Lawsuit looks to put the brakes on taxi hailing apps

Apps that help you find a taxi are the next big thing in the city, with companies like Uber so sure you’d find their spacephone app useful that they once paid for your damn taxi ride. But, even with support from the mayor and the Taxi and Limousine Commission, the apps are facing resistance from livery cab drivers. How much resistance? They’re suing the city to stop them from implementing the apps.

Crain’s reports that The Livery Roundtable and Black Car Assistance Corp. filed a lawsuit in state court to block the new rules handed down by the TLC that pave the way for the use of apps to flag down yellow cabs. Neither group would go on record with Crain’s for a comment, but Crain’s noted that livery drivers have complained about apps before, since they claim to cut into their business of pre-arranged rides with customers.

At least to us, this all seems a tad unnecessary. Walking around Brooklyn, you see tons of livery cabs but very few yellow cabs. Obviously we’re not in the days where yellow cabs won’t go to Brooklyn, but out in Bushwick, down in Crown Heights, we just don’t see how an app like this would hurt the black car businesses. And in Manhattan, if you need to be somewhere at a specific time, the odds are that you’ll still call a black car because you don’t want to leave it up to chance that a yellow cab that can pick you up is within a half-mile radius of you. But, any livery cab drivers are more than welcome to educate us in the comments.

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