This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.
Bamba Matche remembers the old days, when Eighth Avenue in Manhattan had three full lanes, all of them for cars. When taxis could pull right up to the curb outside the Port Authority. When bikes were mechanical, not motorized. When it wasn’t quite so exasperating to simply drive from one spot to another.
“Before,” he said with considerable understatement, “it was easier.”
Matche has been driving a yellow cab since 2011. New York City, by some metrics, had the worst traffic in the world last year. Some drivers say they’re lucky if they can get across Manhattan in less than an hour these days.
“It’s insane,” said Eric Owusu, another taxi driver. “It’s the worst ever.”
The city streets have been put to a variety of new uses in recent years and are now crowded with dining sheds, e-bikes, ride-share and package delivery vehicles, and lanes dedicated to buses and bicycles. No one has borne witness to these changes like the city’s professional drivers, whose livelihoods demand that they navigate the increasingly congested streets.
But whether they’re ferrying passengers through Midtown or waiting around for a customer, taxis, Ubers and Lyfts are also taking up considerable space on the roads. And the more ride-share vehicles there are on the street, the tougher it is for ride-share drivers — and everyone else — to maneuver through traffic.
“Almost any motorist who is paying attention can see that the vast majority of the congestion during the day — and for that matter, and a lot of weekends as well — is the influx of a gross number of Ubers and Lyfts,” said Lucius Riccio, a former Department of Transportation commissioner.
There are nearly 93,000 Ubers, Lyfts and yellow cabs licensed in New York. That number has more than tripled in the past nine years, though it is lower than before the coronavirus pandemic. That’s thanks to an explosion of ride-share drivers who signed up for the apps seeking potentially lucrative work with flexible hours.
As a result, many professional drivers have traffic jam horror stories.
Owusu said it has taken him 20 or 30 minutes to drive from the Port Authority to the Museum of Modern Art, a trip of just 1.3 miles. “How is that?” he said. “It’s unimaginable.”
Mayjur Laskar, a driver for Uber and Lyft, described spending more than an hour in the Holland Tunnel trying to get a passenger from Midtown to Hoboken, N.J. The worst part? It was after midnight, nowhere close to rush hour.
Jannatul Naim, who has been a taxi driver in New York for just two months, recalled getting stuck in unmoving traffic in a Midtown intersection after a green light turned red. A driver coming the opposite way got out of his car to scream at Naim and pound on his windows, but Naim couldn’t move.
In the past decade, New York City has committed to building miles of dedicated bike lanes and bus lanes, aimed at making travel safer for cyclists and more efficient for bus riders. But taxi and ride-share drivers say both developments have caused more congestion, since they have reduced the space available for cars. They complain that the bus lanes, like the one across Eighth Avenue north of 42nd Street, make it hard to pick up and drop off passengers; pausing there even briefly can land them a ticket for as much as $250 for repeat offenders. Last month, city officials announced that they would install more cameras along bus lanes to beef up ticketing efforts.
The city’s long-planned congestion pricing program, in which drivers would pay a toll to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, was supposed to reduce car traffic and raise money for public transit, but last month Gov. Kathy Hochul postponed it indefinitely. Uber supported congestion pricing, betting that better public transit would discourage New Yorkers from buying cars of their own and prompt them to use Uber instead. But some drivers worried that the tolls would discourage people from using their services altogether.
Drivers complain, too, about the proliferation of e-bikes, weaving in and out of traffic, sometimes at high speeds.
Owusu said he saw one e-bike rider come within inches of a catastrophic crash in Midtown recently. “He popped out from nowhere beside a bus, like boom,” Owusu said.
In 2015, when the Taxi and Limousine Commission started issuing special licenses for ride-share vehicles, there were approximately 12,500 Ubers and Lyfts in New York. Now, there are about 83,700. By comparison, there are 9,050 yellow taxis now, down from around 13,600 at the end of 2014.
Josh Gold, a spokesman for Uber, acknowledged that ride-share vehicles are taking up space on the road. But he argued that other vehicles, like delivery trucks, are part of the problem, too.
“Everyone is contributing,” Gold said. “We don’t deny it.”
Two years ago, Riccio wanted to figure out exactly how much of New York’s traffic came from ride-share vehicles. He set out with a video camera to capture every car that passed through several intersections in Manhattan during short windows of time on work days.
In a series of dozens of videos (which you can watch on Riccio’s YouTube), he counted 2,030 vehicles, and sorted them into categories: personal cars, taxis, trucks, commercial cars, for-hire cars and everything else. The for-hire cars, identified by special license plates issued by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, made up the biggest of all the groups. Slightly more than half of the vehicles Riccio recorded were passenger cars for hire: Ubers, Lyfts, town cars or taxis.
He thinks New Yorkers don’t realize how many Uber and Lyft drivers are on the streets because they blend in with the commuters and shoppers driving themselves around. Riccio, who now teaches at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, has a solution: The city should mandate that all ride-share cars adhere to a certain color scheme — say, gray — the same way taxis must be yellow or green.
Where certain blocks in Midtown were once awash in the canary yellow of taxi cabs, Riccio speculated that “now, you’d see a sea of gray.”
Enjoying our Street Wars series? Tell us what you like or how we could improve: [email protected]
New York’s Ongoing Struggle to Prevent Car Crashes
When cars first arrived on the scene in the late 1800s, they were not just a quick way to get around — they also soon became a significant cause of death.
By 1929, automobile fatalities were setting records across the country. In New York City, things were so dire that The Daily News began publishing a “death barometer” comparing auto deaths with gun deaths. That year, the cars were deadlier: More than 1,200 people died in car crashes, compared with 337 killed by guns.
In the late 1930s, the number of deaths involving cars started coming down, and New York City hasn’t seen a number over 1,000 since 1934.
Recently, Gothamist reported that so far this year, New Yorkers were more likely to be killed in a car crash than in a shooting.
But the overall trend is that traffic fatalities are down. There were 265 people killed in 2023, down from 381 in 2000 and 701 in 1990.
Ydanis Rodriguez, the New York City transportation commissioner, said the city has defied national trends. “We’ve accomplished this by redesigning our streets for safety, expanding public education and improving traffic enforcement,” he said.
Gov. Kathy Hochul recently signed legislation intended to drive the numbers down further.
Sammy’s Law allows New York City to lower its speed limit to 20 miles per hour on almost every street. It was named after Sammy Cohen Eckstein, a 12-year-old who died after a van hit him in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Amy Cohen, Sammy’s mother and the co-founder of Families for Safe Streets, noted that many recent changes to streets — lower speed limits, bike lanes, narrowing of lanes for cars — were put in place to save lives.
“It’s too late for my family,” she said. “But it may not be too late for someone else’s.”
Sammy was killed on Prospect Park West, and Cohen said that, ironically, some work had already been done to make that street safer before his death. “They had put in a bike lane there,” she said. “The roads were a little narrower and they changed the timing of the lights to slow people down.”
But the block didn’t have daylighting, an intersection design that improves visibility for both drivers and pedestrians by prohibiting cars from stopping or parking too close to a crosswalk at an intersection.
“The driver didn’t see Sammy,” Cohen said. “Compromises — because of community pushback, people who resist change — are deadly.”
The post They Drive for a Living and Say New York Traffic Is ‘the Worst Ever’ appeared first on New York Times.