Why The Medallion Tanked

For several years now the most talked-about topics of conversation with passengers have been Uber and the fate of the once coveted taxi medallion.  How an established commodity selling for as much as 1.3 million dollars in 2013 could drop in value to virtually nothing in the span of a year is quite a story and I find that not only New Yorkers but people from all over the world are often quite interested in it and many are surprisingly knowledgeable about it as well.

And yet I have not encountered a single person who actually understood the true reason for the medallion's decline.  Nor have I read an article that pinpointed exactly what happened.  The assumption is always that Uber showed up and took the passengers away or, according to a recent series of articles in the NY Times, that predatory loans agreed to by unsuspecting drivers were the cause.  (To read these articles click here.  This is outstanding investigative reporting by Times reporter Brian Rosenthal.)

It is true that these are both parts of the story, but they do not identify the primary cause of the medallion's collapse.  What I'm doing in this post is setting the record straight.  

Some History

You may already know about taxi medallions.  If not, here is some information about them:

A medallion is a license -- symbolized by a piece of metal (called the "tin" in the industry) -- attached to the hood of a cab.  It's a license not to drive, but to own one taxicab.

The owner of a medallion may or may not be the driver of the cab.  Most often the driver of a yellow cab in NYC is not the owner.  The owner is more likely to be an investor who either leases the medallion to a middleman (known as a "taxi broker", who in turn sets up a driver with the medallion, a taxicab, and insurance) or the owner of the medallion leases it to the operator of a taxi garage. Taxi garages, also known as "fleets", vary in size.  Some may have only ten or twenty cabs.  Others have hundreds.  There are many taxi garages scattered around New York City, mostly in the boroughs outside of Manhattan.

The medallion system was set up in 1937, during the Great Depression.  In those days all you had to do to get a permit to be in the taxi business in New York was to have a car and pay a $10 annual fee to the city.  The industry was so easy to enter that there were eventually way too many cabs for the amount of business on the streets.  No one could make a living with that much competition.  So the city decided to stop issuing new annual permits (medallions) altogether.  If you didn't renew it you lost it and as a result the only way to become the owner of a taxi medallion was to purchase one from someone who already owned it.  Thus a market was created for the medallion.  Business remained poor for several more years and the number of taxis dwindled from over 30,000 to exactly 11,787, where it stayed until 1996 when the city auctioned off 133 new ones.  After World War II ended in 1945, however, business picked up considerably and the demand for ownership of a medallion steadily increased along with its value, which rose to its peak in 2013 at 1.3 million dollars. 

It should be noted, however, that many thousands of car service vehicles -- far more than the number of medallion cabs -- were added to the streets of the city as time went on.  But only the medallion cabs could legally pick you up by means of the street hail.  All other for-hire vehicles had to be summoned by telephone.

2013

Okay, that should be sufficient history.  Now here's the story.  Why did the medallion drop from $1.3 million to virtually nothing in less than a year?

Let's go back to the year 2013.  Conditions in the NYC taxi industry are pretty much the same as they've been for decades.  There are approximately 13,000 yellow cabs (one cab for each medallion) on the streets, a number that is set by law and does not increase, as noted, except on the rare occasion when new medallions are auctioned off by the city.

The majority of taxi drivers are working out of taxi garages.  Working conditions, as always, are far below the labor standards of most American workplaces.

Drivers must pay leasing fees for twelve-hour shifts -- either a day shift (5 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or a night shift (5 p.m. to 5 a.m.)   They also pay for filling the tank up with gas at the end of the shift.

It takes about five hours of driving time to break even, so you don't start making money for yourself until that point is reached.   You don't have to work the full twelve hours of a shift -- that's okay -- but you still have to pay the full price of the shift.  It's not charged by the hour, or by a percentage of the money from passengers.   It's charged by the shift.

There is no union looking out for the drivers, only a taxi advocacy group called the Taxi Workers Alliance.  They try their best but they are not a real union because they have no clout -- that is, they have no ability to call for and enforce a strike. No one who has any real power to improve your working conditions -- like the mayor, the Taxi and Limousine Commissioners, or the owner of your garage -- is looking out for you.  There is nothing resembling a human resources department in the taxi industry that you'd find in any big business in the United States.

There is no overtime.

There is no health insurance.

There are no sick days.

No paid vacations.

No pension.

No profit sharing (of course).

No bonuses.

Although they pretty much fit the description of "employees", drivers have been deemed "independent contractors" by city law since the early 1980s.  (And there went the concept of "benefits".)

Once you're out on the road you are driving in a kind of perpetual horse race with other taxi drivers to be the first to arrive at people waving their arms in the air.  It's very competitive.  Some cabbies prefer to work the airports and spend a lot of time waiting in lots at LaGuardia or JFK.  Others choose to wait in lines in front of hotels, museums, or clubs.  Most, though, are battling traffic and other taxis on the streets of Manhattan in search of their next customer.

After you have won your prize -- a passenger -- you must provide service to a person sitting a few feet behind your head.  It's not like you're moving cargo.  You've got people -- virtually every type of person imaginable -- to contend with.

You're carrying cash.  Even though about 70% of the payments are made with credit cards, the fact that you are known to have cash could make you the target of a criminal.  You cannot legally refuse service to anyone unless they are "disorderly" or intoxicated and you can be fined heavily or even have your license revoked if you're found guilty of doing these and other offenses by one of the TLC's kangaroo courts.

So it's a dangerous and usually a thankless job.

And yet, even with all these liabilities, there are always plenty of drivers.  The great majority of them are immigrants from third world countries.  Why?  Because as substandard as these working conditions are, they're still a lot better than whatever they had in Bangladesh.  Or Nigeria.  Or Haiti.

Indeed, one problem owners of taxi garages never had was a shortage of drivers. Drivers would tend to come and go, but new ones showing up and old ones returning were always in sufficient supply.  Quite often there were more drivers than there were cabs, which gave the owners of taxi fleets a great advantage.  If they didn't like a driver for whatever reason, they could simply refuse to lease him a cab.  This put drivers in a position of needing to put up with varying degrees of unfairness if they hoped to continue working there.

Dispatchers demanding "tips".

No compensation for lost time if their cab breaks down.

Payment to the garage for accidents which is not returned after insurance compensates the owner.

And so on.

Perhaps the greatest unfairness of all was forcing drivers to accept a "weekly deal". It's better for the owner of a garage to assign one driver to one car and be assured of payment for an entire week than to let drivers work whichever days they preferred.   This meant that even if they took a day off to be with their families they were still paying for the shift for that day.

The point I'm making here is that drivers for decades have been utterly taken for granted.  I mean "utterly", as in completely, totally, absolutely, entirely, thoroughly, in all respects, and to the hilt.

Look at this:

I took this picture in 2009 at my taxi garage.  It pretty much tells the story.  Labor Day is the one day of the year in the USA that is set aside as a national holiday to honor working people.  One driver took it upon himself to write "WE ARE NOT SLAVES" on this insulting notice.

2014 - Uber Arrives

Although according to Wikipedia Uber "went live" in NYC in 2011, it didn't have any impact on the taxi business here until early in 2014.  Then, quite suddenly, everywhere you looked -- on billboards, on TV, on the internet, and especially on the backs of buses -- there were ads from Uber directed not at customers, but at drivers.  Some of these ads were actually offering guarantees of monthly income, something completely unheard of in the history of the taxi industry.

In 2014 Uber pulled off what I would call a military-precision invasion of New York City.  You've got to have several things in place simultaneously for this to be successful.

1. You've got to have a public that has heard of you and has access to you.  There was considerable word of mouth about Uber in the United States from people who traveled to places where Uber had already set up shop.  And by 2014 everyone had a smart phone, so access, of course, was automatic.

2. You've got to be able to provide your service to the public immediately.  If you promote a car service and an app to the general public and then you can't provide a car and a driver, you're finished.  That's what happened to Hailo.

