DeBlasio vs. Uber

The Castro-and-Ortega-loving NYC mayor wants so badly to get his regulatory mitts on the ride-hailing service.

But when Freedom-Haters; start cooking the numbers to make their case, they inevitably get exposed:

Plainly and simply, the numbers did in Mayor de Blasio’s wrongheaded, politically motivated, anti-progress, anti-progressive plan to cap the growth of Uber, the popular cellphone-based car-for-hire service.
The mayor and allies on the City Council, long comrades-in-arms with the yellow cab industry, had planned to pass a law restricting the growth of Uber and similar services for a year while conducting a study of their impact, on the ground that they were adding to traffic congestion.
De Blasio threw around numbers, such as that Uber is adding cars at a rate of 2,000 a month, strongly implying it is to blame for slowing traffic. But his own administration’s Taxi & Limousine Commission had data clearly showing that de Blasio’s contentions were at best misleading.
Blame it on bad staff work or blame it on carrying water for pals, the result is the same: The release of Uber’s data to the Daily News Tuesday documented that the service had far fewer cars on the road than suggested in the most congested zones and at the most congested hours.
What’s more, the data showed Uber cars were busiest during off-peak hours, with substantial numbers picking up passengers in the boroughs and northern Manhattan, exactly the areas that the yellows have long avoided.
Worse still for de Blasio, his mayoral campaign footed the bill for its workers who hired Uber cars, no doubt because, like thousands of New Yorkers, they found the service more convenient than the traditional ritual of standing on a corner to hail a cab, hoping for the best and eventually taking a trip in a car less comfortable than the typical Uber vehicle.

Even Governor Cuomo, who wants more business to come to his stagnant state, was on the correct side of this one.

A business model like Uber makes Freedom-Haters' teeth grind. They can't stand the elegant simplicity of the free market. Happy drivers and happy riders turning on their apps and going places and making money without a bunch of paperwork and licensing and restrictions.  That's way too beautiful for their dark aspirations.