Look, here's a number that should make you sit up: about 18,000 taxi licences in this city, and most of them aren't even owned by the guy driving the cab. They're owned by investors, some of them the same families for decades, and they get rented out nightly to drivers who don't own a thing. Meanwhile Uber's been running here for years without a licence to its name, and everyone just quietly uses it anyway, including, I'd bet, some of the officials now promising a crackdown.

So what does "cleaning up the taxi trade" actually mean when enforcement finally shows up? Watch who gets stopped. It won't be the licence holder sitting on an asset that's basically a small property investment. It'll be the driver on shift, the one who rents the medallion by the day and eats the fine if he's caught doing something the app-based competition does completely legally. That's not a cleanup. That's protecting one guy's asset by fining another guy's shift.