3. You've got to have a business model and all sorts of administrators to put it into action.  This means people, policies, locations, and equipment.  You've got to have the app set up and ready to go without crashing, tech personnel to maintain the app, people to answer phones, people to explain the deal to drivers and get them on the road, managers, lawyers, and staff to run offices.

4. You've got to have a ton of money.  By demonstrating its success in other locations before it arrived in New York, Uber was able to obtain venture capital from major investors.  By June of 2014 they had secured over a billion dollars in funding.

5. And finally, you've got to have a green light from the city you're about to invade. City officials turned a blind eye as Uber was able to add unlimited numbers of for-hire vehicles to the already congested streets of Manhattan.  (By 2018 there were over 100,000.) I think it's safe to assume that the savvy leaders of Uber would not have attempted to enter the world's largest taxi market in the way they did (not with small steps, but with a bang) unless they felt confident that they would not be met with serious opposition from the mayor, the TLC Commissioner, or the City Council.

Meanwhile, At The Taxi Garage

Let's take a look into the world of the taxi garage.  Imagine that you operate a taxi garage and you own or lease a hundred medallions.  That's one hundred cabs, double-shifted.  Two hundred drivers.

If every shift is sold out that means you've got two hundred drivers paying you approximately $125 every day for the use of a cab for twelve hours.  That's a lot of money coming in, but you also have an enormous overhead.  Your expenses include:

--- the cabs themselves which by TLC rules must be replaced every three years.

-- the parts for the cabs which are in constant need of repair.

-- the cost of the garage.  This includes whatever you pay for renting the space if you don't own it, for property tax and insurance if you do own it, the parking lot for the cabs, the equipment you need to maintain the cabs, office machinery and office supplies.

-- insurance for the cabs, over $500 per month per cab.

-- a body shop and its equipment.

-- perhaps a tow truck.

-- personnel, including mechanics and dispatchers.

-- lawyers.

-- accountants.

-- fees paid to the city.

-- and let's not forget the cost of leasing medallions if you don't own them or paying for loans that may be outstanding on the medallions that you do own.

Clearly, it's an expensive proposition to run a taxi garage in New York City.

The Key Question

About a year after the medallion crashed it occurred to me that I didn't know the answer to a very pertinent question about the economics of the taxi business.  I keep up with these things and I was sure I'd never heard the answer to this question in conversation nor had I learned about it from trade magazines or in the media.  So I posed the question to the owner of my taxi garage, a person who has operated a fleet of as many as 240 cabs for thirty years:  

"What percentage of your cabs have to be out on the road for you to break even?"

He answered immediately without needing a moment to think about it.  

"Eighty per cent."

Eighty per cent to break even.  That, ladies and germs, is a great piece of data.

Here's another one: the customers of the owner of a taxi garage are not the passengers who get into his taxis and pay for a ride.  His customers are the drivers who lease his cabs.  His income comes almost entirely from his drivers.  It is of little concern to the garage owner if passengers are happy with their rides or even if his drivers are out on the streets for the full shift and racking up lots of money on the meter.  In fact, it would be fine with him if the drivers don't work the full shift.  It would mean less wear and tear on his cabs.  

The customers of the owner of a taxi garage are his own drivers.  That's where his money comes from.

Why The Medallion Tanked

The medallion did not tank because Uber took the passengers.  Uber certainly took many passengers but not enough so that you couldn't still make a living driving a yellow cab.  I can say this for a fact because I've been driving a yellow cab since 1977 until the present.   It's true that I'm making less than what I was before Uber showed up in 2014, but it's not that much less.  There's still plenty of business for yellow cabs.

And that's because the business model of the medallion cab -- people who live and work in an extremely condensed piece of real estate (Manhattan) step out onto the street, wave a hand in the air, and a yellow car suddenly appears and whisks them away -- is actually competitive with and often better than the app.  I see people all the time standing there waiting for their Uber to show up while available yellow cabs are driving right by them.  The app may have replaced the telephone but it has not replaced the street hail.   

The medallion also didn't tank because several hundred drivers were swindled by predatory lenders.  There are over 40,000 people in New York City who have valid hack licenses.  There were thousands of people who never drove a cab but purchased medallions strictly as investments.  The misfortunes of a relative few could, and should, lead to reforms in the way loans are made and even to compensations to these drivers, but it would not by itself destroy the confidence that so many others still had in the commodity.

The medallion tanked because the drivers defected to Uber.  

They suddenly left the garages, in big numbers, and did not come back.  New drivers considering entering the industry chose Uber instead of yellow.  Old drivers considering returning to the profession decided to give Uber a try instead of taking the old twelve-hour shift deal.  

Drivers, who for so many years were taken for granted, whose working conditions were deplorable, saw the possibility of a better life if they left the garages and went with Uber.  

No more twelve-hour shifts.

No more working for five hours before you break even. 

No more waking at 3 a.m. to get to the taxi garage by 5:00 to start your twelve-hour work day.

No more working all night and not getting to sleep until 7 a.m.

No more dispatchers shaking you down.

No more being turned away because all the cabs are already leased out.

Now you can own and drive your own vehicle.

You can make money even if you drive for just a few hours.

You can arrange your schedule to give you time with your family.

Work when it's busy.

Work whenever you feel like it.

Surge pricing!

Unfortunately, and predictably, this didn't last.  As time went forward Uber (and Lyft), like the owners of taxi garages, showed themselves to be not particularly concerned with the welfares of their drivers. In fact Travis Kalanick, Uber's founder, shamelessly announced that the long-term goal of Uber was to completely do away with their drivers and replace them with self-driving cars!  These companies allowed their market to become saturated with unlimited numbers of drivers and the good times were over.  It was, and still is, actually very similar to the situation which led to the creation of the medallion in 1937.

But in 2014 Uber sure looked great if you were working out of a taxi garage.

At first the drivers began to drop away like weary soldiers disappearing from their ranks on the long march home.  You might wonder whatever happened to so and so who you used to see at the garage every day.  Someone would say out of earshot of the dispatcher that so and so went to Uber.  The word started to get around from these early defectors that they were doing so much better now, making as much money in two or three busy hours as they were making in twelve at the garage.  

I will never forget what I started seeing in September of 2014.  Traditionally summer was always the slowest season for yellow cabs due to so many New Yorkers being out of town on vacation.  Many cabbies took time off in the summer, too -- the only time of the year when they may not have had to worry about losing their weekly deal.  I might see a dozen empty cabs parked on the street in front of my garage in the summer months, whereas at other times of the year there would be perhaps just two or three out there, waiting for repairs.   

But every year right after Labor Day, it would be as if a switch had been turned on. Immediately the business was back, the traffic was worse, the shifts at the garage were selling out, and things were back to normal.  This did not happen in 2014. Instead there were dozens of empty cabs sitting on the street because they did not have drivers.  In fact, the owner of my garage had a new problem -- he had no place to put his cabs.  He had to start paying to keep them in commercial parking lots. 

Driving around the city I saw the same thing.  Every taxi garage with dozens of empty cabs on the streets.  As months went by, nothing changed.  Rows and rows of empty cabs at every taxi garage.  

The days of endless supplies of drivers were over.

This meant that the garages were below their 80% threshold.  They were losing money.

Worse than that, the confidence in the medallion evaporated.  There was no reason to believe that things were ever going to get better.  

This carried over into the taxi broker segment of the industry as well.  As mentioned above, some drivers preferred to lease medallions rather than continue working out of garages.  They'd go to a middleman (the broker) who'd set them up with a medallion (owned by an investor), a taxicab, and insurance.  He'd then guide them through the red tape of the Taxi and Limousine Commission and they'd be in business for themselves.  Part of this arrangement would be for the driver to sign a contract agreeing to continue to lease the medallion for an agreed upon period of time.   

