In the immediate aftermath of the stock market crash in 1929, amid the suicides, collapsed fortunes and other pervasive miseries, the number of men looking for jobs in New York expanded the ranks of the city’s cabdrivers to 30,000. Chaos reigned. There were too many drivers going after too few passengers — fares were slashed, tensions between fleets escalated, violence erupted. Some drivers working 20-hour days could not make enough money to support themselves. As a result, in 1937, the city devised the medallion system to limit the number of vehicle licenses. In the late 1930s, there were just under 12,000 medallions in circulation; more than 75 years later, in a city larger by one million people and benefiting from far greater prosperity, there are only 13,000.

History reveals the perils of both too little and too much regulation. In the four short years that Uber has operated in New York City, it has sent about 12,000 new for-hire cars onto city streets. Growth like that cannot continue without examination. But of course growth like that might never have occurred if the city’s yellow-taxi system could respond to fluctuations of supply and demand. Instead, arcane aspects of state and local law and, crucially, the power wielded by wealthy and politically generous fleet owners — who don’t want to see the creation of more medallions lest the value of theirs decline — make that virtually impossible.

Let’s leave aside that Uber, like Soul Cycle or the Hampton Jitney, has become an aspect of identity for many New Yorkers. “Uber” is something you do; it’s a verb; you “Uber” to dinner at Barbuto, whereas in 2010 you would have said — how benighted the sound!— that you were going to “take a taxi.” With Uber there is no grammatical intimation of remove. On a recent evening when I suggested to a friend that we hail a cab on a street known in Brooklyn Heights to have many of them, she pulled her iPhone out of her bag and looked at me as if I had proposed carving our own wooden alphabet blocks from the first ginkgo tree we could find in the forest.

The de Blasio administration’s feud with Uber, which went on hiatus on Wednesday, was troubled from the start, in part because of these passions, in part because the mayor was tainted as a recipient of fleet-owner largess and in part because what is really required is a comprehensive rethinking of the entire taxi system’s regulatory framework. The city’s proposal for a temporary cap on Uber’s growth — which it dropped in exchange for Uber’s promise to release data that the city would use to analyze the effects of so many for-hire vehicles on traffic patterns and the environment — was born out of proclaimed worries about congestion. But if we’re going to worry about congestion, we might also worry about the city’s seemingly unchecked pace of construction or, perhaps, the ubiquitous presence of film crews with their enormous trailers clogging streets.