In New York getting a Taxi Medallion took essentially getting a mortgage.
It's like picking up food at a restaurant vs some random guys house: technically they're both strangers, there's no guarantee the restaurant is clean either... but only one is a stranger to serving customers food.
> Instead of lending directly, the big banks worked through powerful industry players. They enlisted large fleet owners and brokers — especially Neil Greenbaum, Richard Chipman, Savas Konstantinides, Roman Sapino and Basil Messados — to use the banks’ money to lend to medallion buyers. In return, the owners and brokers received a cut of the monthly payments and sometimes an additional fee.
The big players knew what was happening, they exploited individual drivers to quickly offload their liability. They weren't directly exposing themselves to the risk.
When prices collapsed PE swooped in and bought them outright.
Brokers can't rent: only "leasing" (on an asset they didn't own) and financing both with regular payments, an interest rate, and forfeiture if you don't pay in time, just like a mortgage.
Whether or not there's data to back that up, Taxi's also existed for about a century prior to smartphones, which are a great deterrent to victimizing strangers from your car.
Taxi regulation, let alone the prohibitively priced licenses people are referring to elsethread, are a much more recent development from what I understand.