Let's say the driver signed a two-year contract to lease the medallion in November of 2012.  The two years go by; it's now November of 2014.  He sees that all the drivers he knows who went to Uber are doing great, much better than he is.  Is he going to renew his contract to lease that medallion?

No.  He's going to return it to the broker.  See ya later.

Also, getting back to the owners of taxi garages -- they usually own some medallions themselves but they, too, were leasing medallions from investors.  Seeing that they no longer had enough drivers and were losing money, did they renew their leases with the medallion owners?

No.  In order to cut their expenses they reduced the number of cabs in their fleets by returning the medallions they did not own.  My garage shrunk from 240 cabs to 144.

What if you were the person who bought a medallion (or ten) strictly as an investment?  That commodity which had been giving you a great return in the form of a monthly check from a broker or a fleet owner has now been returned to you. There are no drivers to be found and you are getting nothing.  If you owned only one medallion (and one cab) at least you could still make money by driving the thing yourself.  But you can only drive one cab at a time.  And you own ten medallions.

You are screwed.

Supposing you owned a bank or ran a credit union.  Would you still accept the medallion as collateral for a loan?

No.  So the existing medallion owners could not borrow on their own medallions in the hope of riding out the crisis.

Supposing you were someone who had been considering buying a medallion and you understood what was happening. Would you buy a medallion for a million dollars? Would you buy one at any price at all?  No, you would not.  Nor would anyone else.

If no one will buy a medallion, what is it worth?  

Nothing.  

So that is the story.  That is why the medallion tanked.  The engine that was producing the wealth -- the drivers -- galloped out of the stable in the hope of finding a better life.   

It's a story that has a certain karmic appeal to it.

If you kick a horse long enough it will no longer be around to pull your wagon.

Get `Em While They're Hot

What's that?

You still haven't bought my book, Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver?

Well, good news, your holding out is about to pay off, at least if you own a Kindle.   HarperCollins is now offering the ebook edition for a mere $4.99 on Amazon.com. The price had always been $10 and change, so... what a bargain.

Just click here and you're on your way.

Say what?

You need further convincing?

A promotional video or something?

Well all righty, then, here you are:

Driverless Taxis? My Op-Ed in The Guardian

There was an announcement in the worldwide media several days ago that Uber and Volvo have been working together to develop the technology for a driverless taxi and that the first of these cars are already being tested on the streets of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (USA).

Is this the beginning of the end of the profession of Taxi Driver?

I was asked by The Guardian, one of the UK's top newspapers (with an online edition for the US), to write an Op-Ed on this disturbing news...

Click here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/22/driverless-cars-taxis-cabs-uber

The Taxi TV And Me

My God, how I hate these things.

For those who may not know, let me first tell you what the Taxi TV is. It's a television monitor situated in the rear compartment of all yellow and green (outer borough) taxicabs in New York City. It's not, however, a regular TV like you'd have at home. Rather, it consists of pre-programmed information, the majority of it being clips from television talk shows, along with commercials and the occasional public service announcement. The entertainment, the pitches, and the hear-ye-hear-ye's are packaged in continuous loops which the passenger may see and hear twice or even three times during the course of a ride. The driver hears it whenever the meter is turned on, which on the average is 60% of his twelve-hour shift.

The speakers of the Taxi TV are situated about 24 inches behind the driver's head. Not only does the cabbie have no control over its coming on automatically when the meter is engaged, he has no control over the thing's volume. The passenger can, with a tap-tap-tap of his finger, raise the volume to make it suddenly blasting into the driver's ears. He may also turn it off, and many do just that if they can figure out how to accomplish the task. Most, however, simply ignore it while conversing with their riding companions or the driver, texting, or chatting on their phones. Thus the Taxi TV is, more often than not, just "noise".

And if all this weren't enough to make you scream, let me add that it was the city itself (Mayor Bloomberg, in particular) which mandated its presence in all cabs in 2008. It is there primarily to raise advertising revenue for medallion owners and the companies which won the contracts for its installation and maintenance. The drivers don't see a dime - of course!

It is very unpopular with the majority of the taxi-riding public.  And needless to say, the drivers universally hate the thing.

Well, my dislike for the Taxi TV has been welling up in me for all these years.  The only positive thing I can say about it is that it has given me a worthy replacement for my Giuliani rant.  (I had my Giuliani rant perfected to such a point that passengers in my cab, who may have made the mistake of saying something positive about former Mayor Giuliani to me, would have been happy by the end of the ride to sign a petition to have the man tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a pole.  It was a thing of elocutionary beauty.)

A few weeks ago an acorn dropped on my head and the idea occurred to me to make an offer to passengers in my cab to raise awareness of the outrageousness of the presence of a television monitor in a taxicab, or at least of its continuous noise.  I decided to give them a one dollar rebate on the ride if they would just turn off the damned sound.  

It made the New York Post.  

Click here for the link.

Well Worth The Eighteen Bucks

There are certain rides which you suspect will be trouble, but then it turns out there is none. For example, the passenger looks drunk, acts drunk, is drunk, and you’ve got a feeling that any second now this son of a bitch is going to puke in the back seat. But he does not. And that is good. 

But then there are others for which your suspicion is justified - you could see it coming, and indeed it arrives. But at least you can say, “I saw it coming” and give yourself credit for possessing a certain amount of wisdom, even if your wisdom wasn’t of sufficient quantity to have been able to avoid the damned thing in the first place.

Such was the case with a ride I had a couple of months ago, on a frigid Wednesday evening in February. I had taken a fare from Manhattan to Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, at 6:20 - not something a cabbie wants to do at that hour because it likely means going back to “the city” (Manhattan) without a passenger and that is money lost. And although the mantra of the veteran New York City cab driver is supposedly “I don’t go to Brooklyn”, I took the guy without even a hint of complaint - a sign that I may be softening up in my old age.

It was the next ride that was the trouble. Before I could turn around and head back to the Williamsburg Bridge I was hailed at McCarren Park by three teenage boys, dressed in outfits typical of the so-called “inner city”, each about 15, maybe 16 years old. Now here’s a little truism a cabbie learns, usually the hard way, about teenagers and taxicabs in New York City - there are only two situations in which kids between the ages of 13 and 17 ever take taxis without an adult accompanying them. 1) They are “rich kids” from the Park Avenue or 5th Avenue parts of town. 2) It is a Friday or Saturday night and the teenagers are a boy and a girl who are out on a date. The reason: money. Cabs are too expensive for teenagers unless you’re a rich kid or it’s a very special occasion.

Now, I know this, but as mentioned maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, or maybe it’s just that it’s been so long since I’ve had any teenagers in my cab who didn’t fit into one of those two categories that I’ve let my guard down. Whatever the reason, I stopped and let them in, all three in the back seat. Immediately there was this sinking feeling a cabbie gets when he knows he’d made a mistake. I had gone against my instinct, thinking I was doing the right thing by stopping for whomever wanted my services, as per the rules, but now I had a problem on my hands. As soon as they were in my immediate space, danger signals went off on my taxi driver radar. These were not your normal taxi passenger particles, so to speak. They weren’t passing through the filter.

What I do in a situation like this, as I’ve described elsewhere in this blog, I call my “Three Strikes And You're Out System”. Strike One: from your outward characteristics you look to me like potential trouble of one kind or another. I don’t feel comfortable with you in my cab. Strike Two: I also don’t feel comfortable with where in the city you want me to go and the time of day (like late at night) you want me to go there. Well, these three fellows by appearance, age, and demeanor brought me to Strike Two immediately, and when I asked them where they were going the one directly behind the partition next to the right-side door barked out:

“Ridgewood, yo.”

Ouch.

