“We’re gonna have all of our cabs be hybrid.”
So said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Matt Lauer on the “Today” show in 2007, as they stood in front of a hybrid yellow cab donated by Yahoo! and emblazoned with its logo.
The mayor gestured toward a thin man in glasses to his left: “And most importantly, this is City Councilman David Yassky, who has been leading the environmental fight here in the city.”
Today, Yassky is Bloomberg’s taxi commissioner. And 2012, the year by which the taxi’s fleet was to go hybrid, has come and nearly gone.
In the meantime, not only has the city’s powerful taxi lobby defeated the mayor’s hybrid-cab plan in federal court, but the city is now taking steps that will actually reduce the number of hybrids on city streets.
“We were really hoping New York could be a leader,” said Johanna Dyer, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s kind of a shame that it seems like we’re falling back a little bit."As we relayed last year, the mayor takes vehicle emissions seriously. Here he pimped his ride so it wouldn't have to idle to keep that sweet, sweet AC crankin':
Paul Gillespie, former president of the taxi commission in San Francisco, where most of the cabs are now green, said, “It’s just so disappointing to me now, because Commissioner Yassky and Mayor Bloomberg were early champions of hybrid vehicles.”
Bloomberg, who’s made public health a principal cause in both public and private life, was a big hybrid booster.
Regular cabs, he told Lauer on “Today,” “just sit there in traffic sometimes belching fumes.”...MORE
This in-the-wall air conditioning unit as seen on the cover of the
New York Post was spotted by the tabloid in the window of Mayor
Bloomberg’s official city SUV. (Photo: CBS 2 via NY Post)
