You make a license trade-able when you care about limiting the supply, but you don't care who gets it. The purpose of a taxi medallion is to limit the total number of taxis, and the purpose of a liquor license is to limit the number of establishments that sell liquor.[1] But the government doesn't care who has the license. Making it trade-able ensures that the license goes to the person or organization that values it most highly (Coase Theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem).
[1] These purposes aren't, on their face, unreasonable. Taxis generate undesirable congestion, and establishments that serve liquor tend to create undesirable drunk people. If you don't believe me, take a walk through Wrigleyville in Chicago on a Friday night, where you can see an endless parade of taxis picking up an endless parade of drunk students.
Jane Jacobs rolls in her grave when you say stuff like that. The overwhelming majority of transportation engineers will tell you that taxis alleviate congestion by raising asset utilization. And they also reduce the need for vast parking facilities and block-circling in search of parking (which turns out to be a large fraction of traffic in some areas). It's a triple-win.
You're assuming that private cars are the current dominant form of transport. That's not always the case.
Transport planners i've come across would probably start wittering about modal shift. If introducing more taxis into a city leads to a modal shift from taxis to cars, it's a good thing. But if it leads to a modal shift from buses to taxis, it's a bad thing.
A Machiavellian transport engineer might even consider restricting taxis so as to maximise the available modal shift to buses (or rail etc), to make projects to introduce those easier to sell.
> These purposes aren't, on their face, unreasonable. Taxis generate undesirable congestion, and establishments that serve liquor tend to create undesirable drunk people. If you don't believe me, take a walk through Wrigleyville in Chicago on a Friday night, where you can see an endless parade of taxis picking up an endless parade of drunk students.
I agree that sometimes this setup (licenses to restrict supply) make sense, but taxis are not a good example of where this provides a net benefit.
I'd rather have a bunch of taxis than a bunch of drunk college students driving. Furthermore, from a city planning perspective the most efficient use of both road space and real estate (parking) is to have cheap, on-demand taxis instead of personal car ownership. If public transportation is fairly extensive and always available (as it is in NYC), it makes sense to eschew personal ownership of cars and use taxis for the rare case when public transportation isn't enough.
Overall, this reduces congestion, and is one of the reason that taxis are oftentimes taxed less (or pay less in tolls) than personal, non-commercial vehicles.
In fact, I posit that a significant reason that services like Hailo and Uber exist in NYC specifically is that the supply of on-demand taxis is heavily restricted[0]. If the supply were left up to the free market[1], Uber and Hailo would be able to provide some added value (the convenience of the mobile app and the "premium" feel), but not the level that they are now.
[0] Since the 1970s, the number of medallions available has not increased commensurately with the increase in population
[1] but with the same laws regarding nondiscrimination of service with respect to destination, credit cards, etc.
You're not wrong in what you say regarding the necessity of public transportation and the benefit of taxis instead of personal vehicle ownership, but the free market will have no incentives to reduce congestion until such point as people would rather walk. Panama City has less incentives to clog the roads in that taxis are universally unmetered; where taxis are paid per-minute, congestion is profitable.
Despite the lack of metering and a recently-introduced subway, Panama City has terrible congestion. There's always a taxi when you want it, but a lack of regulation means that it will almost certainly be in a barely-roadworthy condition, and if you are traveling at peak hours you may as well walk. I'm told it used to be worse, that taxis would not even take you if your destination were more than a short distance away; I've only encountered this a few times. Also, while many drivers are honest, any sign that you are not a local is liable to result in your being asked to pay several times the going rate. This is the free market at work.
If you are going to invoke market forces, you need to make sure there are sufficient incentives to not wind up with a worse problem than not having a taxi when you want it. What springs to mind would be taxing taxis in proportion to your congestion problems. I am not sure that would be an improvement.
i think the quality of the taxis and the medallion system are two different issues solved by different means. There doesnt seem to be any suggestion here that the congestion of panama would go down if taxis were replaced with vehicle ownership.
None of those points have anything to do with the number of taxis and everything to do with regulation of the taxis that exist; perhaps that's a limitation of their ability to regulate and enforce, but that should be the bottleneck preventing taxis from staying on the road. That is to say, the answer to 'we can't enforce all these taxis' isn't 'let's enforce no taxis'.
take a walk through Wrigleyville in Chicago on a Friday night, where you can see an endless parade of taxis picking up an endless parade of drunk students.