This was further bad news because not only did they want to take me for a long ride in the opposite direction from Manhattan, but Ridgewood is a low-income, not-gentrified part of the city which I don’t really know very well due to the fact that I get so few fares out there. This ride was going to be something like fifteen to twenty dollars on the meter. Three inner-city teenagers paying that much money for a cab ride when they could have taken the subway? Noooo… this particle was definitely not making it through the filter. Still, the procedure of my system is that when you have a Strike Two, what you do is communicate, or try to. Often what looks like something ominous turns out to be not that way at all upon further observation. So I went at it.

“So what street do you want in Ridgewood?” I asked.

“Huh?” the kid on the right-rear grunted.

“Where are you going? What street?”

There was a brief conversation among them. And then, “We don’t know yet,” replied the same kid, who seemed to be a spokesman for the group. “Get on Metropolitan.”

This was a further bad indicator. They’re taking an expensive ride and they’re not sure where they’re going? Two possibilities enter the mind of the taxi driver: maybe they aren’t concerned about spending money on a ride to a vague destination because they have no intention to pay for it. Or, worse, maybe they want to get to a general area and then find a street where it would be a good place to hold you up. I knew I had to determine which possibility it was before we got to Ridgewood - my life could be at stake here. If I decided what they had in mind was just to beat the fare, I would take them. If I was right, all I would lose, really, would be some time. But if I wasn’t sure, I would have to abruptly end the ride in a busy area with lots of people around (hopefully right behind a police car, if I could find one) and through overt or covert means, get them out of the cab. (That’s Strike Three.) So I had a plan. But first I had to continue with my attempt at communication.

The kid in the middle, who I could easily see in the rear-view mirror, was wearing a Yankee cap. I thought this was a good way to start a conversation, so I looked at him in the mirror and asked him if he was a Yankee fan. He seemed surprised that he was being asked a question. After thinking about it for a few seconds he replied, rather flatly, “Yeah.”

“How do you think they’re looking for the new season? Think they’ll make the playoffs?”

The kid pondered this concept - Yankees… playoffs… and finally responded. “Maybe,” was all he said. He wasn’t saying much, but he said something. I took this as a hopeful sign and continued.

“Hey, you know who I had in my cab last summer? Derek Jeter!”

Now for any Yankee fan, or even any baseball fan, this statement should result in a “Wow!” of one sort or another. Derek Jeter, the recently retired superstar of the Yankees, has been the most admired sports figure in New York for the last twenty years. But all it got out of the kid was an even-voiced, “That’s cool.” And nothing more. This was not good.

I was beginning to think I was going to have to get rid of these guys for my own safety when there was an oddly positive development in the ride. They started goofing off with each other. One of them accused another of farting. Then the one who’d been accused yelled up to me, “Hey cab driver, did you fart?” which brought some laughter in the back seat. It was juvenile and disrespectful, but it gave me something with which to calculate their intentions.

In my understanding of human behavior I could not see three teenagers joking around with each other if what was in the back of their minds was to pull out a weapon and rob me. If that had been their intention, they would have been serious, silent, and mean-spirited. I could see that these kids were basically just wiseass teenagers. Still, something was up and I was pretty sure at this point that what was up was that they were going to try to beat the fare. That suspicion wasn’t enough to kick them out of the cab, however, so we continued on.

When we’d gone a couple of miles down Metropolitan Avenue some disagreement arose among them as to where they wanted to go. One kid said turn left, the other said no, turn right, and then there was a whispered conference among them - a development I didn’t like one bit. What was it they didn’t want me to hear? It was a little after seven in the evening and although it was dark there were still plenty of cars and people on the streets, so I still didn’t think they intended to hold me up. But now I wasn’t so sure. I decided that if they directed me to turn into an alley or a dead-end street I would quickly close the partition window on them, lock it, and order them out of the cab. The Plexiglas partition is bullet-proof (it had better be!) and as long as I had an open road in front of me I could take off the moment they stepped out of the cab and be safe, hopefully. To hell with the money.

If, however, they were simply going to try to leave without paying, as I expected, well, I had another plan…

We took a few lefts and rights and wound up on a one-way, residential street. Halfway down the block the kid in the rear-right says, “Okay, stop here.” As I brought the cab slowly to a halt, I noted that the street in front of me was devoid of other vehicles, a good thing. Stopping the cab, I left it in “Drive” with my foot on the brake.

“You’re getting out here?” I asked the group, noticing that there was $18.30 on the meter.

But there was no answer, as such. Instead there was a sudden, loud, rebel yell from both sides of the compartment as the rear doors flew open simultaneously. With grins of joyous complicity on their faces, the two kids who had been sitting next to their own doors jumped out of the cab and began to run away the moment their feet touched ground. Seeing this, I put my own plan into action. Instead of just sitting there and watching them run, I stepped on the gas, hard, while at the same time reaching back, slamming the partition window shut, and locking it. The sudden forward thrust of the cab caused the two rear doors to close on their own. But I wasn’t driving down the street alone. The kid in the Yankee hat who had been sitting between his friends hadn’t been able to get out in time. In an instantaneous reversal of fortune, he was suddenly a prisoner in a moving vehicle.

“Like I didn’t see that coming,” I called back to him while bringing the speed up to about 25 miles per hour. The look of shock on the kid’s face was priceless. I wish I could have taken a picture of it.

“So,” I said in sarcastic cheerfulness as we continued down the street, “let’s find a cop.”

There was panic and confusion in the kid’s eyes. Perhaps he saw his future melting away due to being arrested. Perhaps he could see how he would lose the respect of certain people in his life whom he admired. Or perhaps he could just see himself being picked up at the precinct by his momma, who would give him more than a piece of her mind when she got him home. Whatever it was, he kept it to himself. He didn’t say a word to me.

For my part, I knew I had to keep the taxi moving while looking for a cop. If I brought it to a stop, the kid would certainly bolt. I continued driving down the street for another block with still no other cars in front of me, but then slowed down a bit to make a left turn at an approaching intersection. As I went into the turn, the speed of the cab going down to about fifteen miles per hour, the kid suddenly pushed open the right-rear door and jumped out, rolling over a couple of times onto the pavement just like in a scene from an action movie. Looking back at him through the mirror, I could see him rising to his feet, apparently uninjured. There was an accumulation of snow on the street which may have cushioned his fall.

I kept driving, satisfied that I had won the game. Actually, just the look on the kid’s face was worth the eighteen bucks. In these fare-beating scenarios, it’s not really about the money, anyway. It’s about pride, not letting someone make a jackass out of you. Also it’s about teaching the person a lesson, if possible. Hopefully this kid had a realization along the lines of there being consequences to stupid behavior. Of course in this particular instance, he may have had a realization of a different kind...

...like that he may have a future as a stuntman!

The One Good Thing That Happened To Taxi Drivers After Uber Invaded New York City

Passengers in my cab are always surprised when I tell them there is no taxi drivers’ union in New York City. It is assumed that with all these cabs everywhere you look there must certainly be a union, but there is not. There is a taxi drivers’ advocacy group, the Taxi Workers Alliance, whose leader, Bhairavi Desai, often appears in the media and at meetings of the Taxi and Limousine Commission to try to present the viewpoint of the drivers, but the Taxi Workers Alliance has no clout. This was painfully evident in September of 2007 when Ms. Desai called for a two-day work stoppage to protest the imposition of the high-tech “system” (GPS monitoring, credit card readers, and back seat television screens) upon the taxi industry in New York City. Her call was widely ignored by the drivers who instead opted to avail themselves of the inducement of Mayor Michael Bloomberg to pay her no mind and instead make a bundle on those days because he was allowing drivers to accept multiple passengers and charge by zones.

