 Hi, welcome everyone. This is our fourth session of PSAPs by Shooting and Fighting Series. So today we have the pleasure to welcome four speaker panelists. Two speakers have been driving rules recently passed by the TLC Commission. The impact of a hearing for higher services on the city's shooting and for higher sectors. And more about the need for spark, need for involvement, policy making, and more. So first I'd like to introduce our model group. Alastair Zuma is a technology entrepreneur. And she is the author of the book, Our Howler of the Inspirited, rewriting legal support from the University of California Press. Now, can the critters please join me in welcoming Alastair Zuma. I'm not an entrepreneur actually. I'm an ethnographer, which is like the opposite. Ethnographers, critique systems and entrepreneurs are optimistic about them. So we're here today to discuss an earning standard for New York City's app-based drivers, the Taxi and Limit-being Commission's proposed new rules. And with us today we have Commissioner Mira Josh Sheep. I'm going to only give short parts of everyone's bios to save time for questions and such, but you can see them all on the website for this event. Commissioner Josh Sheep oversees the largest private for higher ground transportation industry in the United States, and she is a vocal advocate for the value of robust transportation data that brings policymakers and citizens together, and under her tenure the agency has become a public sector leader in the open data movement. We also have, to my right, Professor Anthony Benke, who is an assistant professor in urban planning at Columbia, focusing on the use of data-centric practices in city-making, and his own research considers the use of digital data and pervasive sensing technologies in designing, planning and evaluating urban environments, and spans the disciplines of urban design, urban technologies, innovation studies and public health. And to my left we have Research Scholar Eric Goldwin, who is at the NYU Urban Expansion Program at the Marin Institute, and his dissertation examined transportation planning and policy formation in New York through the lens of Brooklyn's dollar vans. We're going to start with Commissioner Joshi, who is going to present on the most recent work that TLC has accomplished with the weight-earning standard. Thank you everybody for coming, and I'll start out with a blatant pitch for public service, and the TLC especially. We're always looking for people that are interested in city planning, since together the TLC licensed vehicles move about a million people a day. Their daily travels have a lot to do with how, or are greatly affected by how our city is planned, so I'm done, but there. So TLC regulates all four higher transportation in New York City. That's yellow taxis, green taxis, Uber, Lyft, the dollar vans, which are now two dollar vans, ambulance, limousines, your local car service, your luxury black car service. All told it's about 140,000 vehicles driven by about 200,000 drivers. What really pushed those numbers up is the app services. When they came to New York City in probably 2014 is when they started to become a greater actor. 2014, late 2013, you found more and more drivers coming into this sector, more passengers, or more people in New York interested in taking for higher service because now they associated it with something they just pressed their phone. It wasn't like calling your local car base and waiting for five, ten minutes. That's what mine always says, five, ten minutes, but it's true. And so the sort of number of trips grew, the income opportunities grew, and by the thousand we were seeing cars and drivers join the fleet. So that's about 3,000 drivers a month and about 2,000 cars a month. And that was steady from 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. So there's some mitigation because people leave or they give up driving, but overall the increase was monumental. And what had started out as a tale of this is great, I have flexibility, I don't have to deal with a garage, the Danny DeVito picture of the guy in the cage yelling that you're not going to get the car you want, that's a thing of the past. You can now just get paid immediately, work when you want to work, use your own car. It has to be licensed and passed by us, pass our inspection, carry insurance, no other jurisdiction has the same requirements we have in the U.S. But still you have this freedom and it brought a lot of people in the industry and a lot of sort of happy driver advocates at first. So around 2015 we started to get some initial trip data, which demonstrated to us pretty clearly that the bulk of these trips weren't happening as advertised in transit deserts or in the outer boroughs. The overwhelming majority of them, 70 to 75 percent, and we're talking middle 2015 are happening right in the core in Manhattan where we already have buses and taxis and a million other ways to get around. And so we raised the thought to City Council and City Hall, maybe it's time to start clamping down on this endless licensing that we're doing because it's compounding an existing congestion problem. And at that time, some of you probably remember all the press that went along with this, one of the biggest sources of pushback came from Uber, but not always in the voice of Uber, it came in the voice of drivers who they had given t-shirts to and convinced that if this thing went through their days of milk and honey would be over, they wouldn't be able to earn the way they're earning and this was going to be the end of their new found income opportunity. And there were many drivers that believed that and I think the day we had some days where we had driver protests right in front of our building, there's a whole other side where Uber attacked the politics, but there was this real groundswell of drivers. If you fast forward to 2018 when we successfully passed rules that dictate minimum driver pay, what you see that's changed dramatically is drivers are no longer of the belief that they're, you know, hit the jackpot, they're very much aware that they're not making very much money at all. And in those three intervening years where there were no limits and didn't result in them making more money, it resulted in them making less and less year over year. So we, in 2016-2017, required the companies to give us driver pay information, to determine this amount of analysis of that, determined that 96% of the app drivers make less than a minimum wage, the state equivalent, which is now $15. And we went on to devise a formula whereby you're guaranteed a certain amount per minute, a certain amount per mile, and each company must keep you busy every hour. If they can't keep you busy, they're going to have to pay you more per minute and per mile. And those rules became TLC law on February 1st. And the first of this sharing with Alex is, you know, you don't get a lot of compliments in this business, but the fact that we're getting very few complaints and some compliments in fact is, to me, a sign that this was a huge need among the working population, and that's, you know, at least 80,000 people were talking about that