The Uber and local Taxicab Medallions are thrusted back into the news for their recurring disagreement. With every passing week coming with a taxi driver suicide case in the headlines the subject becomes even more crucial.
Uber and Lyft offered to bailout taxi medallion owners but New York City refused.
60% of Medallion owners are single operated cars. The catch is that the medallion prices have skyrocketed in the recent years to a good 50%. We have seen the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars and a fleeting high of $1 million for a medallion.
With the taxi business severely affected by these ride services, Uber and Lyft decide to send down a proposal of $100 million ‘hardship fund’ to the individual taxicab drivers to drop the proposal to limit the number of Uber and Lyft vehicles, only to get rejected by the city council.
I am very proud to be fighting for the New York City Taxicab Medallion drivers. We have filed many lawsuits against Uber. In fact, I am the first attorney in the country to defeat Uber arbitration agreements.
Uber is completely bamboozling their customers into agreeing to things without your knowledge. In their terms and conditions, they have links to several other pages that they force you to accept when you order a ride. Within these links, they have sneaked in a mandatory arbitration clause that forces you to agree to settle any dispute you might have against Uber outside of court. A judge in Brooklyn threw that arbitration out, making us the first firm to get that done in the country.
We now have five bills which the city council is putting forth.
We understand that the taxis are regulated beyond belief.
There are only 13,000 taxi cabs and over a 100,000 Ubers clogging up the streets of New York. This is the very reason why you can’t get past ten blocks in under an hour in Manhattan.
We hope that’s about to change and a cap gets on Uber by having put specific regulations in the TLC as a separate category.
We do know many cases where so many Uber drivers were bamboozled into signing up for Uber, but the matter of fact is they make absolutely no money, whatsoever.
MTA is complaining that their subway ridership is down by 15% because of Uber.
One of our bills against Uber is regarding the environmental concerns and pollution.
It is to make sure that Uber has passengers in it when it goes from one place to another because Ubers have been known to sit idle for huge lengths of time. This results in excessive release of environmental toxins in the form of pollution emitted by the vehicles.
There is going to be a huge dent made in the Uber which, by the way, is a foreign hedge fund. They have come into the marketplace and want to destroy our local taxicab medallion service.