Although I did observe the work stoppage myself, I was not at all surprised that it fell on its face. The template upon which the taxi industry in New York operates was conceived in 1937, a time of enormous labor unrest in the United States. Intentionally or not, it has turned out to be union-proof. The number of yellow cab medallions was fixed at 11,787; about half of them were owned by numerous taxi fleets scattered around the city and the other half by independent owner-drivers, one taxi for each owner-driver. So with dozens of taxi garages and thousands of independent drivers scattered all over the city, there was no central location where drivers would ever congregate and no place to put a picket line. Attempts to unionize failed and, boy, the weakness that was the result of that failure has been evident ever since.

Just compare the difference in the way taxi drivers and members of the Transit Workers Union (subways and buses) are dealt with by the city when a strike, or even a temporary work stoppage, is threatened. Mayor Bloomberg, as mentioned, simply bribed the taxi drivers to continue working on those two days. In May of 1998 there actually was a one-day work stoppage by taxi drivers, a labor miracle engineered by Ms. Desai, in response to Mayor Guiliani’s sudden imposition of unpopular new rules upon the industry. For that one remarkable day there were virtually no yellow cabs on the streets of the city. The mayor went on television that evening and with a smile on his face said, “The streets were nice and empty today. They should do it more often.” He refused to negotiate and then for the next two years taxi drivers were continuously being pulled over by the police and ticketed for such offenses as wearing sandals or having an entry missing from their trip sheets. Some felt this was not a coincidence.

But should the president of the Transit Workers Union even be overheard at the gym using the word “deadline” in regard to the expiration of contracts with the city, the attitude from the mayor’s office is along the lines of, “Come on over, we can work it out, let’s do lunch.” Negotiations are conducted and deals are made. Why? Because the TWU is a very strong union - it can call a strike for real and cause great trouble not only for the citizens of the city but for the mayor, who will be blamed for letting it happen. That is clout. That is leverage. That is what taxi drivers have never had.

As a result they have been taken utterly for granted by owners of taxi fleets and city officials alike. Due to a steady influx of immigrant labor, garage owners have never had to particularly worry about not having enough cabbies to drive their vehicles, regardless of the working conditions these drivers were required to tolerate. And any newly-elected mayor or recently-appointed Taxi and Limousine Commission chairman soon learned that they can impose any rules they want on taxi drivers and there will be no meaningful opposition to their decrees.

The examples of this could fill a book (hey, there’s an idea!) but I’m going to give you just three, to illustrate the point.

1) After the recession hit in 2008, taxi garages were overflowing with drivers looking for work. Since it’s more convenient and more profitable for fleet owners to lease their cabs out on a weekly, rather than a daily basis, drivers were told they had no choice but to take the weekly deal. This meant a six-day work week for either a day shift (5 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or a night shift (5 p.m. to 5 a.m.). Should a personal situation or an illness or a Hurricane Sandy come along and you needed a few days off, tough, you still had to pay the full weekly lease if you wanted to continue to drive one of that fleet’s cabs.

2) The high-tech “system” was mandated by the Bloomberg administration to be in use in all taxis in January of 2008. It consists of three components: credit card readers, GPS tracking, and a television monitor in the back seat. I will leave the pros and cons of the credit card readers and the GPS tracking for another day - let’s just talk about the television monitor. Here is a glittering example, the gold standard, if you will, of just how taken for granted the taxi drivers have been. When you sit down in the back seat of a New York taxicab, a TV monitor is staring you in the face. When the driver turns on the meter it activates the TV and the canned entertainment begins. Of late this consists of clips taken from talk shows, interspersed with commercials and public-service announcements. What this means to the taxi driver is that for approximately sixty-five percent of his twelve-hour shift (the average percentage of time the meter is on) he will be forced to endure listening to the same jokes and babble over and over and over and over again. Was any kind of survey ever done of how the drivers felt about this? Of course not. Are the drivers even given a piece of the advertising revenue the Taxi TV generates? Uh, why even ask?

Aside from all this, there is a safety issue, as well. The monitor is about twenty-four inches from the driver’s head, so the noise it emits is inescapable. And to make it worse, the volume can be turned up to make it suddenly BLASTING with a quick tap-tap-tap of the passenger’s finger. Now, quite aside from the obvious annoyance this would be to the person who has to put up with it for two-thirds of his or her work day, has it occurred to no one that it is also a distraction to the driver and it therefore makes a ride in a taxi less safe than it would be if the thing simply wasn’t there at all? If anyone would dispute that point, I would invite them to answer this question: how would you like it if that monitor was twenty-four inches behind the head of your airline pilot as he’s bringing your plane in for a landing? Do you think that would be approved by the FAA? Of course not! But in a taxi, it’s okay?

3) And then there is the Nissan NV200 minivan, the so-called “Taxi of Tomorrow”. Forget about the fact that the car is not a hybrid. Forget about the peculiar and troubling deal that Mayor Bloomberg entered the city into which squelches competition in the marketplace by awarding Nissan an exclusive ten-year contract to be the sole manufacturer of all taxicabs in New York City. Let’s just talk about the feature of this vehicle which makes it so horrible that I told the manager of my garage, after driving it for only two shifts, that if he had no other types of cabs to offer me, I will quit: it comes from the manufacturer with a solid Plexiglas partition which cannot be opened. Why is this so bad? Because, although there is an intercom which permits a sentence or two to come through, it nevertheless reduces the chance of an actual conversation between the passenger and the driver to nearly zero. Like hair salons and bars, the taxicab is a business setting in which there is a potential for real human contact. For a driver like myself, this is the essence of the job, and for many New Yorkers - and for nearly all tourists - contact with taxi drivers is an important part of the “New York experience”. The partition which cannot be opened kills that, and it kills tips, too, as a consequence of the enforced disconnection from the driver.

So into this environment enters Uber, the new kid in town. After some initial wrangling the dust settles down and Uber creates a foothold in the taxi community. Its popularity with customers grows. The owners of car services are very worried because the Uber business model of getting a taxi via an app is superior to having to call for one on the phone and wait for it to show up, if it shows up at all. But the fleet owners of the yellow cabs are not worried because the business model of going out on the street and waving your hand is still superior, or at least as good as, ordering a cab via an app. So even with Uber in town, business was going along as usual… until last summer.

That’s when things began to change. And this was the huge, unforeseen consequence which is turning the New York taxi industry upside down: the drivers of the yellow cabs began to defect to Uber. Like weary soldiers who disappear from their units in the middle of the night, the drivers are deserting the fleets, and there is no sign at this point that they will be coming back. At my own garage at least twenty-five percent of the fleet’s two hundred taxis have been standing empty on most days since July.

This is a disaster scenario for the garage owners. It is quite an expensive operation to keep a fleet of taxis on the streets of New York. The owners' only source of revenue is what they receive from the leasing fees of drivers, so if too many cabs stand empty for too long, the fleet owners will be facing bankruptcy. And to make matters worse, the medallion, which had been trading in the vicinity of a million dollars, is in free-fall. It has lost over twenty percent of its value since the drivers began to shift to Uber, and right now it would be difficult, if not impossible, to sell one because potential buyers as well as lenders are shying away. There is no longer confidence in what the future may hold for the value of the medallion nor does anyone know what the bottom will be. This means that even if a fleet owner wanted to liquidate some of his medallions to help cover expenses while he rides the crisis out, he cannot. And the city, too, has suffered. The sale of 2,000 new medallions, which was included in Mayor Bloomberg’s final budget and was expected to bring in a billion dollars, has been suspended indefinitely.

What does this all mean for the drivers of the yellow cabs? It means hallelujah, leverage has arrived at last. It has arrived not through feeble threats of strikes or work stoppages, but through competition for the services of drivers. Now, for the first time ever, fleet owners and city officials will have no choice but to give serious consideration to how their actions affect the lives of the drivers. If they are wise, they will realize it’s not only a matter of whether or not a cabbie can make more money driving for Uber, although that is, of course, an important issue. It’s also about the working conditions of the drivers - the twelve-hour shifts, the six-day work week, the Taxi TV, the removal of choice in the vehicles they can drive, and so on.

