The chairman of the City Council’s committee on transportation, John Liu of Queens, is deserving of a round of applause for a measure he introduced Wednesday that would give the entrepreneurs of the city’s dollar van industry a break — and, not coincidentally, make it easier for residents in some of New York’s farther-flung communities to get around. Mr. Liu’s proposal is to allow commuters to hail the vans as they would a taxi, freeing the van operators from prearranging and documenting each fare. The city’s powerful transit unions have long opposed any accommodation for this flourishing industry, born during the strike of 1980, and Mr. Liu has risked arousing their ire. Mr. Liu’s performance perhaps falls short of warranting a standing ovation, however, as the most onerous regulation on the vans would remain in place: the prohibition on dollar vans picking up fares along city bus routes.

As things currently stand, the vans are forced to snake along the side streets of the outer boroughs to pick up their passengers — unless, of course, the city desperately needs them to pick up slack in an emergency, such as when a transit strike hits. While union leaders threatened to paralyze our city late last year, civic leaders such as Hector Ricketts, president of the Interborough Alliance for Community Transportation and owner of Queens Van Plan, huddled with the Bloomberg administration to draw up contingency plans. And the vans were called into service in Queens earlier last year when the Transportation Workers Union Local 100 struck and stranded about 100,000 commuters.

Mr. Ricketts had a point when he told The New York Sun yesterday that he doesn’t think he and his fellow van operators should be treated like pawns. “I would like to think that we have demonstrated consistently that we are an asset to the City of New York,” he told us. He continued, in a breath of rhetorical flourish: “Any bill that does not address the bus route prohibition in a city where 50,000 people want to use vans, in a city where every major street is a bus route, in a city where unions hold riders hostage, will have fallen short.”

The unions have impugned the safety of the vans, but, so far as we can tell, without basis in fact. For his part, Mr. Liu tells us that changing the local law regulating the vans would require a change in state law — and he has a point. But he says that he also doesn’t support the necessary change to the state law. “I do not believe in having commuter vans supplant or compete with mass transit,” he said. “This should not be driven purely by the market economy.” As he has expressed to The Sun in the past, he reiterated to us that the market cannot be trusted to provide transportation long term, as companies come and go. Us, we’d take the fluctuations of the market any day over the behavior of the city’s unions. We hope that over time Chairman Liu will arrive at the same conclusion.