live and work in New York City. And it was done in a way that I think responds to the fact that they're not employees, so you don't have the ability to just require their employer to pay them more. Right now, as soon as they became law, you know, Lyft and Juno sued us, so there was some back and forth, and in the beginning Lyft did not pay them the amounts that they were due. There was a lot of pushback from the drivers, and ultimately Lyft decided, although they'll continue their lawsuit, they will pay the drivers what they're due. I leave it to you to decide how effective that strategy is going to be in the end, but there you have it. And Uber on Friday sued to overturn the cap, which was put into, because I forgot to tell you, so 2015 there was no cap put in place, 2018 by August City Council revisited the issue with the benefit of a lot more trip data, which showed that congestion was getting worse, traffic speeds were getting worse, and there certainly was a correlation between empty Uber's and Lyft's wandering around the congestion zone and the slowing traffic speeds. So in August 2018, the council did what they didn't do in 2015, and they put a pause on licensing. So right now we're not issuing any more licenses, and on Friday Uber filed a lawsuit to overturn that local law, and we'll see how that progresses. But this is part of policy making. There's the numbers and the policy, and then there's the politics and the litigation. So we're at the end here, the litigation part. But I'm really happy to be here and that people are interested in this process, and welcome all of your questions. Thank you so much. I'll just respond very briefly. So I have been doing research on Uber and Lyft drivers and how they experienced their work from about 2014 until the beginning of 2018, not just in New York City, but across more than 25 cities in the United States and Canada. And so what's been really unique to see in New York is the political will that has come to bear on improving the living conditions and working conditions of drivers, where Uber and Lyft built off of a pre-existing and very strong taxi industry. And so a lot of taxi drivers would convert over to Uber and Lyft and Juno and Via and Get. There was a merge at one point. And they had a very different sensibility of what it would mean to drive for Uber and Lyft in New York, where most drivers, majority of them were working full-time to pay their bills, to support their families, and this was their occupation. Whereas drivers in many other cities don't perceive Uber and Lyft as their occupation. They might also be working as a social worker, or they might be working as a nurse, or they might have some other primary identity as workers, but they consider this an additional source of income that has often been narrated as supplemental, like play money, like the way that women's work is often categorically assessed as something that's not crucial to household stability. And in fact, this money is being used to pay really significant bills. It's your medical bills, it's rent, it's college tuition for your kid. It's not true for everyone. There is a tier of hobbyists who work for Uber and Lyft recreationally because they enjoy the social benefits, but they too are also affected by conditions that drivers widely perceive as unfair, such as when Uber and Lyft experiment on their pay without notifying them that they're running experiments on their pay. So New York City has been really, I think, a model for cities across the United States and in Canada that are looking to see how they can regulate technology companies of which Uber has come to symbolize because Uber typically symbolizes both the gig economy, but it's also a framing device for how entrepreneurial regulators can intervene in the growing dominance of technology institutions as there's a growing social recognition of their political effects and rather than the sort of cultural narrative that sees technology companies as merrily glue sort of hidden invisible infrastructure to how the services that we all benefit from in our everyday lives. The TLC also has regulatory power that a lot of other cities just don't have in place. And I think a lot of cities are watching to see how New York City can create a sort of minimum wage for drivers because they're also looking at how they can benefit from the services that a lot of their consumers and constituents love and enjoy. They're very popular services, but at the same time, there's a disruption happening to how this work gets done. And I think most recently the taxi driver suicides in New York City really catalyzed a political will and recognition broadly in society that the stakes have shifted. This was no longer just sort of an opportunity for flexible work. This was something else that was going to bear down on how we all consider and conceive of workplace practices in everyday life. My work has also taken me to see that the practices that Uber and Lyft bear on managing drivers as a workforce have been changing our conception of work. Commissioner Joshi mentioned that, of course, drivers are not considered employees and so the city has come in to create other standards in lieu of that. But a lot of battles around how drivers are treated have been crystallizing around labor misclassification lawsuits. What I've seen in my work is that drivers, although they are narrated as entrepreneurs and classified as independent contractors, have a boss. It's just an algorithmic one that encodes the rules of how they have to behave through automated workflows and communications. And so there's, on one angle, there's the misclassification lawsuits that's helping to determine the future of how we conceive of work and what it means to work for an app and a boss. And we also have sort of different regulatory purviews including what the TLC has purview over, which is, okay, well, how can we use our existing laws and our existing powers and even creating new legislative authorities to try and create better working conditions even as those larger looming labor lawsuits take place in other areas. The last comment I would make very briefly is that there are many regulatory agencies trying to grapple with the effects of Uber and Lyft overall because they're so disruptive, because they come in and say, you know, we're not a transportation company, we're a technology company. And so the rules that you have in place for taxi companies and transportation companies no longer apply. The Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't apply to us because we are a technology company. We might do the virtue signaling and say that we also provide accessible services or we're going to serve under certain neighborhoods, but it's not encoded in their practices. It is considered an extra thing they might do even though it's not required. And so what's happened is kind of a split. That split has become very visible in New York City because the medallion system was effectively broken where there was no longer sort of the same kinds of caps that would apply to taxi companies. The medallion system is still in place, but of course, Uber and Lyft came and sort of flooded the market with