Taxicab insurance crisis in New York City

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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{{ One of my first legal jobs, back in the pre cellphone era, was plaintiff’s personal injury. There were two companies that covered yellow cabs…Eagle Insurance, and American Transit. They didn’t settle cases unless they were brought all the way to trial, and even then, didn’t pay like the other insurers. There was one old attorney for them who lived in the Court, spent the day being yelled at by Judges for the lack of progress, and didn’t care. American Transit would talk to taxi fleet drivers and tell them outright better to kill someone than cripple them, its cheaper. }}

free link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/nyregion/american-transit-insurance-uber-lyft-nyc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Lk4.9Msu.dd9ZEI-_ACuB&smid=url-share

intercst

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I think that is the mind set behind vehicle safety regs in Michigan. Michigan had a motorcycle helmet law for decades. Some years ago, the helmet law was repealed “freeedom” howled the (L&Ses). But in a car? “Click it or ticket” says Joe Law. “what is this freeedom thing?”

My cynical takeaway. A biker is more likely to be killed outright, if he isn’t wearing a helmet. Meanwhile, occupants in a car are more likely to not be seriously injured at all, if they are wearing a three point belt. Translation: the law is designed to minimize insurance payouts, for each type of vehicle. “Freeedom” is only a talking point, useful when it fits the agenda.

Steve

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The costs shift onto the state of NY to lock up the cab driver.

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Back in the day I was talking to someone who built an early integrated computer model to calculate the optimal timing of traffic lights. The novelty was it included the economic impacts of traffic accidents and optimized for cost savings. The engineer was surprised that the model kept returning very short pedestrian crossing signals with no warning period. They spent a long time looking for bugs. Finally they realized the model was optimizing for pedestrian fatalities over injuries due to the cost savings.

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Yep, Civil Engineers are trained to keep an eye on the bottom line – Engineering Economics is mandatory on the licensing exam.

When I lived in Houston, they had red light traffic ticket cameras for a while and somebody brought a suit saying that the period of the yellow light was too short to allow the vehicle to clear the intersection before turning red. They were optimizing the “yellow” to increase the number of traffic tickets written.

intercst

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And in some cases the contracts with the traffic camera companies don’t allow the city to make changes to the light timing, even if there are safety concerns.

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