Apps and caps: The City Council's bid to rein in Uber and Lyft gets it mostly right

Driven to excess? (Gene J. Puskar / AP)

The addition of 2,000 new app-hail vehicles onto city streets each and every month has meant booming business for Uber, Lyft and other companies. There are now more than 80,000 such cars in our midst, an armada dwarfing the 13,587 yellow taxis.

The benefits have been new income for drivers, low wait times for passengers and new transit options in long-undeserved boroughs.


But the galloping growth has also created huge problems, with hack driver incomes falling, yellow cabbies reeling, and ever more traffic congestion in crowded Midtown and Downtown.

A package of City Council legislation tries to remedy the ills while preserving the gains.

A smart driver income bill would grant the Taxi & Limousine Commission the power to require that drivers for Uber et al earn enough to cover their expenses and take home the equivalent of the soon to be $15-an-hour minimum wage.

If a driver doesn’t clear enough, the company would have to pay him or her the difference. The point: to discourage the behemoths from flooding the streets with underutilized vehicles.

It also makes sense to create a new registration category for app-based vehicles, which slipped into the city as corporate black cars, which they’re clearly not.

The Council also proposes pausing the number of app-based cars for up to a year while the TLC researches the optimum level. At the end of the study, the agency would have the authority to set a hard cap on their totals.

We opposed a freeze and cap when de Blasio proposed something similar back in 2015, when there were a quarter as many app-hail cars on the roads.

Conditions changed; we’re now more open to the idea, at least in theory. If yellows can have a level, so can Ubers. The question is what it is.

A cap, though, is a last-resort blunt instrument. Used properly, the driver-income rules can and should make the apps themselves find the equilibrium on the number of cars, while also setting the right balance between Manhattan and borough services.

And instead of setting a single number, we’d rather find ways to shoo Ubers away from Manhattan and urge them to cruise outside it.

The best way to make that happen is pedal-to-the-metal congestion pricing, a necessary idea that Albany must deliver on.