many, many new vehicles as well. And so when we think about what New York City is doing, it's good to keep in mind that it's a model for how you can try and collect the data you need to assess how drivers are actually being paid. In many jurisdictions, cities don't even have basic data on where TNCs are operating. They don't have zip code data. And so that's been a fundamentally different and powerful approach to try and assess the impact of these services. But more broadly, there's numerous policymakers that are trying to figure out the right tools to bear on a model that is seen as quite disruptive. And that changes the framework for even approaching the problem. So if you're not a transportation company, and you're a technology company, what does that mean for how the rules apply? Next, I think I'm going to turn it over to Anthony who will respond. Cool. So I have four points of different scales and types. So I apologize. It'll be a little bit scattered. The first thing that I want to say was actually my appreciation for the thought that went into the living wage aspect. Numbers are contentious. And I actually argue against a $15 minimum wage in New York, not because it's too high. I think it's actually too low. And some estimates from the press say this wage could actually be as high as $17 for a driver. Again, that's contentious. Just to put it in perspective, the living wage calculator out of MIT calculates that for a single individual household, the living wage is about $1750. So even the minimum wage laws that have just been enacted are not actually enough to sustain a single individual household, let alone if you have children. So I think the thought, at least from what the press is evaluating of this regulation, is actually probably a better model for what the city should be thinking about, at least when it comes to the welfare of individuals, when it comes to their income. For me, I was saying earlier to some of the panelists that I've been a longtime user of these services that according to my Lyft profile, my first ride was 2013 April in Boston when you used to sit in the front and you fist-pump, which I learned they can't do because it confuses of whether they're employees or not. But I think for me and I think for many people, the reason why these were popular compared to traditional taxi systems, if some of you can think back that far, is how the relationship between information has changed that for a long time a lot of taxi companies, I wouldn't say the companies, but the drivers benefited from the asymmetry of information that we had. They know the routes, they know what the fares are, and they know whether the credit card machine actually works or not. And I remember many times back then, I would take a taxi in New York and lo and behold, there's always a posted note on the credit card machine where it's broken. Because, I mean, a lot of it is that they weren't paid every day, they might need that money. There's a lot of reasons. I'm not gonna say it's unjustified that happens. And when these apps came along, all of a sudden you knew the fare, you presumably knew the route that you were taking. And now, if you compare that to a taxi driver, I'll make it even more concrete. I was in Bangkok, and I was gonna take a taxi. I could try to ask them, I don't know Thai, of how much a fare would cost. They could make up any number that they want. I could also just pull up Grab, which is a competitor, and say, well, this estimates that the fare is this much. So if the Delta is four times, then I know that they're trying to maybe rip me off as a tourist from the United States. And as these apps have come into play, that symmetry relationship, that asymmetry has disappeared, at least with those companies for the consumer, that you could begin to see this, and the regulations have now really pushed kind of a greater symmetry of information with the taxi drivers and the consumer. What I think was interestingly highlighted by this new wage law is, although there's, in some ways, more symmetry with you, the consumer, there was not the symmetry with the driver, that they're being tested upon. They don't know how much they're gonna make per ride. They just see a number, and that this is a fare. And that's not necessarily whether you're gonna get paid because there might be discounts that are added later that they didn't know. So I think that what this is doing is it's highlighting the role of regulation in actually breaking open this black box it adds to smashing. But I think as we move forward with these technologies, there's still a lot of black boxes, right? That how surge happens, how much does it happen by, is still somewhat a black box. The routing is still somewhat a black box. So how do we begin to appreciate the benefits of the technology but make sure that, in a way, that all the parties involved are benefitting and not just the kind of computer systems hidden in Silicon Valley. And how do we, as a consumer benefit, the community benefit but also the drivers? My last point with that last part about the community is that there's still a lot of questions as we grapple with these conversations of congestion. And this is not just in the preview of the TLC, so I'll say it, but how do we think about the relationship of the built environment, our other transportation policies, the MTA and all of their kind of conversations that they're having and thinking about a holistic transportation system that actually remedies some of these aspects? This congestion pricing, the silver bullet, is fixing the MTA with unlimited money, the silver bullet. I don't know, but deadheading is partially a result of labor dynamics, the services, but it's also the physical environment as well. We don't manage curbs in the city. So how do we have a larger holistic conversation as these services are just becoming more and more pervasive in more part of our everyday life? Thank you so much. I'm going to turn it over to you. So my name is Eric, and the first thing I'll just say is as someone who studies transport, who's always been interested in transportation since I was a kid, the advent of Uber has really made my hobbies and interests much more popular. I assume you feel the same way as being the commissioner of the TLC. If anyone here can name a previous commissioner of the TLC, I'd be very impressed. But I think there are sort of two major things that have happened that I think are very exciting. And one is getting to Professor Vanky's point about just sort of overall surface transport policy in New York. It's something that doesn't exist, and as far as I'm aware, has really never exist in this city. Other cities do a much better job of sort of coordinating between public transport, taxis, parking, so on and so forth. I mean, in the English-speaking world, London is sort of the prime example. And I don't know if you think that sort of your job is made much harder because you don't have control over all these different things. The other piece of this, I do think, is the labor piece, and one of the things that I think is very underappreciated is what is the nature of driving as a profession? Is it a profession? I think if