Hey, Taxi and Limousine Commission - do you want the drivers to return?

How about doing some surveys?

Find out what's really needed and wanted from the drivers.

And then give them some good reasons to come back.

The Kissing Hail

It’s quite common in New York City to see people kissing each other on the sidewalk, like this:

What’s not common is to see someone hailing a cab while kissing someone. Imagine one of the people in these pictures waving an arm in an attempt to communicate to a taxi driver that his services are required while maintaining the kiss. In Chapter 16 of my book this is referred to as “The Kissing Hail”. It’s a thing of beauty, requiring balance, agility, peripheral vision, upper body strength, and a need to make a train.

I saw one recently in Tribeca at around 10 p.m. as I was driving up Hudson Street in search of my next passenger. I was impressed not only with the inventiveness of the hailer, a young man with an attractive young lady wrapped around him, but with my own ability to see it coming. You see, an alert taxi driver sees people kissing on the sidewalk not only as an urban sideshow, but as a business opportunity.

It comes in two forms:

1. There’s the First Time We’ve Done This kissing. Usually (but not always) seen quite late at night - say, after 11 - it’s what happens after two people have either been out on a date or have met in a bar, have taken a liking to each other, and are bringing the attraction to its next logical step. They will often be propped up against the side of a building, perhaps just off the sidewalk a bit, in an attempt to create their own little space. There’s no separating them. An explosion could go off on the other side of the street and they would continue to stare into each other’s eyes, run their hands gently across each other’s faces, kiss passionately, come up for air, and do it again.

There is no business opportunity here. Just keep driving.

2. But then there’s the Until We Meet Again kissing. Again, two people are embraced in a passionate kiss, but there are subtle differences. They are usually close to the curb. There is no gazing into each others eyes. There are no exploratory caresses. There’s just the tight embrace and the prolonged kiss, as if to say, “I want you to remember that I love you, you mean a lot to me, sorry we now have to part, we’ll be back together again soon.”

When a cabbie sees this, slow down. One of them is about to hail you.

What happened on Hudson Street was that I was cruising along, looking for my next one, but caught a red light at Franklin. As I waited for the light to change I couldn’t help but notice the two people going at each other with some vigor. After fifteen seconds or so of careful observation, I decided they were Until We Meet Again kissers. I was pretty sure one or both would be wanting a taxi, but I had a problem. There was construction taking up half the road and I wouldn’t be able to stop and wait for them to cease osculation without blocking cars behind me. I would have to keep moving when my light turned green.

As more seconds ticked by, tension grew. The light on the Franklin Street side turned yellow. Then red. My light turned green. Damn, why don’t these two stop kissing each other already? I mean, come on, enough! I inched my cab forward, keeping an eye on them. Slowly, slowly, until I heard a car behind me start leaning on his horn (a New York City tradition). And then, just as I was about to step on the gas and forget about them, it happened…

…the Kissing Hail!

Yes, without parting bodies, without unlocking lips, without even looking at the vehicles approaching on Hudson Street, the guy’s hand went out behind his back and started waving! I hit the brakes, pulled over, and brought the cab to an abrupt stop. The cars behind me expressed their displeasure and one driver gave me a little scowl as he squeezed around me, but I didn’t care. This was business. Like a fisherman reeling in his line, I awaited the arrival of my catch.

The young gentleman walked his girlfriend to the cab, gave her a final kiss, and she climbed in. “Make sure she gets home safely,” he said, not so much really a communication to me but a gesture meant to give her one last assurance of his caring about her before they parted for the evening. I thought it was a nice touch.

And off we went on a long ride out to Queens.

The hail was so extraordinary that I felt I should acknowledge its brilliance, even though it wasn’t she who had performed it. So I told her about “The Kissing Hail” and how rare it is to see one and how it’s in a book that I just happen to have on my dashboard and here take a look at page 323 and why yes as a matter of fact I wrote it myself.

My passenger was kind enough to overlook my need for attention and we engaged in one of those conversations that can occur sometimes in a taxicab by which at the end of the ride you feel that you’ve made a new friend.

There’s something about the randomness of that, like the randomness of life itself, that I find so appealing. It’s the reason I’ve stuck with this profession for so many years, if truth be told.

Public Lewd Versus Private Lewd

Quite often during the course of a ride a taxi driver gets to learn - either by being a fly on the wall or through direct conversation - something about a passenger’s interesting story that is still in progress. But then the ride ends, the passenger departs, and the driver is left wondering how the hell it will all turn out.

But of course he never gets to know this.

Well, almost never.

Recently I had a fare with a passenger who had a wild story that she was right smack dab in the middle of. And I did find out how it all turned out…

It started on a Tuesday evening around 8 p.m. when a nice-looking, twenty-something female hailed me in the East Village and said she wanted to go to Garden City. Now, two things were good here: first, I know where that is. It’s a town on Long Island quite near to where I grew up, about a forty-minute ride from Manhattan. And secondly, since it’s an OT (“out-of-town”) job, it’s lucrative.

Cha-ching!

I did some math and came up with $100 as a fair price - mostly fair to me as it’s more than an hour and twenty minutes of my time is worth. She agreed and we were on our way.

“So where in Garden City are we going?” I inquired.

“It’s a lawyer’s office. They’re waiting for me.”

Wow - intriguing! Anyone would have been curious to know what this was all about, but it would have been inappropriate for me to ask. After all, it was none of my business. I was merely providing a service here. If she wanted to tell me about it, she would. If not, not. So we drove on in silence through the Midtown Tunnel and out onto the Long Island Expressway while she stared out the window and I looked the highway.

But it was sitting there in the air between us.

Five more minutes of silence and it was really bothering me. This was so unusual. Could she be a lawyer herself and was going all the way out there to sign some document or something? I suppose, but, looking at her in the mirror, she didn’t have that sort of cocky professional demeanor that lawyers often have, even the female ones. She seemed worried about something, which might be expected if one were in some kind of trouble and the urgency of the situation required a hundred dollar cab ride and lawyers waiting for you in Garden City.

And there was that other thing, too - there was the distinct possibility that I could drive her all the way out there, drop her off, and then realize that not only would I never find out how it had turned out, I would never even know what it had been about. And I knew it was something, and that it just had to be a good one. It just had to be!

So I decided to put aside my professionalism and delve. I told her I was a writer, that I had a blog, even a book, and I knew it was none of my business but I just couldn’t help but be curious to know what was going on, if she didn’t mind. Now she could have just said, sorry, it’s a personal matter that she couldn’t talk about, or some such, but instead she was quite forthright, perhaps even glad to get it off her chest, and told me the story.

It concerned lewd behavior.

Definition: lewd adj. obscene; bawdy; indecent.
(Macmillan Dictionary for Students)


She was a kid from Vermont, whom we shall call Gloria. Her journey to New York City had begun a couple of years earlier when she took a job at a tech start-up company in Vermont and got to know the owner of the company, whom we shall call Jeff. Jeff was a nice young man who owned a particularly cool dog, whom we shall call Arthur. Gloria took an avid interest in Arthur, often dog-sitting for him, and so, in addition to their relationship in the workplace, they had become friendly outside of that environment.

Eventually Gloria left Jeff and Arthur for greener pastures in the Big Apple, taking a new job in a similar tech start-up. Within a year, however, Jeff, seeking greener pastures himself, moved his company to New York City and the two of them began seeing each other again. One night at about 1 a.m. they were seeing each other in Jeff’s car, parked in the busy-at-night Meat Packing District. And as often happens when nice young men and women find themselves alone in a car, they were soon in each other’s arms.

And legs.

Or at least that’s what the cops who saw them thought. In actuality what they had seen was Gloria straddling Jeff in a passionate embrace while kissing. Due to their position, however, it looked like outright public fornication, even though both were fully clothed.

