Chapter 1 Scope

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) is the City agency responsible for regulating for-hire transportation in New York City, including taxis, street hail liveries, high-volume for-hire services such as Uber and Lyft, black cars, luxury limousines, livery vehicles, commuter vans, and paratransit vehicles. The TLC licenses about 175,000 drivers, 115,000 cars, and 1,000 businesses, which together transport more than a million passengers a day, making TLC the most active for-hire transportation regulatory agency globally with oversight of a critical component of the City’s transportation network. With the introduction of new apps and technologies, TLC is on the front lines of a rapidly changing mobility landscape, and our innovative efforts–whether regulating driver pay, ensuring wheelchair accessibility, working to eliminate traffic fatalities, or preventing discriminatory service–often serve as a model for other cities.

The purpose of this document is to document practices, procedures, and processes of analysis and work at the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) with a focus on the Analytics Unit. This will be an evolving document to be shared with current and incoming staff to maintain and capture all knowledge relevant to completing work at the TLC. In addition to laying the groundwork for standards, it will serve as a living document of the vision and strategy employed by the analytics team to help the constituency with data-driven decisions and support for policy research. The idea for the analytics team is to create a highly effective rapid-prototyping research element within TLC that will serve to do the following (examples provided below each point):

  • Provide policy research support

    • Medallion Relief Program

    • Black Car and Livery Task Force and Report

    • Regulatory Review

    • Battery Electric Vehicle Pilot Program

    • Driver income study analytics support

    • Vehicle retirement adjustment

  • Maintain automated metrics and KPI’s for rapid access internally and externally

    • Respond to internal and external data requests

    • Open data support

  • Rapid prototype applications and analytical processes

    • Testing new technologies for integration with IT & the taxi industry

    • Maintaing and imporving existing solutions like TLC Data Hub

    • Creating new tools for internal and external users

  • Modernize data infrastructure

    • Working towards speeding up data processes with technologies like SQL Server Datawarehousing/Apache Spark

  • Engage with the public

    • Publish innovative research on For-Hire industry

    • Partnering with academia and think thanks

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.