you look at the history of yellow taxi drivers, I don't know if I'll list some names here, but Larry David, Michael Powell, the commiss for the New York Times, many professors, many medical students, many people have been part-time taxi drivers sort of in the 60s, 70s, and 80s as a way to enter into a different profession. The average life of a cab driver was very short. I don't think, I thought this number was the most recent TLC fact book, but I remember looking at it four or five years ago, I think the average lifespan, meaning the time someone was a driver, was about nine years, was that right? Drivers tend to be older and stay in the profession for a longer time. So I think it's like nine years, and I think the average age of a yellow cab driver is between 40 and 50. The dynamics of it are very different from someone who's like, this is a stepping stone to some other thing. And if that's the case, I do think then we do really need to think about what are the the way that we sort of pay these people and what are the benefits that are associated with this job. I think that transition has totally sort of destabilized the industry starting in sort of the late 70s and has sort of come to a head with the apps. And one piece of data that I've never seen from any of these companies is sort of what is the churn rate of their drivers. How often 68% for Uber drivers after six months and it's a little higher for women. 68% continue or drop out after six months. Which makes sense why they're suing you over wanting to have more people. It might be lower in New York. It's not specific to New York. It costs a little bit more to start up in New York. The varied entry in New York is very different which is partially why you get so many full-time drivers. It doesn't make any sense to do it part-time. Right, and I think that's a great point. The other sort of piece of all this that I found interesting, I was looking through all the data over the past couple days and the thing that sort of blew me away and there are reasonable explanations for this. If you were to assume what vehicle do you think does more rides per day, an Uber, Lyft or a Yellow Taxi? Someone take a guess. How many people think Yellow Taxi? How many people think Yellow Taxi? Thank you for leaving. How many people think Uber or Lyft? Right. I don't know who the majority was. The majority was with the Uber and Lyft. Yellow Taxi. There's more trips a day. Absolutely, and there are some I think reasonable explanations for this but I think one of the promises of all this technology was that there would be greater efficiency and that at the end of the day these vehicles would essentially be perpetual motion machines with people filtering in and out and it was like the Jetsons or some other futuristic thing. I think that bill of goods and that future has not come to be for the time being and as a result cities, policy makers, planners and so on really need to think hard about what are our objectives, what is good transport policy but what is just good social human policy and I think that those are some of the things that we're seeing coming out of the TLC that is very interesting and makes New York unique compared to other jurisdictions. Anyhow, that's all I got. I wanted to add just one or two last points. Commissioner Joshi mentioned earlier that drivers gave voice to a lot of Uber's platform early on when the city made efforts to try and reign in some of its practices and I think that's a growing trend with direct to consumer products because Uber leveraged its identity as a technology company to accomplish regulatory arbitrage to say these regular rules don't apply to us, it had this and it had an app it was able to leverage drivers as political constituents and not just drivers passengers too might get a map showing a de Blasio version of a map indicating that if Mayor de Blasio's rules came to pass a couple of years ago that there would be literally no cards available on the map. It's a very effective political tool and I think in a lot of ways there's been some regulatory forbearance, I think the word where the rules might exist but people may hesitate to implement them because they're going up against a very popular service. I think one of the reasons that the TLC can create the rules that has implemented now with greater societal support is because there's a growing reckoning, a tech lash even where the role, the sort of more insidious power of very popular technology companies and services are recognized as having very little restraints and very few responsibilities and feel to users beyond providing a very great product and that's become a point of political dissent at the level of the federal government as well and so that's just something to bear in mind. It's hard to go up against a really popular service. The other point I was going to make is that part of what makes the TLC's data collection policies so incredible is that often when we're talking about a black box about algorithmic accountability we're talking about really small things like how much did you make? How much should you have made? Did you get the tip that the passenger inputted? Has Uber implemented a new pricing policy without telling you what they did? Drivers had a contract where they would remit let's say 25% for really more like 30% of what the passenger paid back to Uber as a commission and before Uber actually changed the terms of its contract or explained anything otherwise to drivers it started experimenting by charging some passengers more or even sometimes less than what the driver fare would be and that is not so different from the kinds of experimental practices we experience as users of the internet where there's constant AP testing the headline you see for a news story might be different than someone else's Facebook might perform an emotional contagion experiment displaying sadder posts to some people and happier posts to others to test whether or not the bad feelings spread or the good feelings spread those kinds of experimental practices are part of what Uber has imported to the world of work and part of what's so interesting by setting a minimum floor it doesn't preclude companies from continuing to experiment and optimize as they see fit it just says you have to be able to pay drivers effectively a minimum wage if you're going to do all of that I'd like to open up the panel to questions from anyone who might have questions what questions do you have I want to first thank you sorry I was late for you I really appreciate your conversation I have lots of questions but the main are two right I wonder if you have data on who actually uses the contract or all of it share not that I'm poor but I actually rarely use taxis or I've actually never used Uber except when I work with other people it's rather expensive I don't think 40% of the residents giving work can actually afford it so we had a poll you previously studied these informal chances and so on what about those the social justice aspect not just the work I appreciate the part where we talk about workers in different ways but there's just so much spaying on the street so we set aside life length and the buses take