There was a time in New York City when such behavior, even when it really had been outright public fornication, would have been handled with a blast of a siren and some flashing red lights. And then some chuckles as the miscreants scrambled to put their clothes back on. But that was then and this was now, an era when even minor sins must be handled with the full weight of the law, lest the pillars of civilization come tumbling down.

They were ordered out of the car, placed under arrest, handcuffed, charged with “public lewdness”, and driven to the precinct on West 20th Street, about half a mile from the scene of the crime.

Gloria was already shocked and humiliated, but her ordeal had just begun. At the precinct, after being separated from Jeff, she was handcuffed to a pole for two hours. Then she was transferred in a van to another precinct on West 54th Street and placed in a cell by herself. This cell had no running water other than a toilet which, if she used it, would make her fully visible to anyone who walked by. She was spoken to rudely by the police personnel. She was not allowed to call anyone. And for breakfast she was fed an orange soda and a Happy Meal (a taste of station house irony, there). Finally she was arraigned and released the next afternoon at 2 p.m. So making out in Jeff’s car had resulted in thirteen hours of incarceration and a sample of what it’s like to lose one’s freedom and be at the mercy of the police department.

That had been five weeks ago. And now she was in a taxicab heading to Garden City. The reason for the trip, I learned, was that a hearing before a judge was to take place the next day and at the last minute Gloria decided it might be a good idea to hire a private attorney rather than take her chances with a free public defender. It had suddenly dawned on her that a conviction of Public Lewdness might not look great on her resume. Or on the internet. And that getting a dismissal was worth the expense. So she called a friend who recommended her own family’s attorney, but she would have to go out to Garden City immediately to pay $1,500 for the service in advance.

So that’s what it was all about.

We found the attorney’s place, an office building on the periphery of the Roosevelt Field Mall, without too much trouble. I was about to head back to the city when Gloria realized she might have a problem getting back to the city herself, so she asked me to wait. Half an hour later she emerged and off we went to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where she lived. The charge for the taxi ride came to $162, including the waiting time and the tip.

As she departed I told her I was dying to know how this story ended and gave her my card with my email address, asking her to drop me a line. She promised that she would, but I doubted I would ever hear from her. People who take your card rarely get back to you, even if they were sincere at the time. So I was delighted when her email arrived in my inbox a few weeks later.

What had happened? She and Jeff, who used a free public defender, were “put through the system” by their lawyers. Behind closed doors a deal was made by which they agreed to plead guilty to the charge of Public Lewdness and perform six hours of community service, picking up leaves and things in Tompkins Square Park on a Saturday at eight in the morning. They were given what’s called an “A.C.O.D.” (Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal), which means that after six months of “good behavior” the whole thing would be taken off their records, as if it never happened.

So it turned out to be a case of “all’s well that ends well”. No stocks or pillories in the town square. No rotten tomatoes being thrown at one by the outraged citizenry. No scarlet letters.

“Was it worth the expense of driving all the way out there and hiring your own attorney?” I asked.

“A complete waste of money,” Gloria replied. “But at least I get to feel that I’ve contributed to the economy.”

Indeed she did - my economy. That $162 certainly helped make my night.

But my night turned out to be not over regarding the subject of Lewd Behavior. As if being watched over by the gods of Lewd themselves on a break from a Bacchanalian ritual, I was shown that when it comes to this kind of activity there are right ways and there are wrong ways to go about it.

At three in the morning I was hailed by a young lady in tight clothing coming from the Penthouse Club at 45th Street and 11th Avenue who was heading out to Astoria in Queens. She was pleasant and conversational and I soon found out what I already knew: that she was a - what’s the right word? Dancer? Entertainer? Performer? Oh, all right, she was a stripper, okay? Which of course means that she’d just spent the entire evening strutting around naked, or almost naked, and sitting on men’s laps whom she didn’t even know in exchange for money.

Uh, I believe that would be defined as “lewd” according to Mr. Macmillan.

What I didn’t know, but found out from her, was that she didn’t live in Astoria. She was on her way to the apartment of one of the laps she’d been sitting on in the Penthouse Club where, I assumed, some further lewd behavior was about to take place.

So what have we learned? Sit on your lover’s lap in a car, you go to jail and pay a lawyer fifteen hundred bucks to get you off. Sit on a stranger’s lap in the Penthouse Club and he pays you fifteen hundred bucks to come over to his place to get him off.

It’s all about location.

Means Of Exchange

Recently I had one of those iffy passengers who fell right in the middle of the Trouble/No Trouble Line of Demarcation. He might be okay, he might not be okay - I couldn't tell.

He was a twenty-something, medium height, medium weight, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, with a Detroit Tigers baseball cap topping off the package. So he looked all right as I approached him, his hand in the air, on 2nd Avenue up in the Upper East Side. But a moment after I brought the cab to a complete stop I noticed the first sign of trouble. It was a nuance thing, just a little tiny thing only a veteran cabbie would spot: it took him just slightly too long to open the rear door. Normally you stop and there is a one to two second elapse of time before you hear the click of the door handle being lifted. It took this fellow three to four seconds to accomplish that task. If he'd been with other people it wouldn't have appeared on the radar screen as he could have been saying goodnight to his friends, but this guy was alone. Figuring in the additional factors that it was two-thirty in the morning and he was in an area where there is a multitude of bars all still open even though it was a Tuesday, and it translates to the driver as only one thing:

he's drunk.

Now, some of us realize this and drive off immediately. But I'm not as quick as I used to be and, besides, it's dead slow on Tuesday at 2:30 a.m. and if I don't take this guy it could be - who knows? - half an hour before I get another passenger in my cab. And karma being what it is, that next passenger will probably be a drunk, too. So I stayed put and awaited fate. The question now became, how serious would it be with this guy? How drunk was he?

The first thing you have to do is put him through a little coherency test. Is he capable of communication? Can he tell you where he wants to go? Obviously if he can't do this the ride never begins. So you don't start driving or turn on the meter until he clears that hurdle. This guy, although he was taking too long to respond, was not so drunk that he couldn't tell me that 7th Street between Avenues C and D was his destination. So I started moving forward.

"Do you want to take the Drive?" I asked. We would either jump on the FDR Drive, a highway, or head down to Alphabet City on 2nd Avenue. The Drive would be faster.

No answer.

"Take the Drive?" I repeated.

I looked at him in the mirror. Oh, shit, he was slumping over. Immediately the possibility of three bad things presented themselves to me mentally:

a) he may vomit;

b) he may be so out of it that he doesn't realize that he has gotten into a cab and has no way of paying for the ride;

c) he may descend into complete unconsciousness and be unable to be awakened.

And now I was stuck with him. He'd given me an address, he'd closed the door behind him, and we were moving. I could think of nothing to do but hope for the best and take him where he'd said to go.

"I'm taking the Drive," I called out, knowing I was speaking to an inanimate object. I made a left on 79th and within a minute we were on the FDR's 73rd Street entrance ramp at the edge of the East River. The tension was mounting up within me. The biggest fear of the three bad things is a) above. Puke spilling out onto the back seat of the cab is a horror of Stephen King proportions to a taxi driver. But there are ways of trying to handle the vomit candidate and the best of them is to keep him talking. Unfortunately that wasn't possible with this guy. All I could do was get him to his place as quickly as possible in order to reduce his window of opportunity. So I picked up my speed and whispered a little prayer to the Patron Saint of Please Don't Throw Up In My Cab.

I took the long way to the Houston Street exit, knowing he wouldn't object, since it was the fastest way to get him there. In less than five minutes we were off the Drive and cruising up Avenue D toward 7th Street. I made the left there and steeled myself for what was to come - how bad would it be?

"So where should I stop?" I kind of yelled toward the general vicinity of the rear compartment.

Not surprisingly, once again there was no response.

