By Betty Parsons
New York City’s rule requiring Uber and Lyft to shift toward electric and wheelchair-accessible vehicles is running ahead of its own schedule. The data — trip volumes, charging infrastructure, fleet composition — shows exactly how, and where the pace may be about to get much harder to hold.
The mandate, in plain terms
The Green Rides Initiative is a Taxi and Limousine Commission rule, adopted in October 2023, that applies to the city’s “high-volume” for-hire services — in practice, Uber and Lyft, which together operate roughly 78,000 TLC-licensed vehicles. It requires a rising share of their trips each year to be dispatched to either a zero-emission vehicle or a wheelchair-accessible vehicle (WAV). There’s no partial credit: a hybrid doesn’t count, and neither does a trip sent to a gas-powered car with a WAV waiting nearby. Only a completed trip in a qualifying vehicle counts toward the number.
The schedule was set years in advance, so there’s no ambiguity about what’s required and when:
| Year | Required share of trips (EV or WAV) |
|---|---|
| 2024 | 5% |
| 2025 | 15% |
| 2026 | 25% |
| 2027 | 40% |
| 2028 | 60% |
| 2029 | 80% |
| 2030 | 100% |
The jump from 25% to 40% between 2026 and 2027 is the single largest year-over-year increase in the entire schedule — more on why that matters below.
Where the numbers actually stand
New York has cleared every benchmark ahead of schedule so far:
• The 2024 target of 5% was met by January of that year — nearly two years early — with the actual share already past 17% by April 2024.
• By August 2024, 19% of trips were EV or WAV, well past that year’s requirement.
• By July 2025, the share reached 21% — six points above the 15% required for that year.
• By April 2026, combined Uber and Lyft dispatches reached 23.8% — just shy of the 25% target for the year, with Uber alone individually clearing 25.9%.
That’s a pattern of the city beating its own numbers by a comfortable margin for three straight years — though the April 2026 figure is the tightest gap yet between what’s required and what’s actually happening, worth watching as the year closes out.
The trip volume itself has grown fast
Beyond the percentage, the raw number of EV trips has scaled quickly since the mandate took effect:
| Month | Monthly EV rideshare trips |
|---|---|
| November 2023 | 362,000 |
| January 2024 | 1.08 million |
| March 2024 | 2.05 million |
| July 2025 | 2.46 million (record) |
That’s roughly a sevenfold increase in monthly EV trip volume in under two years. TLC also reported that March 2024 set an all-time high for WAV trips specifically — 1.9 million that month, a 32% increase over March 2023 — showing the accessibility side of the mandate moving in parallel with the electrification side, not lagging behind it.
The cumulative environmental tally, since the start of 2024:
• About 222 million trip-miles driven in EVs
• An estimated 55,000 metric tons of carbon emissions avoided
• Equivalent to roughly 6.2 million gallons of gasoline not burned, or about 61 million pounds of coal not burned for the same energy output
Charging infrastructure has scaled alongside demand
A citywide EV mandate is only as workable as the charging network backing it up. According to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the city’s fast-charging (DCFC) network has grown substantially:
| Fast-charging ports citywide | |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 117 |
| Mid-2025 | ~360 |
That’s a 207% increase in five years, including 136 new ports installed in just the twelve months between July 2024 and mid-2025 — the fastest stretch of buildout in the network’s history.
How individual fleets are converting
The citywide numbers are made up of individual companies and drivers converting vehicle by vehicle. A few data points on how that’s playing out:
• American Lease, which operates about 5,000 TLC-licensed vehicles available for short-term driver rental, has converted more than 2,100 of them to EVs — replacing what were previously gas-powered vehicles.
• As of the most recently reported fleet composition tied to the 2026 benchmark, roughly 20.9% of the entire active TLC plate fleet is now EV or WAV — split between about 12.9% fully electric and 8.0% wheelchair-accessible.
• Reaching the 2027 target of 40% would require converting an estimated 15,000 additional for-hire vehicles to EV or WAV within a single year — about 14% of all currently active TLC plates converting in twelve months, a pace well beyond anything achieved so far.
That last figure is the crux of why industry analysts are watching 2027 closely: every year to date has cleared its target comfortably, but the size of the next step up is substantially larger than any the city has faced before.
A side effect: yellow cabs are losing ground
The mandate’s mechanics have created a side effect that isn’t part of its stated goal. Uber and Lyft receive no compliance credit for trips they dispatch to yellow cabs — even though New York’s yellow cab fleet is itself increasingly wheelchair-accessible, with TLC requiring 100% of new taxi “hack-ups” (vehicle replacements) to be accessible vehicles. That creates an incentive structure where, from a compliance standpoint, sending a rider to a yellow cab does nothing to help an app meet its Green Rides number — only an EV or WAV dispatched directly through the app counts.
One industry analysis has linked this dynamic to a recent downturn in yellow cab activity:
| Month | Yellow cab trip change (YoY) | Uber/Lyft trip change (YoY) |
|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | −6.8% | — |
| March 2026 | −7.1% | +7.4% |
| April 2026 | −7.0% | +6.3% |
That’s a reversal from 2025, when yellow cab trips were reportedly growing at an average of nearly 17% year-over-year each month. The same analysis noted that yellow cab medallion valuations have softened somewhat over the same period, alongside the trip decline.
It’s worth being precise about what is and isn’t confirmed here: the TLC has not issued its own statement attributing the yellow cab slowdown to the Green Rides mandate. The correlation comes from an independent industry analysis, not an official agency finding, and the analyst disclosed a financial stake in TLC fleet operations. Other factors — congestion pricing, seasonal ridership shifts, medallion supply changes — could also be contributing, and untangling the exact cause would need further reporting.
What to watch next
• The 2026 finish line. At 23.8% in April, the year’s 25% target is close but not yet secured — the tightest margin of any year so far.
• The 2027 cliff. A jump to 40% requires converting roughly 15,000 more vehicles in a single year. Whether the pace of the last three years — which cleared smaller, more gradual targets — can scale to that size is genuinely uncertain.
• Charging capacity. Whether the fast-charging network can keep expanding at the rate it has, or whether growth plateaus as the easiest sites get built first.
• The yellow cab question. Whether TLC or the mayor’s office responds to the reported taxi trip decline, and whether any rule change addresses the credit gap between app dispatches and yellow cab dispatches.
A note on sourcing and images
Every figure above traces back to an NYC TLC official press release, the city’s official Green Rides page (nyc.gov/greenrides), NYSERDA charging data as reported by TLC, or a named industry analysis (AutoMarketplace’s newsletter), which is flagged wherever its numbers or interpretations — rather than TLC’s own data — are being cited. Before publishing, it’s worth a final check that each figure still matches the source, since TLC updates some of this data monthly.
The four charts above were built directly from the sourced figures in this piece — not sourced from a third party — so there’s no copyright issue there. For photography, I’d recommend pulling from your own fleet, TLC’s press kit, or NYSERDA’s public image library rather than stock or news photos, since republishing someone else’s photojournalism carries its own rights issues separate from the text.
Category: Business/NYC · Tags: TLC, EVs, Rideshare, Green Rides, Transportation, Data
