This article is bullshit. It's quite obvious to me that Seattle roads are a classic tragedy of the commons. There is a point where Seattle streets are saturated such that adding cars increases traffic and congestion without reducing cab time from point A to B. There is also a point where the supply of taxis meets the demand exactly.
Currently, we have little data to say where these points lie on the number line of "taxis" in Seattle. If the first point is less than the second, the city should place a limit at that point. If the second point is equal to or less than the first point, then the city can set the limit at an arbitrary value equal to or greater than the second point and let the market sort it out.
Either way, by regulating the quantity of taxis, the city can slowly increase the limit to find the optimal solution.
Even if we take street congestion to be a tragedy of the commons, it's not obvious that more cabs imply more congestion, since as part of a network of public transportation, they may help reduce personal car usage.
But even if we take it for granted, I still think your approach is pernicious. The issue with your - and the city's - method is that while the claimed problem is congestion, the solution is to limit the number of registered cars per service. But the error in that reasoning is that it presumes that they are perfectly correlated, and so it prevents market players from coming up with better solutions that reduce congestion without reducing the number of cars.
For example, services like Uber which rely completely on calls via the Internet have the potential to cause much lower congestion compared to a service that relies on having idle drivers drive around looking for people waving their arms.
If one wants to reduce congestion, then the only good solution is to tax cars driving in congested areas.
Unless they do the same thing with private automobiles, which exist in far greater number than common carriers, this is hypocritical at worst and useless at best.
This article is bullshit. It's quite obvious to me that Seattle roads are a classic tragedy of the commons. There is a point where Seattle streets are saturated such that adding cars increases traffic and congestion without reducing cab time from point A to B. There is also a point where the supply of taxis meets the demand exactly.
Currently, we have little data to say where these points lie on the number line of "taxis" in Seattle. If the first point is less than the second, the city should place a limit at that point. If the second point is equal to or less than the first point, then the city can set the limit at an arbitrary value equal to or greater than the second point and let the market sort it out.
Either way, by regulating the quantity of taxis, the city can slowly increase the limit to find the optimal solution.