3:20 pm Oct. 12, 20124
“We’re gonna have all of our cabs be hybrid.”
So said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Matt Lauer on the “Today” show in 2007, as they stood in front of a hybrid yellow cab donated by Yahoo! and emblazoned with its logo.
The mayor gestured toward a thin man in glasses to his left: “And most importantly, this is City Councilman David Yassky, who has been leading the environmental fight here in the city.”
Today, Yassky is Bloomberg’s taxi commissioner. And 2012, the year by which the taxi’s fleet was to go hybrid, has come and nearly gone.
In the meantime, not only has the city’s powerful taxi lobby defeated the mayor’s hybrid-cab plan in federal court, but the city is now taking steps that will actually reduce the number of hybrids on city streets.
“We were really hoping New York could be a leader,” said Johanna Dyer, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s kind of a shame that it seems like we’re falling back a little bit."
Paul Gillespie, former president of the taxi commission in San Francisco, where most of the cabs are now green, said, “It’s just so disappointing to me now, because Commissioner Yassky and Mayor Bloomberg were early champions of hybrid vehicles.”
Bloomberg, who’s made public health a principal cause in both public and private life, was a big hybrid booster.
Regular cabs, he told Lauer on “Today,” “just sit there in traffic sometimes belching fumes.”
Hybrids, on the other hand, work most efficiently at the same low speeds at which cabs tend to operate on congested city streets, drawing on their battery power, rather than on gas.
“In an urban environment like Manhattan, when taxis are often sitting in traffic, that’s when hybrid engines are actually putting out the least amount of pollution,” said Michael Seilback, a spokesman for the American Lung Association of the Northeast.
As Bloomberg put it to Lauer, thanks to the city’s hybrid cab initiative, “Our kids will breathe a lot better air.”
IN 2005, THEN-COUNCILMEN YASSKY AND JOHN Liu introduced legislation that would require the Taxi and Limousine Commission to allow taxi owners to purchase hybrids.
Thanks in good part to City Council pressure, that same year, the Taxi and Limousine Commission approved six hybrid models for use as taxis.
“I'm determined that in five years, every cab on the streets of New York will be a hybrid," Yassky told the Daily News.
At the time, most cabs were Ford Crown Victorias, which get between 12 and 14 miles per gallon in city driving, according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission.
On Earth Day in 2007, about a month before his "Today" appearance, the mayor delivered a large-gauge policy speech at the American Museum of Natural History, enumerating 127 initiatives to make the city more sustainable by 2030, by which point, the city estimates, New York's population will have grown by a million. He called his program, of which lower-emission taxis were an element, PlaNYC.
"PlaNYC initially called for converting the fleet within 10 years," noted the Times, that May. "But Mr. Bloomberg said City Councilman David Yassky, a longtime advocate of a greener taxi fleet, had persuaded him to cut that time in half."
The administration’s plan did not require taxi owners to switch to hybrids, explicitly. Rather, it mandated that when owners retired their cars after the requisite three-to-five years, they replace it with a vehicle that gets at least 25 miles per gallon starting in 2008, and 30 miles per gallon in 2009. Those sorts of efficiencies simply wouldn't be achievable with the old cabs.
Administration officials, according to that same article, “said the mayor’s plan was believed to be the most extensive of any major city.”
By October 2007, there were more than 500 hybrid cabs on the road. Thomas L. Friedman wrote a laudatory column about the effort in which the mayor is quoted as saying, “When it comes to health and safety and environmental issues, government should be setting standards.”
In 2008, Bloomberg announced that black limousines would also have to meet new fuel efficiency standards.
But then, in what would ultimately prove the initiative’s death knell, a powerful taxi lobby called the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade filed suit in federal court.
Its argument was two-fold: first, that only the federal government can impose fuel efficiency standards, and second, that hybrids weren’t safe.
By that time, 1,400 of the city’s 13,237 cabs had been converted to hybrids.
The accelerated conversion plan, according to Board of Trade spokesman Michael Woloz, would have forced medallion owners to buy “too-small passenger hybrids that were never intended to be used as 24/7 taxicabs and in fact automakers like Toyota had expressly warned against using their hybrids as taxicabs including the Prius, the Camry and the Highlander.”
(A spokesman for Toyota was quoted by the Times saying, “Our engineers are nervous about it because they were not designed for commercial use.")
On Halloween, just a day before the new rules were to go into effect, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the city from moving forward.
The mayor responded by accusing his opponents of "trying to kill our kids," and issuing a new set of incentives that would penalize owners for using gas-devouring Crown Victorias and reward them for buying hybrids. The taxi lobby protested that too, and again, a federal judge ruled in the industry's favor.
By 2011, the year the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the city, quite a lot had changed. Though the mayor has supported a bill in Congress that would give cities the right to set fuel economy and emissions standards, he had more or less given up the fight at home.
The administration moved forward on a separate program, called the Taxi of Tomorrow, which will have the effect of decreasing the number of hybrid taxis on the city's streets.
The idea was this. The city would leverage its market power by offering one manufacturer an exclusive decade-long deal, estimated at $1 billion, to manufacture one tailor-made vehicle for New York. The vehicle would be designed to handle the wear and tear of the city's pothole-ridden streets and offer both drivers and passengers a more comfortable ride than current cab models do.
How about instead of "an electric vehicle future" the city mandate that new cabs must be electric right now. Electric makes lots of sense here for at least four reasons. One, unlike hydrids, they don't pollute at all (and they're much quieter besides). Two, the operating costs would be far lower. This should be appealing to the taxi industry. Three, electric vehicles last far longer than gas-powered vehicles. A service life of 25 years wouldn't be unrealistic. Four, car manufacturers often say electric vehicles could be manufactured for the same or less than gas-powered vehicles if they were sold in similar volumes. By mandating electric taxis, you know you will sell a critical mass of cars. In fact, if the NYC electric taxis proved successful, which I'm sure they would, you would get big orders from every other large city. Right now we can design and build a viable electric taxi with a range of at least 200 miles. In fact, the range of electric vehicles increases substantially the slower they are driven. At the typical speeds cabs go on crowded streets, you might even get more than 300 miles range. This should be sufficient for an entire 12-hour shift. With the right charger, today's batteries can be charged in under 30 minutes (or overnight if the cab won't be needed until the next day). The time is right to convert many of the fleet vehicles in NYC to electric. Taxis and sanitation trucks are the first logical choices. Next should come buses and police cruisers. Eventually, perhaps by 2020 or 2025 the city could prohibit ALL gas-powered vehicles, making air a lot cleaner.
electric and hybrid vehicles are not always the most "green" because of their construction process... over their entire life they can end up causing more pollution than a "normal" car. In 20 years that may be different though... Likewise - in terms of emissions the net effect is not always a positive. It's only a clear positive when the electricity it uses was generated in a clean way. That said - it does make sense for a municipal fleet to be as alternative as possible... whether natural gas/diesel hybrid/electric. Different types of vehicles have different payloads and travel differently... so it's not a one size fits all. Delivery trucks are important too - but as per the federal ruling... there is nothing the city can do except offer tax breaks. Smith Electric though is an electric truck maker that moved to the Bronx. Thankfully incentives are offered to companies who will buy their trucks.
In San Francisco, where gas prices are well over $4 per gallon, nobody wants to go back to the old gas-guzzlers. It's crazy to spend $50 per shift on gas.
well hopefully the electric version won't be too far off