much more precedent because it carries more people per square feet and so that comes with another aspect how do you sort of work around the idea of access to the street space I don't know I just haven't done any research on it so that's my first question I think the Taxi Commission has a lot of leverage in terms of let's say we put out a put down we say taxis have to be the primary there's a way for you to regulate how many taxis that we're going to get on the streets but Uber and all of that is a lot shorter so what's your commission's role in coordinating with other agencies what kind of leverage do you have and I think our students would be kind of interested in doing that I'm not sure that every city has this right and so just be interested so to your first question I think you raised a lot of points and hopefully I'll capture them does everybody have the money to afford this I'll tell you my own personal feeling is there's a large number of people that take these services that don't have the money to afford it now that's not technically that they don't actually have the money but is it work with their budget probably not I compare and I have no numbers to back this up but it is to me it strikes me often as like the Starbucks problem especially with younger people they all of a sudden realize they can't afford an eight dollar coffee every morning because it's too expensive and this is compounded I think because you're not exchanging money so you're putting it on your credit card and at the end of the month okay I'll pay the minimum on my credit card you're not really understanding how much you just paid for transportation and I have scolded my own son for that very thing you just worked for a week for Uber and Seamless congratulations so I see it firsthand so I do think there is there's a honeymoon phase let's hope it doesn't last forever more self-budgeting but there is a very real danger that there's a generation of people that believe this is payment without really attaching it to the bottom line which is that bill needs to be paid and there's interest on that credit card and yes you got from one month to the next but on who's dime on MasterCard's dime on your dime that you gave to MasterCard anyway so that's I do think there is a problem with the number of people that are taking it and whether they can afford it we don't have insight into who particularly is taking it but we do know what areas they're being picked up on and we are now getting the prices so we will soon be able to see of their price differentials among neighborhoods which I think will be very insightful whether there's any implicit discrimination whether certain neighborhoods are being charged more than other neighborhoods second question on how do you do this balance between sort of taxi and Uber and who controls the street and who gets the bike lane and the bus lane and the HOV lane it really is a partnership between the department of transportation and the taxi and limousine commission but the primary mover there is the department of transportation they make the decision on whether the HOV lane will let the taxi or an Uber in or not they make the decision on whether there's going to be a taxi stand here or there's not going to be a taxi stand here or there's going to be a bike lane here or there's not going to be a bike lane here we got recently the authority from council to come up with a regulatory scheme which we have to do by August 2019 to regulate the number of Uber and Lyft cars coming onto the street keeping in mind congestion that in a way that you minimize the empty vehicles in the congestion zone and so I think that will for the first time give the agency and we have to do that with department of transportation so together we study the issue and together we come up with the regulations and I think it's the right marriage because we can't I'm going to advocate for what drivers want the most because I have to look up for my constituency and DOT is going to advocate for how to share street space now as a person I may agree with them but as a TLC commissioner I'm going to stick with you know so it's the right marriage you need a little bit of both and so this will be the first time that the city is the agency is able to exercise this level of control over the for higher market taxis we've only ever able to exercise control through a series of state laws and some coordination with city council the agency itself doesn't have control over the number of taxis the city council can decide how many taxis are on the street and if you want to sell them for more than the cost of the license you need authority from the state to auction them so there's always been a large political dance every time the number of taxis changes and it has nothing to do with need, demand or street space it has probably more to do with 11th hour bargaining in Albany to be honest I'd like to turn also to professor Venke who was also thinking about how do we locate these issues inside of just one agency and within a larger conversation about regulation in the use of our street I mean this is not easy it's easy for me to throw it out as a critique but it is a difficult one of the things that came to mind too was on the positive side of the TLC is that it can be fairly nimble in making policy to Boston where I was living where the regulatory authority for regulating the app based transportation came from the legislature so if you want to change anything you have to get the assembly to agree even though it's completely controlled by democrats they can't agree on anything so how are you going to change it but as we look at the data we begin to find interesting things that I think poses larger questions we're not just in the normative scope of transportation the nature of regulation the nature of policymaking is constantly applying bandages and Massachusetts when they looked at it for the question that was just asked they found that there was a higher than expected usage in poor communities in Boston and they thought that was suspicious because why are there so many rides where people have less flexibility with their income to spend and when they did surveys because it became the mode of transportation of last resort that you couldn't rely on a taxi to actually come a taxi might be cheaper but you can't trust that's going to get there to you in time for you to get to work on time the buses were lagging or whatever it is so I think that when my hope is that as we find these things particularly this conversation of what do we do when we look at the street is because there are challenges and I think for New York congestion, congestion pricing public transportation I mean everything for the unfortunate side is all coming together to actually have a comprehensive conversation of what surface level mobility transportation looks like let alone also considering pedestrians bicyclists in this I mean literally a block from where I lived in Cambridge another bicyclist just got hit by a car lost her life unfortunately New York I think because of just madness here doesn't happen as often because no one can get around positives and the negatives but I think that there are