetched around $350,000, a sum that would buy a comfortable condo overlooking Lake Michigan — and one that buyers often finance as they would a mortgage.
In New York, taxi medallions have topped $1 million. In Boston, $700,000. In Philadelphia, $400,000. In Miami, $300,000. Where medallions exist, they have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009.
More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/27/as-uber-fights-new-battles-over-privacy-an-older-war-simmers-with-the-cab-industry/
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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