George Takei on 'My Lost Freedom'

A coalition of business groups and community justice advocates is calling on the Mamdani administration to overhaul New York City's pedicab industry, including shifting enforcement from the NYPD to the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

The group argues the TLC could better protect tourists from overcharging and reduce enforcement pressure on drivers. In a report, the group says employing the TLC would also unburden a portion of the court system where many summonses are dismissed.

"It has become a dumping ground for this entire industry," said Danielle Mindess, project director of the Midtown Community Justice Center for the Center for Justice Innovation, which released the report this week.

Mindess said pedicab drivers have become so familiar with the Midtown court system that many of them know the presiding judge by name. The legal drivers, she said, are paying the price for the regulatory vacuum.

“Then they're competing against people who are not following any of the rules and are not operating legally," she said.

The report, produced in collaboration with City Councilmember Gale Brewer’s office, the Times Square Alliance, the Central Park Conservancy and the New York Pedicab Alliance, lays out eight recommendations.

The central proposal is to move oversight from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to the TLC, which the report says is better equipped because it already has a dedicated enforcement arm and licensing infrastructure for other for-hire vehicles.

Other recommendations include mandating GPS-enabled meters with standardized rates, holding fleet owners accountable for the vehicles they rent out and legalizing safe electric motors while banning unsafe ones.

A 2009 law, passed days after a pedicab crash on the Williamsburg Bridge, set a cap of 850 pedicabs, required licenses and insurance, and mandated per-minute pricing on exterior signs. The report estimates that 1,200 to 1,500 pedicabs currently operate in the city, many with forged credentials.

Tourists have been charged from $500 to nearly $1,000 for 15- to 20-minute rides, the report says. The city's 311 system has also received 172 pedicab complaints in 2025, including 86 about overcharging, according to the report.

Consumers aren't the only ones bearing the costs.

In August, a pedicab driver named Musa Cetin took his own life in police custody after an arrest on an open summons warrant, according to police and prior reporting.

Part of the problem, Mindess said, is that the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has no enforcement arm, leaving the NYPD as the only agency policing the industry. Officers write summonses during sporadic enforcement blitzes, but the cases routinely collapse in court.

"There's no prosecutor in summons court, and so the NYPD would have to produce discovery, which they do not do ever," Mindess said. "So they all get dismissed."

In 2025, more than 2,000 pedicab summonses were docketed at the Midtown Community Justice Center. The vast majority were dismissed, according to the report.

An NYPD spokesperson did not return requests for comment.

Unscrupulous operators exploit this dynamic, according to Kenneth Winters, who helped organize the New York Pedicab Alliance, a group of licensed drivers. He said drivers routinely request trials specifically because they anticipate that the NYPD won't produce discovery and the case will be tossed.

"These are not the kind of people we want in the industry," he said.

Winters said he hopes that tougher oversight under the TLC will push out the bad actors.

"Once we go under TLC, it's going to get rid of a lot of the bad guys and only the good guys are going to remain."

The current rules are unworkable for drivers and dangerous for consumers, said Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance.

"A pedicab ride can be a fun way to see our great city, but when those drivers are subjected to outdated rules that make compliance impossible and foster predatory practices, it's time for reform," Harris said in a statement. "We urge the Mamdani administration to overhaul the industry and treat pedicabs like other for-hire vehicles with protections for operators and consumers."

Most of the recommendations would require City Council legislation, according to the report. Two pedicab-related bills, Intros 0077-2026 and 0673-2026, remain in committee and would address pricing transparency and fare regulation.

The mayor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side, said the TLC, which already licenses and enforces rules for yellow cabs and rideshare vehicles, is better equipped to bring order to the industry. As an occasional passenger, she said, the rate signs on the side of the cab are "often crossed out," and there is no way for a customer to know how long a ride has actually taken.

"I feel terrible for the tourists who have no idea what a pedicab is or what they're paying or what they should pay," Brewer said. "Right now, it's really the Wild West."

