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URL: https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-city-electric-uber-lyft-license/
Submission: On November 21 via manual from US — Scanned from US

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Aarian Marshall

Business
Nov 21, 2023 7:00 AM


NEW YORK WANTS MORE ELECTRIC UBERS. EVERYONE IS MAD

New York City is lagging in the electric vehicle transition, and officials want
to speed it up. What could go wrong? Well, the court’s involved now.
A Tesla car driving through Times Square in New York City on January 26,
2023.Photograph: Leonardo Munoz/Getty Images

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Save this storySave

George Saliba didn’t get it: Why were all these people from the Bronx suddenly
crowding his electric vehicle dealership in Ewing, New Jersey? Why did they all
want Tesla’s black-on-black Model Y? And why did they keep coming?

Other electric vehicle sellers in the tri-state area were equally busy. The
reason? A change of rules at New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, or
TLC. In mid-October, an update, the first in half a decade, allowed any aspiring
Uber and Lyft driver to freely apply for a license to drive in New York. All
they needed was an electric vehicle.

The program, part of a larger Taxi Commission program called Green Rides that
aims to have an all-electric taxi and ride-hail fleet in New York by 2030, is
part of the city's strategy to get more people driving EVs. The logic goes:
Suddenly increase the number of electrics on the road and charging companies
will race to get their chargers into the ground. Lots of people want to drive
for ride-hail companies, but New York, which regulates drivers more firmly than
other American cities, has for years capped the number of Ubers and Lyfts
allowed on the road. No more.



Win-win, right?

Not at all. Three weeks after the program was introduced, a group representing
taxi and ride-hail workers in the city petitioned the court to intervene. They
argued that city regulators hadn’t gone through the appropriate steps before
creating the new program, and that it would drive down existing drivers’ wages
and drive up traffic congestion. In early November, a state court judge ordered
a pause on the program.



As governments at the local, state, and national levels race to hit ambitious
electric vehicle goals, the incident highlights the political trickiness of
implementing policies that might turn entire transportation systems on their
heads. Plenty of places, including London in the UK and California in the US,
see cars driven by gig workers using Uber and Lyft as big opportunities: Give
these highly utilized ride-hail vehicles electric powertrains and get a local
flywheel of adoption spinning. But leaning on lower-income and middle-class
ride-hail drivers—who in New York City tend to own or lease their cars—has
downsides. Now a court will likely decide the future of the city’s program.

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In New Jersey, Saliba saw even more people rush to lock an electric after the
court intervened, but before the TLC had to stop taking new applications. The
commission received more than 9,700 applications for an electric vehicle license
between mid-October and mid-November, according to numbers shared with WIRED,
almost 8,000 of them between when the court ordered the licensing program’s stop
and the mandated deadline. More than 100,000 vehicles are licensed to drive for
Uber, Lyft, and other for-hire car companies in New York City.

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Drivers wanted that black-on-black Model Y because they could use it to drive
for Uber’s more expensive Black service. Saliba usually sells 60 electrics a
month; over the weekend of November 11, just before the program shut down, he
sold 26. Saliba, who sources EVs from all over the US, even bought some Teslas
direct from the company to flip to eager New Yorkers. “It was the craziest thing
I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “I wasn’t sleeping the whole time.”

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Unique New York

The latest electric vehicle tiff is uniquely New York.



For one thing, the city is very different from its other American peers because
it has always regulated Uber and Lyft operations more tightly. Because vehicles
must have a particular license to drive on the apps, and because the number of
those licenses has been restricted since 2018, workers in the city are more
likely to be full-time drivers than those elsewhere. The city also has a strong
recent history of taxi and ride-hail driver activism. After the new app-based
companies upended the taxi market in the mid-2010s and pushed down incomes, a
spate of taxi driver suicides drove the city to put even more guardrails on the
industry.