But isn't this supply meeting demand? If there were too many taxis, wouldn't the supply eventually cull itself when nobody can make enough money?
The subtext behind an invocation of Wrigleyville is that drunk bar clientele from outside the area makes it difficult to live in. Wrigleyville is a running joke among people who live on the north side of Chicago.
And now I suddenly feel the need to stand up on behalf of people four years younger than myself and say: drunk college douchebags are people, too. They have equal rights and an equal stake in governance, too.
Sure, but the issue in this case isn't about rights or governance, it's about local issues caused by non-local individuals. Vancouver has a similar issue, where the drinking/clubbing/partying district, Granville Street in the heart of Vancouver's downtown, is a huge destination for partygoers from all over the region; not just Vancouver, but outlying cities and suburbs as well; a city of around 600k has to take on the responsibility of hosting the drunks, clubgoers, partiers, concertgoers, etc. of a region of 2.8m people, and many of those party people live and work outside of the city, pay taxes outside of the city, pay rent outside of the city, and only come downtown to party.
That results in an increased cost of policing the area (since all drinking and clubbing establishments are forced together), the increased cost of cleaning (everything from garbage and smashed bottles to a surprising amount of vomit), increased regulation, transportation congestion, medical care, etc.
It also results in a neighbourhood which goes from a mostly pedestrian mall-esque area full of shops and boutiques to a shitshow where you might get punched for no reason (as happened to a friend's boyfriend as they were walking home from the movie theatre; shattered his jaw, which had to be wired shut).
The problem isn't necessarily 'outsiders are bad', but rather that these people come downtown, drink, have a good time (or a bad time), but feel no responsibility for the area. They don't have to walk through it after a bad night to get to work and see the catastrophe they caused, so they may never realize the social and economic impact of bad behaviour. If it were their mailbox kicked open or their doorstep puked on or their neighbour hospitalized, it might encourage more restraint, or at least more consideration, but unfortunately that's not usually the case.
I think that's generally the problem with the 'drinking district' in a lot of cities; people from everywhere but there go there to party and have fun, and if they don't, they cause problems and then head on home, lost in the crowd, and probably don't even remember it the next day.
Nightlife isn't concentrated into small eras because of licensing. If you want bars and nightclubs spread out through an area, you are arguing for liquor licensing.
In neither the Vancouver example nor the Wrigleyville example is the problem "college students".
I somehow doubt that those people would stop going out and getting drunk during the evening if there were fewer/no taxis. They'd just be driving themselves.
Sure, maybe you could push it out of one neighborhood and into another, and the residents of Wrigleyville might be all for that, but is that actually much of a net gain for society in general?
I'd rather have drunks clogging sidewalks and taxis clogging roads, than drunks clogging roads.
I see... I guess one possible solution would be to make liquor licenses non-transferable, and then only issue them to businesses that are not located close to some threshold of other license holders.
Calibrating those thresholds to not generate more traffic (as people barhop with cabs instead of walking between bars) and to not kill the nightlife completely would probably proof challenging though.
If you only issue licenses to businesses that aren't close to other businesses, you've created an artificial scarcity. That's fine, but the economically optimal solution to scarce licensing is auctioning or, if that doesn't work, secondary markets.
The same happens to all areas with bars were night life is concentrated, whether there's taxi present or not.
There are completely similar places were ("drunk bar clientele from outside the area makes it difficult to live in") without any taxis (e.g in Amsterdam or Barcelona). Or places where the drunks prefer to drive (don't ask). In a dense city people can just walk there from a different area, or use the metro.
Arguably the state should care about who gets the licenses, but even if it didn't, the state can easily ensure that licenses go to the people or organizations that value them most by auctioning them on an annual basis (and offering incumbent licence-holders first option to renew the licence at the market determined lease rates) whilst collecting the licenses' appreciation in value
But as soon as you start caring about who gets the licenses, you have to create a set of criteria, and people will have a hard time choosing them.
The old politician from the old part of town will argue for historical precedent; the younger, hipper politician might argue that new applicants should be given higher priorities; etc. As soon as you start trying to decide, you start deadlocking and someone gets screwed.
As it is now, all you need is money, rather than money and a friend on the council.
[1] These purposes aren't, on their face, unreasonable. Taxis generate undesirable congestion, and establishments that serve liquor tend to create undesirable drunk people. If you don't believe me, take a walk through Wrigleyville in Chicago on a Friday night, where you can see an endless parade of taxis picking up an endless parade of drunk students.