De Blasio, Uber strike deal: No cap on company during study

Uber said the proposed policy, which was scheduled for a vote as early as today, would have crippled customers’ ability to get cars on-demand, causing wait times to “double or even triple” in New York City.

The deal means there will be no restrictions on Uber while it conducts a four-month study.

“It forms on the move a process to help an intensive and reasonable community retort, along with statistics, into the spike in…”

On the one hand, Uber has made transportation so much cheaper and more convenient, especially when the alternative is city cab services that refused to evolve with the times.

Uber officials also said that it has an hourly average of just under 2,000 cars in the city’s central business district during the day, a far cry from the huge number of yellow taxis that operate there during that time.

New York magazine credited de Blasio’s defeat in large part to Uber chief adviser and board member David Plouffe, the man behind Obama’s 2008 presidential win.

Uber, a $40 billion company, has become a dominant force on the streets of New York, dispatching 25,000 cars compared to 13,000 of the city’s iconic yellow taxis. “Again, Uber has grown intensely in this city, and that’s great and they provide a service that a lot of people take advantage of, but there still has to be some balance in this equation”.

Uber’s expansion in New York, as in many other cities, has been a contentious one. Uber supporters pointed out that new jobs would be in jeopardy with the limit on drivers.

Uber aggressively fought the original bill over the last month, flooding the New York airwaves with commercials featuring sad testimonials from Uber drivers on why the ban would leave New Yorkers stranded and drivers out of a job. Officials said a similar restriction remained a possibility in the future. According to First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris, this study will begin immediately and will end in November, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Uber did not cease their attacks, calling out the mayor an hour before the deal was revealed, saying it was untrue that the company is the main reason for traffic congestion.

Uber also agreed to make its vehicles more handicap-accessible and to contribute to the city’s mass transit system, as yellow cabs do, Wiley said.

Under the deal, Uber will release data “above and beyond what has previously been provided”, the mayor’s office said.

De Blasio, who has donors in the competing taxicab industry, had sought to portray the San Francisco-based company as a “multibillion-dollar corporation” anxious only about its bottom line while trying to skirt government regulation.