opportunities I think this is a golden opportunity to bring multiple people together to have this conversation I mean the fact that this conversation about congestion pricing that money will go to the subways and buses even if that doesn't happen at all at least two parties or two different parts of transportation are now linked in a conversation that they roll off the tongue together even if nothing happens at least we're having a conversation that we couldn't have unless there was a state of crisis I mean what's the old political saying never waste a good crisis but I think that there's a lot of things that are happening now that can actually bring these agencies together I mean one would hope that we wouldn't need these crises to talk about this but it is a great way to actually have people in the same room and I'm actually really excited to hear what happens come summer with this conversation with the DOT and TLC what other questions do you have future policy makers in America in the vehicles sort of make sure that if the Uber or Lyft rides are in some way incentivized that they are I always if I take Uber or Lyft I do the full version but they only pick up another person like I feel like maybe 10% of the time barely ever so there's a way to make sure that when you do pull they're actually pulling so we unsuccessfully fought for what might have been an incentive but let me give you the sort of landscape first pulling in New York is difficult I think New Yorkers generally don't want to share and we've tried through taxis over the years to you know force some pulled rides and they were all epic fails when Uber and Lyft and these guys said you know we want to do pulling they're allowed to do it under our rules as long as both parties agree and I was happy turned it over to them we're really bad at trying to organize this ourselves and over time it has become more and more popular so in the beginning it was woefully low the actual number of matched was 5, 10% we're now up to about 30% we get the data on actual shared rides I think we have on medium that we have a piece up that shows you know shared rides over time and how it's grown but on our open data website all that information is available so it certainly has grown and the more and more people it's true that pick shared rides the likelihood that you're going to share goes up one of the opportunities to incentivize it came with the congestion pricing and if you don't put any of this on twitter I'm just telling you now that there was a decision to give every shared ride a discount in the congestion zone so at Ubers pay $2.75, Taxis pay $2.50 and shared rides get $0.75 and a question we had was okay but make it a real shared ride you get $0.75 if it's a real shared ride but if it's a request for a shared ride it's not really shared there's a great way to game that you just turn everything to shared rides and save $2 pick a shared ride and whether you link up with another passenger or not you're going to get the benefit you're going to be able to pass that on to the customer but the decision in Albany was no let's make it for every trip that's going to happen and it's going to be a great opportunity to incentivize them to really make sure that their algorithms work to share rides not just to get more people in cars Eric I know you've been thinking a lot and I consider commuter vans the original shared ride between your work on dollar vans and your current concerns are on how limiting driver growth through a cap or congestion pricing or a minimum weight for how those efforts will affect the city's larger mobility goals I want to respond to a point brought up by Professor Wu and then some of the discussion that's come up here first so one I too never do any of these services personally if I'm in New York I have an unlimited metro card or I walk but I will say I did take a shared ride with someone they booked it for me the other night and from I recommend you all do this next year there's a homeless count every year in late January is like four in the morning I was with someone in my group and we were going sort of in the same direction so she got an Uber pool this is from LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City down to the Lower East Side and my fare was four dollars so I take yellow taxis it's never that cheap and I think sort of I don't know you guys probably experience this there is something crazy about the fares that are charged this was before the most recent February 1st changes how long that those fares can continue to be that low I don't know that seems unsustainable but the other piece when I again looking through the PLC Backbook the areas where their sharing happens tends to be farther out in Brooklyn, East New York, Crown Heights neighborhoods where people do have lower incomes and so maybe there's some gaming of that system that's going on I don't quite know the answer to that but I think sort of going more broadly is that this is all feedback on surface transport in general people use these services because the buses and subways aren't satisfying their needs again I look at dollar vans and I don't look at them as this is well I do look at them as being great and all that stuff but that's not my point the point is more that the bus is failing along Clapush Avenue in Brooklyn if you look at bus speeds over time they're dropping dramatically passenger ridership also dropping dramatically huge crisis in Brooklyn in my opinion and these vans offer much more reliability and faster travel speeds and that's what people opt for and when you talk to them that's what they tell you so I think that that's the big thing that the hope of congestion pricing or even dedicated bus lanes or whatever it is more certainty and regularity to our transport network and that way you can rely on it up here I don't know how bad traffic actually is but in other places at the peak period if you want to get to school to work to the hospital to a medical appointment whatever it is if you have to bank in an extra half hour because the bus is just so unreliable you're just not going to take it whereas if you take a commuter van or a taxi or whatever it is reliability drops to 5, 10 minutes and it's something that you can work much more with and I think that's the real change and benefit of these types of services they show where public transport is faltering and failing and I think the response is okay public transport like do some push ups like get it together perform better not just sort of abandon it all together I would highlight that there's a cost to that kind of reliability for drivers so although they're narrated as entrepreneurs and classified as independent contractors they operate at a distinct informational asymmetry and disadvantage they don't negotiate any of the pay rates Uber and Lyft and the others set them laterally they can negotiate for a lower fare but not higher so and they have to bear the cost of that kind of thing so one of the great booms Uber was promising early on was that it was going to resolve a longstanding issue of curbside discrimination if you're a person of color especially if you're a black man a taxi cab might pass