MTA offer to cabbies squeezed by congestion pricing adds insult to injury

Taxi drivers put out of labor by Manhattan congestion pricing might be given particular desire for jobs as MTA bus drivers.
AP

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s congestion-pricing scheme threatens to place tens of 1000's of taxi, “black automobile” livery and for-hire automobile drivers out of labor. In comfort, the MTA is providing them . . . a desire for jobs as bus drivers.

The company says it’ll waive the $70 bus-operator-exam price for drivers “experiencing job insecurity” and supply “a direct pathway to licensing, coaching and job placement with MTA or its affiliated distributors for gratis to the drivers.”

This, when the plan’s tolls of as much as $23 to enter Manhattan south of sixtieth Road are designed to kill the hired-car business, which “consultants” blame for all the town’s visitors woes.

And by no means thoughts that the yellow cab business, particularly, has been reeling due to various setbacks from suicides to collapsing medallion costs to COVID-19.

Some 23,000 Uber drivers have to this point written the MTA protesting the congestion tolls and saying they don’t need to grow to be bus drivers. It’s very probably that cabbies and livery drivers really feel the identical, since driving a bus is a completely completely different line of labor.

And even with different lame MTA concepts (like hiring a couple of displaced drivers to broaden its Entry-A-Trip program for the disabled) added in, it’d barely make a dent within the total job losses.

The MTA wants to determine a scheme that doesn’t double-bill or in any other case penalize taxis and for-hire automobiles — whose clients already pay $2.75 a visit (about $400 million a yr) to the MTA in congestion prices.

Advocates insist congestion-pricing labored nice in London, however as one native lawmaker as soon as snarked, “the final good concept to come back out of London was radar.” The MTA must give you higher concepts, quick.