A Capital District Transportation Authority bus in Albany. | wikipedia After Uber bill stalls, CDTA cleared to help Capital Region cab service

ALBANY — After state lawmakers left the Capitol last month without agreeing on a bill to let car-hail services operate in upstate cities, municipalities in the Capital Region are moving forward with Plan B.

Legislators did successfully push a bill that will let the Capital District Transportation Authority — which operates buses in Albany, Schenectady, Rensselaer and Saratoga counties — become a central regulator for the notoriously bad taxi service in the region.


“This is actually part of a bigger picture: one of the things we have been trying to do for the last number of years is to provide people who live and work here with more mobility choices,” CDTA executive director Carm Basile told POLITICO New York. “It really is a localized industry that needs some parameters, some boundaries, and some rules.”

Advocates of Uber and Lyft, a group which includes most of the Capital Region’s legislative delegation, say the companies will provide competition and an alternative to cab companies that are unreliably dispatched, variably (and excessively) priced and generally unpleasant, according to rider surveys.

When trial lawyers and other interest groups pushed to kill the upstate car-hailing bill, legislators turned their attention to the CDTA legislation. It passed both houses of the Legislature during the last week of session, and is awaiting action by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

If he signs it, Basile said, the next step will be to have the region’s largest cities adopt a model ordinance that sets standards for cab cleanliness, fares and background checks for drivers. The goal is to have the big players pass the law around the new year.

And once that happens, CDTA will be able to help would-be riders as a kind of centralized point of contact. It won’t do combined dispatching, but its call center will field inquiries about which company to call and complaints when drivers don’t show up.

There’s even a chance, Basile said, that CDTA would develop an app in future years.

“I don’t think they’re rushing to this, but they’re certainly not running away from it,” he said. “Logical definitions is the way to move here, and as we grow into this, we could develop our own app — or integrate it with our own fare app, Navigator — so people can see what the fare is going to be.”

The bill has yet to go to the governor’s desk. The Albany Times Union, in a recent editorial, said the bill “would offer local companies and communities a way to benefit from the success of CDTA.”

“We don’t have any reason to suspect he’s not going to sign it,” Basile said. “I know we will make this better.”

