Vivid Example of Uber's Creative Destruction of New York Cab Business

Sad story (if you don't think about all the benefits to drivers and passengers) of how Uber is really screwing up street parking in one Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood, via Gothamist.

Jon-Nicholas Kiouvas has been working at McGuinness Management Corporation, a taxi dispatcher at the corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Huron Street just south of the Pulaski Bridge, since 1996…

For the last seven months, Kiouvas has come into work at 7:30 a.m., and methodically moved dozens of unused yellow cabs out of their parking spaces on surrounding residential and industrial streets, in order to avoid parking tickets…

Dozens upon dozens of yellow cabs have been shuffled this way for the better part of the year, throughout the blocks contained by Huron Street to the south, Freeman to the north, Provost to the east and Manhattan Avenue to the west. McGuinness Management is the heart of what one frustrated neighbor recently dubbed the "taxi graveyard."

Hossam Yossri has been working at McGuinness for five years. "Business is getting so bad, that people are just dropping their cabs off here," he told us on Tuesday. "Everyone is going to Uber, where they don't have to pay a lease, and they don't have to deal with a dispatch."….

As the number of drivers continues to dwindle, between 80 and 120 cabs sit empty on any given shift. Yossri recalls one day recently when there were only enough drivers to send out 24 cabs, and 147 of them sat empty.

My November 2014 feature on the rise of and regulatory fights against Uber and the other companies in its space.

Jim Epstein on the most recent quelling of attempts to hyperregulate Uber in NYC; attempts that we can be confident we'll see rise again.