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Comment by monkeypizza | Hacker News Reader

Why do you need medallions at all? The drivers already have licenses - just make the background check part of getting a license, and just charge 100$ for a license. Let as many people be taxi drivers as want to be.

We don't worry about reducing work to a living wage in any other field - we allow free entry into carpentry, construction, business & don't require them to buy medallions before starting to work.

It's a general problem of resource allocation - just like cancer. Some group or cell identifies a resource and starts diverting or blocking it for their own benefit, and this increased power/energy is enough to protect the problem from unmotivated defenders.

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Or if you wanna keep the supply artificially low somehow, and provide some sort of barrier for entry, do like London does and require prospective drivers to pass a ridiculously stringent test of their understanding of local geography (The Knowledge). From wikipedia:

"It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab-drivers, and applicants will usually need at least twelve 'appearances' (attempts at the final test), after preparation averaging 34 months, to pass the examination"

"In all some 25,000 streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross are covered along with the major arterial routes through the rest of London.... The Knowledge includes such details as the order of theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue, or the names and order of the side streets and traffic signals passed on a route."

Overkill in the era of GPS? Probably. But pretty cool.

Not for the customers who will be paying artificially inflated prices and not for the aspiring drivers who have to pass ridiculous three-year hazing ceremony in order to be able to earn a honest living. Of course, once they passed, they have an incentive to make the others suffer as badly as they did.

Yeah, the flipside of this is that taxis in London are ridiculously expensive and anyone except tourists, the very rich and the very desperate will just wind up hiring a Minicab, which means getting into a filthy wreck of a car with a random stranger who inevitably looks like a rapist, which is precisely what taxi licencing schemes are designed to avoid in the first place.

I don't know. You end up wishing The Knowledge was compulsory in all cities outside of London, perhaps because it acts as a basic intelligence test.

London taxis make NYC taxis look like a complete bargain because of that stupid test.

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