Just last week I wrote that there are legitimate concerns about Uber. Using congestion as the reason to limit the company’s expansion while ordering a study seems wrong and exactly the kind of political move that smacks of corruption. Given that Bill de Blasio received significant support from taxi fleet owners during his campaign it is hard not to believe this. Certainly taking one year to do a study seems like an undue delay.

Still congestion is a real issue and adding nearly 20,000 commercial vehicles to New York City streets has the potential to meaningfully contribute to congestion. There is without a doubt some fraction of Uber riders who would have previously used public transport. How large is that? And does it result in net new cars in the city thus adding to congestion? This is a legitimate question (also: most of the new for hire cars are gasoline powered and compare unfavorably from an emissions perspective to both public transport and taxi fleets in many cities). A one year freeze on FHV expansion, however, is not the right government response. An analysis could and should happen much faster.

Uber is counting on leveraging its popularity with riders and the claim that this is preventing job creation to fight against the cap. I am pretty sure though that Uber also has data in its possession that could be used for a first cut analysis. Unless Uber throws away trip data, which I highly doubt, Uber’s own data across the cities it operates in would provide a lot of insight into whether or not there is a plausible relation between the company’s growth and congestion. One might start simply by plotting average speed of Uber rides in a city against the growth of Uber in that city.

In the meantime city planners too could probably do a similar analysis quickly: compare the development of congestion between cities that have Uber, Lyft and others and those that don’t. Now you might say that correlation doesn’t equal causation and that maybe on demand services are only in those cities that have growing economies and it is the economic growth that’s leading to the congestion. That can be controlled for by also looking at economic growth as a factor in the analysis. We need these kinds of analysis and we need them fast.

What else can be done? First, New York City could pass sensible ehail regulation that requires every taxi in the city to be available on all hail applications (instead of the current situation in which there are two different apps to cover taxis and these are largely for payment after the fact). The regs should encourage the sharing of taxis. Anyone who has ever stood on a New York City Avenue to see dozens of cabs go by with a single passenger in them knows why!

We also should finally get the congestion pricing that Bloomberg was working on. The easiest way to implement it would be to charge a toll on all bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. Tolls could probably be made dynamic too with amounts that differ on the degree of congestion currently in the city. The original plan had been approved by the city and died when the New York State assembly didn’t vote on it.

Ride sharing and ehailing can and should be solutions but we should not dismiss congestion as a problem and also remember that public transport needs to be part of the mix as well.