Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood with taxi and Uber drivers at LaGuardia Airport on Tuesday night to announce his choice to oversee the nation’s largest fleet of for-hire vehicles.
The mayor nominated Midori Valdivia to lead the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, which regulates more than 115,000 vehicles, including yellow taxis and Uber and Lyft cars.
“From City Hall, we will deliver meaningful change in the lives of the working people too often forgotten by our politics, and in the day-to-day existences of the taxi drivers who deserve a forceful champion at the T.L.C.,” Mr. Mamdani said.
The city’s nearly 180,000 for-hire vehicle drivers are an important base for Mr. Mamdani, a former state assemblyman from Queens. Many of them live in Queens and most are immigrants, including from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and the Dominican Republic.
Mr. Mamdani has been an advocate for the drivers for years. In 2021, he went on a 15-day hunger strike with dozens of drivers over the crushing debt that many had taken on to buy medallions, the city-issued permits required to own a yellow cab. It ended when city officials agreed to a program that has since brought about $476 million in debt relief to more than 2,000 medallion owners.
“As his political star has risen, he’s never forgotten the drivers,”said Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents more than 28,000 taxi, Uber and Lyft drivers in the city.
Ms. Valdivia, 42, an experienced transportation official, is a board member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state-controlled agency that runs the city’s subways and buses, as well as two commuter rail lines.
She previously served as a deputy commissioner at the T.L.C., where she led a push to expand the city’s fleet of wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Earlier, she was the senior adviser to the executive director at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Her nomination will need to be confirmed by the City Council.
Ms. Valdivia, standing out in a bright blue coat, said that Mr. Mamdani’s “commitment to affordability and a pro-worker agenda brought me back to public service.” She shook hands and thanked drivers.
She would take over as the long-struggling taxi industry has started to come back slowly after the Covid pandemic shut down the city in 2020 and decimated ridership. There were 4.1 million yellow taxi trips last November compared with 6.8 million for the same month in 2019, according to the taxi commission.
Uber and Lyft have recovered faster, and are close to reaching their prepandemic ridership levels. They had 20.8 million trips last November, compared with 21.6 million for November 2019. Last year, Uber partnered with the taxi industry to send more than 10 million trip requests from its app to yellow taxis when Uber cars were not immediately available, said Josh Gold, a spokesman for Uber.
He declined to comment on Ms. Valdivia’s nomination.
David Do, the departing taxi commissioner, said last month that the industry overall was showing “signs of strength” and that “there’s been minimal impact on ride-share trips since the start of congestion pricing.”
Still, the for-hire vehicle industry has continued to face threats, including a nationwide push for driverless vehicles. On Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would introduce a law to allow “a limited deployment” of driverless for-hire vehicles outside New York City.
The governor’s announcement followed a pilot program approved under former Mayor Eric Adams last summer in which Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company, test drove a small number of supervised driverless vehicles in the city.
Mr. Mamdani declined to comment on Ms. Hochul’s push for autonomous vehicles outside New York City, but said that he takes the arrival of driverless cars “very seriously.”
Even before the pandemic, the taxi industry had increasingly lost riders to Uber and Lyft. Many taxi owners also faced financial ruin after taking out huge loans to buy medallions at artificially inflated prices, with the taxi commission reassuring them of their high value.
A spate of suicides by taxi owners and for-hire drivers in 2018 brought public attention to their desperate plight.
In recent years, under Mr. Do, the taxi commission has increasingly sought to improve working conditions for drivers, including by raising fares in 2022 for the first time in a decade. In addition, the commission has required Uber and Lyft to significantly raise driver pay and approved regulations to keep them from blocking drivers from their apps when demand dropped.
But Ms. Desai said that much more needs to be done to help drivers, including establishing retirement benefits as well as a higher wage standard.
Mohammed Ejaz, a longtime taxi driver, said that while he was hopeful that the Mamdani administration would make a difference, he had doubts. “Everybody promises, but for the past 30 years, it’s been more problems, more problems,” he said. “It’s just very hard.”
But another taxi driver, Erhan Tuncel, said he had never forgotten how Mr. Mamdani had stood beside him during the hunger strike.
“That says a lot,” he said. ”I think everything will be OK under him.”
Winnie Hu is a Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.
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