“Taxi king” Gene Freidman is now the court jester of the cab industry.
Freidman will no longer be allowed to manage the more than 800 medallions he’s controlled for the past several years, the Taxi and Limousine Commission ruled this week.
“We have notified all the medallions that were in the management of those companies that they would need to be managed by others,” said TLC spokesman Allan Fromberg.
The Upper East Side’s taxi dependency has dwindled thanks to the opening of the Second Avenue subway this year, according to a new report.
Yellow cab pickups and drop-offs have dropped in the areas surrounding the line’s stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th streets, NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation found in its latest study, published Tuesday.
“When people are offered an efficient service that works well, is comfortable and well-lit, they will absolutely opt for that over personal transportation, like taxis,” said Sarah Kaufman, a co-author of the report, which offers a narrow snapshot of how new subway service can impact congestion and bring equity to transit-starved neighborhoods.
Harkirat Singh, a practicing Sikh, says his turban is like his crown. He’s wearing a new one this week after his old one was ripped from his head by passengers who attacked him, calling him “Ali Baba.”
Singh said he picked the passengers up at Eighth Avenue and 30th Street in Manhattan shortly after 5 a.m. Sunday.
The passengers typed in their destination in his GPS: Jerome Avenue and 165th Street in the Bronx. But when they got there, the passengers — three men and a woman — said he was at the wrong location.
One of the 13,587 pieces of tin that give yellow cabs the right to pick up street hails sold in March for $241,000, a low not seen since the early 2000s and a far cry from the $1.05 million that a similar taxi medallion fetched in 2014.
For some quarters of the taxi industry, the sale is one more sign of how far the yellow cab business has deteriorated since Uber gained traction in New York starting in mid-2014. The previous low for a medallion sale during the past year was $325,000, last April, though there also have been sales, sometimes in foreclosure, for as much as $600,000.
But the low sales could be unreliable indicators, given the rule changes implemented by the Taxi and Limousine Commission to help stabilize the market for medallions.
You may only want to hail yellow taxis: The brightly colored cabs are involved in fewer accidents than blue ones, because yellow is more visible, according to a new study.
An analysis of millions of detailed taxi, driver and accident information over a three-year period from Singapore’s largest taxi company found yellow taxis were involved in 9% fewer accidents than blue ones, the study said.
Researchers ruled out differences in driving speed, number of stops and distance covered as factors, leaving color as the primary reason. “Color was the only differentiator because the company used the same car models and enforced the same maintenance policy for all its taxis,” the study reported.