I pulled the cab over to the curb, stopped, and turned around in my seat, fearing I would see the guy covered in vomit. But, hooray, there was none - just a human body lying flat on the seat in marinated slumber. My task now was merely to wake him up, a far better situation than having to clean up the former contents of his esophagus.

"Hey, buddy, we're here, wake up!" I announced.

He stirred slightly. There was hope.

I raised the volume. "Buddy, we're here - WAKE UP!"

He opened his eyes. Good man.

"We're on 7th between C and D," I said in a normal voice. "So where is your building?"

Arousing from his dreams, he looked around at his surroundings. I could see from the expression on his face that he understood that he was in a taxicab and that I was a taxi driver. So of the three possibilities listed above, he'd made it past a) and c). All he had to do now was tell me where exactly he lived and pay me the $16.30 on the meter.

"Where's you building?" I repeated.

He looked a me a bit oddly, not as if he didn't understand the words I was saying but as if he didn't understand why I would want to know. There's a certain stage of drunkenness in which the gears are turning but they don't mesh together and result in forward motion, like a car with a transmission problem.

"Your building - where is it?" I asked again, thinking if I rephrased the question I might get an answer.

"Go downa da cawna," he said, still half-asleep. This was progress. I drove down to Avenue C, made a right at the corner, and pulled into an empty space at the curb. Okay, I'd done my job, now it was time to get paid and be on my way. Time is money in my business. Or at least hopefully it is.

"It's $16.30 on the meter," I said flatly.

Silence.

I looked at him again in the mirror and saw that his head was slumped over on his shoulder and his eyes were closed. The motion of the cab on our little half-block journey to C had rocked him back to sleep. He would have looked cute if he'd been a six-year-old boy.

"It's $16.30," I called to the back in a near yell.

He stirred.

"16.30," I repeated, calmly.

He now understood that it was his job to find either $16.30 or a credit card on his person and he began to move his hands around into various pockets in his clothing in order to accomplish this task. I sensed trouble but gave him the benefit of the doubt in my mind as I awaited payment. Like many drunks he probably had the money but didn't remember where he'd put it.

I waited.

A minute went by.

Turning again to the back seat, I saw that he'd suffered a setback in his mission - he was slumped over again with eyes closed. I would have to take control of the situation. God, how I hated this, you have no idea.

"Buddy, wake up."

He stirred.

"C'mon, it's $16.30 on the meter. You gotta pay me so I can get back to work."

"...yeah...okay..."

Once again, his hands began searching. What was good here was that at least he wasn't trying to be evasive. I had no sense that he was going to try to beat the fare. From this we could progress. I still thought it was a better than even chance that I'd be paid.

So I waited.

Thirty seconds went by, but I could here the sounds of his hands patting himself down. Still hopeful.

Sixty seconds.

Nothing. Time's up.

"What's happening?" I asked in a not-friendly way.

"All I got is two dollars."

"How about a credit card? You have a credit card?"

"Uh... no..."

Damn.

"You mean you got in my cab with two dollars in your pocket and no credit card?"

"uh... well..."

And with that he resumed his search of pockets and any other crevices he could get his hands into. I was pissed but not outraged. Again, I appreciated that he wasn't trying to bullshit me. He wasn't trying to tell me to "wait here while I go get the money" and then of course you never see him again. He wasn't trying to pay with just the two dollars. To the contrary, he was earnestly, albeit drunkenly, trying to find the money which was somehow mysteriously eluding him.

Still, I wanted to get paid. So I decided to do something that has proven to be remarkably effective in similar situations in the past. And that is, to get a cop. It is amazing how often a passenger is suddenly able to find his money when a cop shows up.

Now, New York must be the most policed city in the world. In most areas of Manhattan you can't stand in the same spot for more than two minutes before a police car drives by, even at two in the morning. This can be intimidating if you're a driver and you're worried about being pulled over for some stupid infraction. But it's great if you actually need a cop.

Sure enough, after about a minute and a half of watching in my side view mirror with one eye and and keeping my attention on my passenger in the rear view mirror with the other, I spotted a cruiser coming up slowly behind me on Avenue C. I opened my door, stepped out of the cab, and waved at the cops.

They stopped beside me. As always, there were two in the car. The officer sitting on the right rolled down his window. With that blank, neutral gaze that cops have when they're entering a scene, he asked me with only the expression on his face what was up. I told him the situation: passenger, probably drunk - $16.30 on the meter - two dollars - no credit card. In unison, they stepped out of the patrol car, walked slowly to the rear of the cab, and opened the passenger's door.

"Good evening, sir, the driver says you don't have enough money to pay the fare," one of them said, flatly.

My passenger, replying in a new found coherency, indicated that he was trying to find his money, it must be here somewhere. The cop said okay, find it. After another minute of futile hand motions, Mister Sobering Up Quickly admitted to the cop that all he had was two bucks. And no credit card. The officer suggested that perhaps he could call someone who could come over and pay the fare. And added that if he could not produce the required sixteen dollars and thirty cents that he would be placed under arrest for theft of services.

That will get your attention.

Like a surreal reversal of the hit TV show Cash Cab, my passenger had a shout-out with which to call a friend and beg for help. I could almost hear the sounds of quiz show music in the background as he nervously dialed a number and waited for a connection to come through. And then, good news, his friend was on the line. He told him the situation, adding that he was about to get "fucking arrested" for not being able to pay for a taxi ride. But his face turned from hope to despair as he learned that his would-be saviour was nowhere in the vicinity at the moment and could not help him out.

Perhaps he could call someone else, the cop suggested.

He could not, my passenger replied, since he didn't know anyone else who lived anywhere around here.

The jig was up. Like a condemned man about to walk the plank, he told the officer he was out of options and resigned himself to his fate. The cop who had been standing beside the first cop came over to me and started to take my information for his police report. Meanwhile the first cop was informing my passenger in a formal manner that he was about to be placed under arrest. He had him step out of the cab and place his hands behind his back as a prelude to being handcuffed.

It was an awful scene and I was not pleased with it as I did not perceive my passenger to be an evil person. In fact, I had come to kind of like the guy. I saw him as a basically well-intentioned individual who may or may not have a drinking problem. And I admired him for not trying to insult my own or the cops' intelligence.

Being hauled off in cuffs was way too much of a penalty here. But, on the other hand, I still wanted to get paid. I knew that if he was arrested I would eventually get a phone call from the precinct informing me that I could come down and pick up my $16.30. No one was going to sit in jail for very long before somehow coming up with that relatively paltry sum. I mentally searched for a solution to the problem and after a few moments I found it.

It was sitting on his head.

I turned around in my seat and called over to the about-to-be jailbird. With the first cop's permission he leaned back into the rear compartment to hear what I had to say.

"I'll make you a deal," I proposed. "In exchange for the ride, I'll take your Tiger's cap. Give me the hat and we'll call it even."

You have never seen the word "elation" better expressed than by the look that appeared on my passenger's face. His baseball cap was immediately placed into my possession and both his hands reached forward to embrace my own as he thanked me, thanked me, thanked me from the bottom of his heart.

"The offending party and myself have reached an agreement in this matter," I declared in mock seriousness to the officer standing beside me who'd been filling out his report, "and I consider the situation to be resolved." A slight smile appeared on his face, the only expression of emotion that was made by either of them. He closed his book and walked over to where the first cop was standing, who was already sending my passenger on his way.

And so, that was that. My passenger was released from custody, headed back toward Avenue D on 7th Street, and disappeared into the shadows, hatless. I thanked the cops and they, too, quickly vanished. I was left sitting there on the corner of C and 7th for another minute, filling out the details on my trip sheet and reflecting on what had just gone down. The truth is, it would have been enough of an exchange for me to just have been thanked so profusely like that. But now I had a new hat, to boot.

All I could think was one thing.

Go Tigers!

********

That, and one other thing: click here for Pictures From A Taxi.