So hard to ‘hack’ it
Challenges of driving a taxi in the age of Uber
IF
you want to know the effect Uber and Lyft are having on New York City’s yellow cabs, just take a ride to JFK’s taxi parking lot.
At any time of day, there are hundreds of cabbies waiting desperately, most of the time for hours, in hopes of grabbing the industry’s consolation prize — a $52 fixed fare back to the city.
Or go to any major hotel in Manhattan and look at all the taxicabs lined up outside. These cabbies are willing to wait for hours, hoping that when it is their turn, the passenger doesn’t just want to go 10 blocks.
With Uber and the other digitalbased ride services scooping up more and more customers looking for cost-saving short trips around the city — and often doing it more cheaply than the yellow cabs — the taxi industry is in, to put it mildly, flux.
Chaos is a better word.
You’ve probably already heard the tales of woe: The price of medallions, which are the licenses to operate yellow cabs, have collapsed; taxi drivers are unable to pay their bills and New Yorkers are waiting on the street longer to hail a ride because so many cabbies are staying in those lines I just told you about.
Recently, I spent hours riding around with a cabbie I’ll call Ibrahim, a soft-spoken Pakistani-American who came here as a child. He’s been driving a cab for a just a few years in an industry where many of the cabbies are lifers.
To walk a mile in Ibrahim’s shoes I had to ride for miles in the shotgun seat of his cab.
I’m keeping his real identity secret because we talked about some things that the New York City Taxi & Lim- ousine Commission wouldn’t be happy about.
Like other cabbies, Ibrahim started his 12-hour shift at 4 a.m. Journalists aren’t quite as hardy. I met up with him at 11 a.m. By then, he had picked up only four passengers, one of whom wanted to go to LaGuardia Airport, which isn’t as profitable as JFK because there is no flat rate. The meter runs for that one and it usually turns out to be cheaper.
As we cruise the streets, we are hoping to find folks with luggage, which indicates they might want to go to JFK or — if our luck is bad — maybe just to their Aunt Mary’s downtown.
Despite the fact that some potential customers look worried because I’m in the front seat, we manage to pick up two guys on Lexington Avenue with bags. They are going to JFK — bingo!
Our riders say they thought about using Uber but haven’t gotten around to it — at least not yet, they say.
It takes us a surprisingly short 30 minutes to the airport and the guys — who are headed on a long vacation in Europe — tip $13.
That’s much better than the 60-cent tip a guy gave us earlier in the day for a short jaunt downtown, or the buck-and-a-half gratuity that a woman gave us for a trip up to an East Side hospital.
On the hospital trip, Ibrahim accidentally ran a red light that had a camera mounted on it. He was distracted by the passenger giving him directions that he didn’t need. His GPS said there was a faster way, but he obeyed the passenger anyway and made a right on the red.
That’ll probably cost him a $50 fine, but luckily camera tickets don’t put points on your driving license. “It’s part of the business,” Ibrahim said. “I only worry about the points violations.”
Those are moving violations and require a cabby to hire a lawyer. Why not defend themselves? “Because the lawyer has connections,” says Ibrahim, who is the father of three and has grandkids.
After we dropped the European vacationers off at the Delta terminal, Ibrahim took me to the cab parking lot, which is on the grounds at JFK but not very close to the terminals.
It’s officially called the Central Taxi Hold Lot by the Port Authority, which runs the airport, and there is room for a maximum of 500 cabs. On the day Ibrahim took me there, about 300 cabbies had logged in via an E-ZPass-like system and were waiting to be summoned to the terminal to pick up passengers.
There are 13,587 medallion cabs in New York City. They are not only competing for business with Uber vehicles, but also with nearly 39,000 black cars, 22,000 livery cabs, 288 commuter vans and 2,206 paratransit vehicles.
Most of the cabbies stayed in their vehicles at the hold lot, but there were also a large number of card and dominoes games going on around a small cafeteria where drivers got a chance to eat and pee — the latter not a small need for people driving for 12 hours a day. (Taxi drivers also often give tips to hotel doormen to serve as entry fees to lobby bathrooms.) Port Authority makes the wait a lot fairer. If a driver happens to get a passenger who doesn’t want to go all the way into Manhattan, he can come back to the airport and get on the “shorty” line, which doesn’t require him to wait as long for his next chance at a Manhattan fare. With cabbies hurting for fares, how difficult is it for them to illegally bypass someone with their arm raised in the street? I’ll examine that particular phenomenon in the next column.