you by and pick up the nearest white passenger and they said well we have a policy of blind passenger acceptance the driver doesn't know where you're going before they accept the ride and we measure their ride acceptance rates and we might fire them deactivate them if their ride acceptance rate falls below let's say 90% or if their ride cancellation rate after they do know where you're going goes above 5% so there were restrictions in place that helped to support these policies but those same forms of management and rules also came into direct conflict with the idea that drivers are truly entrepreneurs who can make informed decisions in scenarios like these they're often like they might be forced to take unprofitable rides not exactly forced you technically can cancel the traffic but the threat of discipline and penalty exists within the system as well and so it's good to locate the benefit of that reliability within a broader contract of how the rules of employment become elastic in order to accommodate this consumer benefit I want to just make one quick comment on reliability because it's key to public transport it's the reason why somebody might pick Uber and Lyft over public transport one thing I think about sometimes is where does the standard of reliability come from and the more and more you have services like Amazon Prime fresh direct things that now I should get that in an hour I should get that in a day it changes the public's perception of what reliable means which means for like public transport sometimes they're at a disadvantage because they're not nimble enough to keep moving up and I don't have necessarily an answer to that but what it does is create it does seem to me to create a huge advocacy group for the companies because now you're without what you want in the time frame that you want it and you didn't define that time frame you didn't set out saying I need this thing in an hour but over time you got used to getting it in an hour or five minutes or two minutes and now it's your right to get it in an hour or two minutes and it's very difficult now to walk back and then we all as consumers become the advocates for the new standards set by the company and when you start to compare those services to something like public transport it is a really hard hill for public transport to climb they certainly have to sort of break a lot of molds and start thinking like a business and these are their consumers and how do we make them just as happy as the Uber and Lyft passenger and without setting that as the benchmark I think it's going to be hard for many cities especially New York City to get the people back on public transport and get the support back for the bus system that's necessary. I think the motivation is money they're both going for IPOs so where they can link you to a bike share service that they also make money off of fine and I could see them linking you to public transport if they've made an agreement with that public transport agency that there's some financial arrangement where it's beneficial for them in the end their companies so they have to do things that improve their bottom line they're not they're not as concerned for you to get to the place you want to go through many modes of transportation even if some of them don't generate revenue for them so they are ultimately going to look for what are the ways I can make sure that more aspects of your life you're using my service which can be beneficial because they're very good at it so it just depends on your particular situation to add to that something that I think is a very interesting idea and I've advocated for is I think cities in the 21st century I'm going to not use the right terminology here but should all have a department of apps or whatever and for example in New York City you easily could have a municipal app where anyone who wanted to be a cab driver had to be on this app right if you wanted to also be on the Uber app fine but it would make the point of that sort of redundant I would say and so that these drivers who are licensing already directly with the city would also be licensing directly with the app and so it would all be filtered through just this one app and not every Uber driver also a Lyft driver would end all of the 17 different screens and stickers or whatever so I think that is something that the city should look at in the future because the making of these apps from as I understand it is actually not very complicated you know I think in New York as of last I checked there were 74 licensed TNCs this was a couple years ago all have the same app the difference is maybe in the customer service or and stuff like that which maybe cities aren't great at don't get me wrong but the point is that it isn't some secret sauce at least I don't think that is the differentiator as for why Uber and Lyft are sort of adding on I completely agree with the commissioner but I also think they're just trying to figure out a business model and you know the thing that I find interesting about taking on bike share for instance is that with the taxi business they don't own any property they don't own the cabs but with these bike shares they're just buying tons of bikes and has already taken on a completely different model for like how they organize and I don't think they quite understand what they're doing you know they're just throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks so I don't think trying to figure out what's coherent or logical is really going to happen by studying them I think also with that too the interesting thing with at least Uber is also Uber eats that you also have to think that now I mean they're throwing things against the wall and they're delivering food but it's also you know as kind of society or policy at least in New York does it make sense to send a car to bring your McDonald's because that's what it is it's trying to utilize an asset to do more and make more money but if you think of the emissions, the time the infrastructure that's required to bring your McDonald's to you in 20 minutes or less or whatever their promise is does that make sense? It may in Atlanta, different urban morphology, different traffic infrastructure but as these companies are throwing things out they also raise flags because they do see themselves as a transportation company not a logistics company in this case with the food and now at least regulatory wise they're a transportation company but that also still falls in a weird gray zone. If you only do Uber eats are you technically the same way? I think we have another question over here I'm curious about what you guys think about the consumer and all of the conversations in the past about this particular issue where most people have said why the MTA or taxi come up with their own app because people are dependent on Uber and Loft maybe people would just use that app to call the taxi rather than the Loft and I know various things in the technology have attempted to do that and Google is the one that is applying my public transport information all these private apps is how I get my information speaking I was talking about that I was thinking about that Uber scandal