Imagine if the long-distance bus industry were allowed to set a limit on the number of airline flights in and out of New York City, or if the beer industry were allowed to place a cap on the number of bottles of wine that could be sold in the city’s restaurants and liquor stores. Something just as outrageous is afoot in the New York City Council, where the speaker, Christine Quinn, is, at the behest of the gasoline-powered taxicab lobby, backing legislation that would impose a limit on the number of pedal-powered pedicabs serving New Yorkers. The gas-powered taxicabs fear that the leg-muscle-powered pedicabs will take away their business, and, as Grace Rauh reported in yesterday’s New York Sun, the gasoline-powered taxi firms have hired a lobbying firm, Bolton-St. Johns, that employs a lobbyist, Emily Giske, who lived in the same Chelsea apartment building as the speaker.

Mayor Bloomberg recently vetoed a council bill that would allow only 325 pedicabs in the city, require pedicab businesses to carry a $2 million insurance policy, and bar the bicycle taxis from using electric assists, which allow drivers to rest their legs on long trips. The mayor said he thought the free market ought to set the number of pedicabs in the city. It’s a wise move. As the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga has written in City Journal and in these pages, in the 1920s the city had as many as 21,000 taxi drivers. A 1937 law set a limit on the license that eventually settled at 11,787, and even adding a small number of licenses to accommodate the city’s population growth has always been a huge political fight. The result is that taxis are scarce at rush hours, in the rain, on New Year’s Eve, and in the boroughs outside Manhattan. In limiting pedicabs, the City Council would repeat the medallion mistake, ensuring scarcity and creating a new class of medallion holders with an interest that runs counter to that of consumers.

None of this is to oppose the police department from regulating pedicabs for traffic flow and safety reasons. But the police department, unlike the City Council, doesn’t take campaign contributions from the gasoline-powered taxi industry and its lobbyists. Some see environmental benefits in pedicabs. But we see this as primarily not an environmental issue but as one of allowing market-based competition rather than political favoritism to dictate the transportation options of New Yorkers. The right move for City Council members is to side with the mayor and free markets rather than the speaker and her cronies in the gas-powered taxi lobby who are trying to quash competition.