New York’s roughly $260 billion state budget was already a month late by the time Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders started talking about money last week.

That’s the upside-down normal for New York’s budget-making process, where major decisions about how to spend billions of dollars affecting millions of people wait until the governor strikes a deal on policy priorities that often have little to do with dollars and cents.

New York’s budget is a stack of bills that go far beyond government spending, negotiated in private by the governor and two legislative leaders while rank-and-file lawmakers, lobbyists and the press scramble to learn any details they can.

Hochul and lawmakers are nearing a handshake deal on a spending plan for the state’s 2026-27 fiscal year, which began April 1. Once it’s passed, it’ll be the latest state budget since 2010, when the stalemate lasted into the summer.

This year’s tardy budget has some lawmakers wondering aloud whether it’s time for things to change.

“ I don't want this to be written in a way that I'm trying to like antagonize the governor,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, told reporters last month. “I'm just saying this process frustrates me.”

There are still major aspects of the spending plan up for negotiation, including billions of dollars for the state’s education and healthcare systems as well as a boost in retirement benefits for public workers — all of which will be divvied up out of public view.

When reporters try to ask Hochul about the specifics of the talks, she often declines to discuss them in public — arguing it would hurt her negotiating position.

“Nice try trying to get me to  negotiate the budget in front of all of you, but I'm not going to do that,” Hochul said Tuesday when asked about state funding for cities. “I'm not taking the bait.”

At Hochul’s insistence, talks on the budget’s fiscal aspects — including education aid and small grants for lawmakers’ pet projects — waited until last week, according to Heastie, who sits at the negotiating table with Hochul and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins.

That’s when Hochul and legislative leaders began to reach consensus on her biggest policy proposals, including reforms to the state’s car-insurance laws, limits on local governments cooperating with federal immigration agents and a partial rollback of the state’s 2019 climate law.

“There is an inordinate amount of time that's been spent on policies generally that the governor puts forward,” Stewart-Cousins, a Yonkers Democrat, said Tuesday. “We just can't rush through those things.”

A governor-led process

Late budgets and lengthy debates over policy aren’t just the Hochul way, they’re the New York way.

State lawmakers have long complained about the New York state budget process, which has largely been in place for a century. The state constitution and court precedent grants the governor significant power to craft a spending plan and various levers to exert leverage over the Legislature as they negotiate the particulars.

But the Democrat-dominated Legislature has been wary of picking a public fight with Hochul, a Democrat who has drawn the conclusion that her leverage intensifies in what she calls “overtime” — the days and weeks after the budget was due, when lawmakers have their paychecks withheld by law.

For several years, Heastie has removed each of the governor’s non-fiscal proposals when Assembly Democrats put out their proposed spending plan each March. But it’s largely a symbolic protest; each year, the governor’s proposals have found their way into a final spending plan.

Changing the budget process to swing power back to the Legislature in a meaningful way would likely require an amendment to the state constitution, a lengthy process that would require voter approval. That didn’t go well for lawmakers in 2005, when they last advanced an amendment to change the process; voters defeated it by a 2-to-1 margin.

“ Passing a constitutional amendment that has to go before the voters — now you have governor versus the Legislature, and I don't know who wins that campaign,” Heastie said.

Then there’s the issue of transparency.

Each of the dozens of policy issues negotiated by Hochul and legislative leaders will be put into one of 10 bills that collectively make up the state budget.

But often, many of the most controversial issues are placed into a single bill — a piece of legislation known as the “Big Ugly” in Albany parlance. That forces lawmakers to cast a single up-or-down vote on a number of disparate issues — including some they may oppose and others they definitely support, making the bill difficult to vote against.

“They'll throw everything and the kitchen sink into it so that people who maybe aren't comfortable voting for it are stuck,” said Assembly Minority Leader Ed Ra, a Long Island Republican. “And they'll do it in the least transparent way they possibly can. The ink won't be dry, but it'll be on the floor.”

