After two defeats in district court in a lawsuit filed by taxi fleet owners who claim that the administration's efforts to hybridize the fleet are illegal, the city is appealing the case to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. A trial is tentatively scheduled for early 2010.
The Bloomberg administration first tried to shift the city's 13,000-car taxi fleet to hybrid when it passed rules in late 2007—to take effect in October 2008—mandating that new yellow cabs be either wheelchair accessible or achieve a 25 miles per gallon standard in 2008, and achieve a 30 mpg standard in 2009. Since yellow cabs must be retired after three to five years' service, this mandate would have essentially created an all-hybrid fleet by 2012.
An assortment of fleet owners and an industry group, the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade (MTBOT), sued in federal court to block the rule. After District Court Judge Paul A. Crotty issued a preliminary injunction last October that prevented the mandate from taking effect, the city went back to the drawing board and drafted a new rule that created financial incentives, rather than mandates, to encourage yellow cab companies to switch to hybrid vehicles.
That second rule, issued in March 2009, changed the fees that fleet owners can charge drivers, most of whom lease their cabs. For hybrid cars, it would have increased the fee per driver's shift by $3. For conventional taxis, it would have decreased the fee per shift by $12. The city claimed these new lease rates were designed to make owning hybrids more profitable to fleet owners.
But when the new program came before Crotty's court, the fleet owners countered that the fee changes on conventional cabs were tantamount to a mandate—because they make owning such taxis so unprofitable that hybrids are the only viable economic choice. In June, Crotty granted another preliminary injunction blocking the reduction of fees on conventional cabs. Agreeing with the challengers, Crotty—a former top aide to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush—wrote that "the combined effect of the lease cap changes, and even the disincentive alone, constitute an offer which can not, in practical effect, be refused."
A mayoral priority
The hybrid program, which aims to double the efficiency of new taxis by 2012, is an integral component of the Bloomberg administration's larger clean air agenda. A 2007 greenhouse gas emission study by the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability recommended that New York, being particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change as a coastal city, develop a rigorous, science-based policy geared to lowering the city's carbon dioxide emissions, 20 percent of which were determined to come from on-road vehicles.
And in a city where one in eight adults has been diagnosed with asthma at some point in their lives, advocates for hybrids have argued that air quality changes can improve health. At the March 2009 Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) hearing, Amy Henes, a representative of the American Lung Association, strongly supported the hybrid program, indicating that "our lungs were not meant to breathe the levels of pollution here in New York City."
Hybrid cabs generate little or no pollution when idling, and waste little or no energy when braking, making them especially useful for in a city that is often bumper-to-bumper.
