Christina Hansen suggests license plates for pedicabs

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No questions for this panel.

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We appreciate your testimony.

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And the last panel we have, if people want to testify, sign up, please do that.

We have Christina Hendon and Paul.

Bader, thank you.

Yeah, and there are people on Zoom.

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We have one person?

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All right.

Good afternoon, Councilmember Epstein, Councilmember Brewer, everybody watching remotely.

My name is Christina Hansen.

I am a New York City carriage driver.

I'm a licensed sightseeing guide, and I'm a longtime resident of Hell's Kitchen.

So I've been an observer of the pedicab industry for a long, long time, as it's immediately adjacent to my line of work and in my neighborhood.

And I would like to say, first of all, I agree with the Conservancy very much about their observations about what goes on in the park.

Central Park South has become utterly degraded with aggressive ticket selling and things like that.

Also, though, there are a lot of good operators in the park.

Right now, with everything else that's going on in the park, they do operate safely and slowly at 6 to 10 miles an hour.

They're not going 15 miles an hour.

They're not going 30 miles an hour with that electric assist, which, although it is currently illegal.

That being said, I heard a lot of questions from the committee to the administration about what sort of technology could we employ here.

And the technology that's not being employed here is a very simple one, and it's called a license plate.

They talk about plates on pedicabs.

But it is just a sticker on the fork of the vehicle that it's a sticker.

And if it peels off, it's voided.

So the pedicab operators are kind of forced to put zip ties around it so nobody could peel it off and ruin their plate.

You can't read it.

It's a four-digit number.

They're easily counterfeitable, et cetera.

They can be covered up.

There's only 840 plates out there and only 340 being issued right now.

It's a three-digit number that could be visible from the back of the pedicab and from the front of the pedicab.

You know, yellow cabs right now have a light on the top.

It's like a very short number.

They've got a plate from TLC.

If they do have a violation, it's easy to capture that and connect it to an owner.

So, you know, in the park, I've had pedicabs drive recklessly, hit my horse in the face, but I cannot report it because there's just no way to even see it.

So that would be my suggestion to the committee.