Diane Savino, a former longtime Democratic state senator from Staten Island, was in office for four different governors, including Hochul. Each brought their own touch to budget negotiations.

David Paterson, for example, forced lawmakers to vote on spending cuts in short-term budget extenders when the budget was late. Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, prioritized on-time spending plans as a symbol of government functionality.

Hochul, meanwhile, is more than comfortable waiting out her legislative counterparts, even if it means the budget’s late, Savino said.

“She's not giving in until she gets what she wants,” Savino said. “I said this when she became governor: She's a tough chick from Buffalo. Don't mess around with her, OK? She just has a different style.”

Robert Megna, who served as state budget director for three different governors including Hochul, is a fan of the state’s executive-driven budget process. He contrasted it with the federal budget, where Congress dominates the process and “ throws the president's budget out five minutes after they get it.”

“I'm a supporter of the executive budget process,” said Megna, who’s now the president of the Rockefeller Institute, a think tank that’s part of the state university system. “But I don't have some fantasy in my head that it means there's no conflict. Of course there's going to be conflict because you're spending people's scarce tax money, and people are going to fight over how that should be spent.”

E.J. McMahon, an adjunct fellow for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said there are simple changes the Legislature could make to improve the budget process. That includes creating a nonpartisan Legislative Budget Office to analyze the budget and create cost estimates, and moving the start of the state’s fiscal year to June 1.

But he contends the Legislature isn’t doing enough to use the power it does have in the budget process. That includes standing up to the governor if she insists on negotiating policy in the spending plan.

 ”This is all baloney, to use the technical phrase,” McMahon said. “‘Oh, she's loading us up. She's introducing other issues.’ OK, well, ignore them.”

Budget overtime

Hochul has presided over late state budgets each year since taking office in 2021, often painting them as evidence that she’s willing to fight for her priorities — which, she believes, are in line with New Yorkers’ priorities.

She’s quick to tick off a list of legislative accomplishments secured in budget overtime in years past, including a school cellphone ban, bolstered penalties for retail theft and rollbacks to the state’s cash bail reforms.

This year, Hochul says her priorities are about making New York more affordable. That includes changes to the state’s car-insurance laws that she contends will drive down rates.

It comes as she’s up for re-election against Republican Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive who is also running on an affordability theme.

“I’d like to be done,” she said last week. “My hands are ready to shake. But we just have to work through some more details because my priorities are very important to not just me, but also to the people of this state.”

Blakeman said  he would prioritize on-time budgets if he wins in November. But the Republican would face a vastly different challenge than Hochul when it comes to negotiating with the Legislature, which is dominated by Democrats.

“Kathy Hochul's … the leader of the state,” he said Monday. “Her party has a majority in the Senate and the Assembly, and she can't get a budget passed. That shows a terrible lack of leadership on her part.”

Hochul, meanwhile, has said Blakeman will be beholden to President Donald Trump if he wins. The Republican candidate was scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Tuesday.

“I know he's going to get his marching orders,” Hochul said. “He's got to find out what Donald Trump wants him to do in the state of New York, because this would be what he would do if he was to be ever elected.”

Lawmakers passed a short-term budget extender for the ninth time on Monday. Legislative leaders said they hope to put a final spending plan to a vote next week.

Good Wednesday afternoon in New York City, where a 28-year old woman is accused of posing as a Bronx high school student.

Here's what else is happening:

• Police in Mahwah, New Jersey, said a beaver that recently attacked multiple people, including at least one child, has tested positive for rabies.
• A by-appointment-only library dedicated entirely to the Epstein files is opening in Tribeca.
• If you have some extra cash, renovating the kitchen in your rent-stabilized apartment you intend to stay in for a while is not a bad idea at all.
• This Philadelphia crossing guard has a great hat.
• Ted Turner has died at the age of 87.
• Are lesbian bars dying or are sports bars becoming lesbian bars (and gambling dens)?
• And finally, if you're going to do it, do it: