New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani tapped a longtime transit official to head the Taxi and Limousine Commission, a move meant to assure drivers that they will be represented in City Hall
Surrounded by dozens of yellow cab drivers outside of LaGuardia Airport on Tuesday, the mayor announced that he was nominating transportation policy leader Midori Valdivia as chair and commissioner of the TLC, the city agency tasked with regulating the city’s for-hire vehicle industry.
Valdivia’s record in transportation is extensive. During Bill de Blasio’s administration, she served as deputy commissioner for finance and administration at the TLC and chief of staff to the chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Before that, she was the senior advisor to the executive director at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. While at the Port Authority, Valdivia supported the implementation of the first wage standards for service workers at JFK and LaGuardia Airports.
She recently served as a board member of the MTA.
Mamdani, flanked by members of New York’s Taxi Workers Alliance, aimed to send the message in Valdivia’s nomination that taxi workers would be given a seat at the table.
“Drivers keep New York City moving, but for too long, they have been on the outside of the halls of power, looking in,” he said to the crowd. “With our administration, drivers have a voice in City Hall.”
Valdivia’s selection comes as the taxi industry continues recovering from the pandemic and drivers face new challenges from companies like Uber and Lyft, which TLC regulates. The pick is also seen as an important one for Mamdani, who has championed the plight of taxi drivers and saw their support become the bedrock of the coalition that catapulted him into office.
As a rookie state assemblymember in 2021, Mamdani joined dozens of yellow taxi drivers who chained themselves outside City Hall and endured a two-week-long hunger strike to protest enormous debts on their medallions.
Some drivers, a majority of whom are immigrants, took out predatory loans to buy yellow cab medallions that the city promised would only go up in value. They were then left millions of dollars in debt as the market collapsed due to competition from rideshare apps. In some cases, the money drivers owed in interest payments cost more than the value of their medallions. In 2014, the cost of a single medallion was $1 million, but by 2021, the value plunged to just $80,000. Drowning in debt, multiple drivers had died by suicide.
Mamdani fasted alongside the drivers through those two weeks, bringing added attention. When the drivers ultimately won their fight and gained city-sponsored debt relief, Mamdani celebrated with the drivers as they danced in victory.
Now, as mayor, Mamdani tells Documented that he intends to break with former Mayor Eric Adams’ administration and double down on his support for drivers as they face a new crisis of arbitrary deactivations and lockouts by Uber and Lyft. In his final hours as mayor, Adams vetoed legislation that would have given drivers the legal right to fight back against deactivations.
“What we saw in the previous administration is exactly the kind of politics we’re seeking to bring to an end,” Mamdani told Documented. “As it pertains to Lyft and Uber drivers, we would not be vetoing the kind of legislation that would protect those drivers against unfair deactivations. We would, in fact, be signing that legislation and then carrying it out and implementing that legislation.”
Valdivia, whose appointment requires City Council approval, told Documented that if she is confirmed, her first agenda item would be reexamining the medallion debt relief program to ensure it’s providing assistance to as many drivers as possible.
“Another thing I really want to work on is to get to work right away on improving worker conditions. And once you improve worker conditions, too, the service automatically becomes better,” she said. “And I’m also always going to put safety at the forefront, workers at the forefront, making sure we’re getting service to places that really need it, like the deep outer boroughs, and just really improving service and safety.”
The location of Valdivia’s announcement was symbolic. Most nights, beneath the cavernous underpass that is LaGuardia Airport’s yellow taxi holding area, hundreds of cabdrivers can wait hours in a queue before being dispatched to hail a fare. If it’s cold, drivers huddle for warmth in their cars while listening to the radio or watching a movie. If it’s warm enough, some drivers play soccer to pass the time. On Tuesday night, it was the spot where Mamdani announced the leader who would regulate every aspect of their professional life.
Mamdani said that his decision to nominate Valdivia was part of his larger objective to reshape a TLC that has long caused frustration for cab drivers.
“When I was on that 15-day hunger strike with members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, TLC was just one face of a city government that had forgotten these drivers, if not betrayed them,” Mamdani said. “And now TLC can, in fact, be seen as someone who is fighting for them as opposed to against and that’s really exciting to have Midori at the helm.”
Bhairavi Desai, president of the NYTWA, said she hopes that drivers can have a path to a middle-class life by establishing a driver retirement plan and setting a living wage standard.
“Midori is somebody who has been in transportation for years, and she has a real solidarity for working people,” Desai told Documented
Desai also expressed hope that the new administration will usher in a new era for her members. “I think that with a mayor that believes in economic justice for working people, we can finally have, you know, a prevailing wage standard that recognizes the unique expenses, long hours, and risks that the drivers take every day,” she said.
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As Mamdani and Valdivia gave their speeches to a gaggle of reporters, drivers watched on. When Documented asked a crowd of drivers what they wanted to see from a revamped TLC, numerous drivers complained about what they viewed as unfair ticketing by the agency. A 2022 Documented investigation found that between 2017 to 2020, individual driver fines rose by 446%. Documented found that, unlike civilian drivers, who have to pay a $50 fine when caught on a red light camera, TLC licensed drivers are required to pay a $300 fine, plus three points for the same violation. A stop sign violation can cost as much as $400, whereas a civilian driver would pay $150.
When asked about drivers’ concerns regarding excessive fines, Valdivia expressed her openness to evaluating the TLC’s penalty system.
“One of the things I am very interested in, and the TLC does this periodically, is reviewing the penalties,” she said. “We have a lot of penalties on the books, and do we really need them all? If they’re not really concerning safety, do we really need to penalize people’s good, earned wages for something that is, you know, maybe more administrative in nature? So that’s something I’m interested in.”