What’s more, New York state is lagging in the electric vehicle transition. In
2022 it had fewer electric vehicle registrations per new car than national
leaders like California and Washington state, but also fewer than New Jersey,
Vermont, and Florida. This is despite its aim to implement a ban on new
gas-powered car sales by 2035. Officials worry this is, in part, because New
York doesn’t have enough public fast-charging stations to convince drivers that
an electric is right for them. It’s a particular issue in the city, where most
residents don’t have access to a personal garage where they might charge their
car overnight—typically the cheapest and easiest way to keep an electric moving.

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Incentivizing Uber and Lyft drivers to go green “lays the groundwork for more
utilization of charging stations,” says David Do, the city’s Taxi and Limousine
commissioner. Get more people into electric vehicles, and more chargers will be
built to accommodate them. “It’s the chicken and the egg issue: If we don't have
infrastructure, then there's never going to be additional EVs. They have to grow
almost simultaneously.”

Building more charging in New York is challenging, and pricey for everyone.
“Real estate is really expensive,” says Scott Fisher, executive vice president
of the charging company Voltera, which does not yet have stations in the city.
“Anytime you’re thinking of integrating charging onto a property, you're wedding
the cost of that real estate into the price you’re charging to drivers.”

What infrastructure is already in place is under-used, says the charging and
ride-hail company Revel, which operates an electric service in the city and
hosts three sizable charging stations in Brooklyn and Queens. More than 90
percent of the drivers topping up there are Revel’s own employees, says Robert
Familiar, a company spokesperson, meaning members of the public, including Uber
and Lyft drivers, are hardly using the stations.

Driver Hopes, Driver Panic

The New York City Taxi Worker Alliance, a union which represents some 17,500
Uber and Lyft drivers in New York City, is less focused on big-swing
electrification goals than the current conditions of its drivers. It worries
that unlimited licenses for electric vehicle drivers will drive down prices and
leave more drivers scrambling for rides. “To have an unlimited number of
vehicles would be an economic disaster in the making,” alliance president
Bhairavi Desai told reporters at a press conference earlier this month. “And the
sort of disaster that, as history has already shown, would lead drivers to a
very dangerous despair.”

Before the program abruptly paused last week, current and prospective drivers
took to Facebook and WhatsApp groups to seek out new electrics and electric
leases. Some crowded brokerage firms, hoping to finish up the necessary
application and insurance paperwork before the court’s deadline.

Desai said she was particularly worried that predatory leasing companies might
snap up the new licenses available to electric vehicles and trap people
interested in driving those cars in expensive leasing relationships. The TLC
says the vast majority of new applications come from individual drivers, rather
than corporations, and Do, the commissioner, urged drivers to be thoughtful
before purchasing or leasing an EV. “We're just opening up more doors for
drivers,” he says.

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Uber and Lyft both support the new licensing program, which also opened up
licenses for drivers of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Both have pledged to go
all-electric in the US (and in Canada and European cities for Uber) by 2030.
Larry Gallegos, Lyft public policy manager, said opening up licensing to more
electric vehicles “is very good for EV adoption” because it allows existing
drivers to easily switch from their gas-powered cars to electrics.



Josh Gold, Uber’s senior director of public policy, says the new initiative will
not dramatically reduce driver wages because Uber is still subject to city rules
governing the maximum amount of time drivers are allowed to travel without
passengers in their vehicle. Adding many more drivers to the Uber platform would
push that time below allowable limits. Because of this, no new drivers are
currently being permitted on Uber’s platform in New York City, he says, which
suggests some of the new electric licenses are replacing old gas-powered cars.
“Unlike any other market in the US, we have a waiting list for drivers in New
York City,” he says.

Gold says Uber has received questions from auto manufacturers and charging
infrastructure companies who want to know where its drivers live. The
conversations might be an early sign that New York’s gambit has started to work:
Companies want to put new chargers where a new generation of electrified
ride-hail drivers will use them.






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Aarian Marshall is a staff writer covering transportation and cities. Before
joining WIRED, she wrote for The Atlantic’s CityLab. Marshall is based in
Seattle, where she’s learning to love rain.
Staff Writer
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