From WNYC and the Associated Press this morning:

New York City’s storied yellow cabs are taking a back seat to black cars.

Uber cars, often black sedans that can be summoned with smartphone apps, now outnumber the yellow taxis that city riders have hailed with a whistle and a wave for generations.

It was a changing-of-the-guard moment that passed with little fanfare this week in figures released by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission: 14,088 registered Uber cars compared with 13,587 yellow cabs.

But it hardly means yellow cabs are out of favor. There are still more than 10 times as many rides in yellow cabs as there are in Uber cars.

That’s because most Uber drivers work less than 40 hours a week while most yellow cabs are on the road nearly 24 hours a day.

There it is. It’s only a matter of time before Uber trip numbers start climbing as well. They’ll keep adding cars because there are no regulations to stop them. This is in addition to the thousands of livery and black cars already on the streets that aren’t associated with an Uber base. I need to do some digging to get total numbers and will update when I have them, but we’re seeing a glut of vehicles that’s reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s when there was no cap on the number of cabs that could roam the streets. And city residents HATED it. That’s why we got the Haas Act regulating the number of cabs, which stayed fixed for decades, and still limits cab numbers to this day.

Click the headline thumbnail to see the original story.

WNYC/Associated Press