that which one? the one that kicked it all off was the female employee but I know immediately after I deleted my idea actually I'm like Uber fan I think there was a slight difference I was really happy about this but I thought about that some of the only things that are sort of slowing down or consumer knowledge or awareness about emissions of Uber's and the splits are adjusting our streets and are causing more traffic and private television so is there an element that we can consider where we consider the consumer a little bit more maybe informational campaigns or at least be a little more competitive in the technology realm against private companies what do you mean by that? Kevin, can cities realistically do that if you were talking about the municipal app? If cities didn't have the arcane procurement policies that they have in place it's incredibly difficult for us to contract and it's incredibly hard for us to hire the kind of talent that Uber and Lyft can hire we can't pay at those we have no equity we can give you and we can't pay at the same levels and it resulted in at least at the TLC we said let's let let's let people develop their own apps and we'll put down the guidelines which is it would be great if there was one app the one problem that we found historically like in the taxi technology spaces there's two vendors now well it's a duopoly and it's very hard to raise standards because the lobbying is incredible when you only have two when you only have one it becomes even harder the city's held hostage to that one vendor so allowing people to develop their own apps and giving them the freedom to do that helps us get over those we lose a little bit on uniformity and you don't have you can't say there's only one but we do allow taxi apps to work there are two that are sort of more well known curb and arrow and we recently changed the rules and allowed them to use GPS meters they can actually do flat fares that are not based on the meters and intentionally we did that so that they can get on things like Google and show the price up front to the passenger and when the passenger is looking at should I walk should I bike should I take the subway the bus Uber, Lyft or taxi can now be an option can I force those companies to do what they need to do to get on to the Google space I can't force them to but I've given them every tool that they need to do it and I've taken away every obstacle that was in their way to do it but there is a little problem between the amount of venture capital that's behind a taxi app versus the venture capital that's behind an Uber or Lyft app on the consumer one unless everyone's going to get a lot more patient and feel okay I mean I find like the Amazon thing is like symbolic I don't want Amazon here but I sure want my book tomorrow like that same person is going to you know I don't know what the answer is we're good some you know we have good thought sometimes and other times we don't all in the same person from the consumer lens I'd say that a growing awareness how consumers can be misled or manipulated by the same systems that offer quite tangible immediate benefits is perhaps one stake in the ground in a very simple or recent example Instacart had implemented and it wasn't alone in this a pay policy of using customer tips to substitute for the guaranteed earnings that a shopper was to earn on each job such as ten dollars so if the passenger tips ten bucks the company's off the hook for most of that pay and tipping has a specific amorphous meaning it's supposed to be on top of your wage if you're especially an independent contractor it's a bit different for tipped workers who are employees but no one is like yes let me tip my Instacart workers that the company doesn't have to pay them you know and so there's moments where deception towards consumers becomes part of this outrage I think of a bit of that outrage also came out of the sexual harassment scandals and even beyond that the larger political scandals of alliances that the companies were making or not making with the Trump administration there have been numerous points where the companies are expected to strategically ally and support causes that far supersede any specific transaction you're going to have to get you from A to B they've promoted themselves as disruptive and as an exception to many of the rules and norms and cultural expectations we have for their operations by producing the sort of guides of offering something like a whole new world and that creates political responsibilities towards consumers as well who then have these expectations like I can't tell you how many people have come up to me with like a Lyft confessional because I wrote a book about Uber saying now I take Lyft and I'm like well that's fine for you I know that Lyft also has very many of the same practices that Uber has had but it's very clever in waiting until Uber has been embroiled by scandal and then like adopting that policy like right afterwards and in lots of ways they actually have done substantively better jobs and creating trusted relationships with drivers but the imprint that left on consumers is very very strong and gives it a competitive advantage in many ways. So it's nice to say that I think a growing consumer awareness how they might be getting higher prices than their neighbor would be a moment of pause for many people who want to have fair and equal access to services so if you can get a book in one day from Amazon but Amazon decides that the person over there actually has to wait for two weeks you might find growing seeds of division. I thought it was so interesting when the commissioner mentioned that they're looking at price discrimination by neighborhood to see if there truly are neighborhoods or groups of people who are paying more or paying less for these services. That's interesting for a whole variety of reasons but a lot of how Uber narrated its technology was that its algorithms were simply reflecting the conditions of the marketplace to leave brilliant matchmakers between supply and demand. Of course with the TLC it's discovered that it's often drivers who bear the costs of being oversupplied to meet that passenger demand but beyond that there's also you know as what's happening with surge pricing well two people standing side by side might actually get a different surge denominator and that's one of those moments that gives people pause in how they trust or distrust large technology institutions. The other piece just real quick we're also going to get information on wait time so when a passenger requests and when the car comes and we'll have that across the city so we'll be able to see if people in certain neighborhoods are waiting longer than people in other neighborhoods you know and you know where those cars are coming from as well so I think that will be very interesting. I think it's 2.15 and so we have to wrap up the front of the panel but I think some of us are available to have another 15 minutes of the conversation I want to thank Min so much for organizing thank you and thank you to all of our panelists for bringing your brilliant comments here today thank you for moderating from this very height