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.

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 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.

Meanwhile, At The Hess Station...

You've never seen a gas station like the Hess Station at 45th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan. With twenty-four pumps, it is the biggest in New York City. And the very fact that it even exists on the island of Manhattan gives it the distinction of being part of a vanishing breed. Like record stores and men who smoke pipes, gas stations in Manhattan are on the verge of extinction.

Well, perhaps I should qualify that by saying "south of 96th Street in Manhattan". If you're not familiar with the demographics of the city, let me explain. When you think of "New York City" - the business and cultural capital of the world (some say) and the kind of people who make it so - you're thinking of Manhattan below 96th Street. Above that you have the sections known as Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood. These are neighborhoods which could just as well be in any of the other four boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx) of New York City. They have their own characteristics, good and bad, but they don't have the same flair, energy, or pizazz as Manhattan south of 96th Street.

What's been happening over the last dozen years or so is that real estate developers have been offering the owners of gas stations so many millions of dollars for the purchase of their tiny plots of land that they'd be fools to turn them down. Up goes the thirty-five story luxury high rise with a pool and a spa on the twenty-ninth floor and into memory goes the Gaseteria. In fact, south of 96th Street - a place where 13,287 yellow cabs must fill up their tanks twice a day and hundreds of thousands of other cars and trucks clog the streets - I can count only eleven gas stations still in existence. At the same time, I can count eleven others that have disappeared in the last five years. It's quite common for a motorist to pull up next to me at a red light, roll down his window, and beg me to give him the answer to this desperate question: "Hey, buddy, can you tell me where there's a gas station around here???"

So you can imagine the kind of business those few gas stations which are still around are doing, and none are busier than the Hess Station at 45th and 10th. Five o'clock is when the shift changes for most cabs and this station is in an area where there are several taxi garages, including my own, so you've got an invasion of yellow taxis all zeroing in on the Hess Station at around this time. Picture this scene: every pump taken by a cab or an occasional private car, two or three cabs waiting in line behind the cabs that are already at a pump, more cabs waiting behind them out on the street, a few cars trying to circle the station in order to find a hoped-for empty spot, drivers waiting on line to pay for their gas or to get their change, night shift drivers walking around looking for their cabs, horns honking, people yelling, tempers flaring.

Chaos.

It's so bad that they actually have speed bumps surrounding the station - when have you ever seen a gas station with speed bumps? - and they need a couple of employees out there directing traffic to try to keep order.

"Yo, you're behind 7N86!"

"What??"

"Get behind 7N86!"

"That motherfucker cut in front of me!"

"I don't care, you're behind him now!"

"Hey, fuck you, man!"

"I don't wanna hear your shit, man, just get behind him!"

And on like that. I am quite used to it, of course, and barely pay attention to the craziness surrounding me as I walk around the place looking for the the cab I myself will be taking out on the streets for the next twelve hours. A couple of weeks ago, however, as I was performing this daily ritual, something odd suddenly caught my eye: a pair of legs sticking out from under the opened front door of an unmoving taxi.



I walked around to see what was going on and found a cab driver lying flat on the pavement, face up, eyes open, and not in any apparent pain. He was just lying there. And what was equally strange was that no one was attending to him. You'd think that when someone is lying flat on his back in the middle of a gas station with cars in motion all around him somebody would be trying to assist him. But, no.



I walked over to another cab driver who looked like he knew what was going on.

"What's with this guy?" I asked.

"He's full of shit," he replied.

"Why, what happened?"

"Trying to say the guy hit him. But he just fell down on his own. I saw it."

"Which guy?"

"Him."

I looked over to the person he was indicating, an employee of the Hess Station who was in an animated conversation with another employee who I knew from prior acquaintance to be the supervisor of the place. He seemed to be explaining to her what had happened and she seemed to be believing what he was saying as she, too, wasn't showing any signs of believing that the guy might actually be injured and in need of assistance. Looking back at the guy lying there, I noticed that he was now talking to someone on his cell phone.



The whole thing was comical. I mean, here was this super-busy gas station with cars moving all around all over the place and there's this guy lying flat on his back in the middle of the whole thing talking on his cell phone! And no one is paying any attention to him. It was like one of those What's Wrong With This Picture? things. A farce.

Seeing it as a fraud-in-progress, I, too, felt no impulse to do anything to help the guy and went off looking for my own taxi d'noir, 2K53, with a smile on my face. A couple of minutes later, not finding my cab, I checked back in on the scene. By this time the cops had arrived and, being cops, were all serious and trying to understand what was going on. A female officer was trying to get the cab driver to his feet.



However, he was apparently a helpless slab of meat who couldn't move his legs and she couldn't hold up the weight of his body, so she lowered him back down to the pavement. Another cop was shouting out to no one in particular, "Did anyone see what happened?" Nobody came forward. "No one saw anything," the cop barked out, again at no one in particular, with a touch of disgust in his voice.



I came forward. "A cab driver told me he saw what happened," I offered. "He said the guy was faking it. I don't see him around, though."

"That's hearsay!" the cop growled at me. Then he turned his back and walked away.

Well, excuse me. He was right, of course, but what about that "courtesy" thing? I shrugged it off and resumed my search for 2K53 and, just as the ambulance, lights ablaze and siren blaring, was arriving, I spotted it coming down 44th Street. The day driver told me that, fortunately, he'd already filled the tank at another gas station, so all I had to do was get in and drive away, which I did. This was lucky because, with all this madness at the Hess Station, it was going to take half an hour to get in and out of the place. I drove 2K53 up to 46th and 10th, did ten minutes of clean-up, and set off for my night's adventures.



The next day I was back at the Hess Station at shift change time and was curious, of course, to know what had happened, especially if the cops had arrested the station's employee. So when I spotted him standing around I asked him exactly how the whole thing had gone down. He told me his version of the story, which I found completely believable.

He had yelled at the cab driver, he said, to move his cab behind some other vehicle in the station. The cabbie, probably tired and irritable after a long day in New York City traffic, took offense to the way he was being spoken to and stepped out of his cab to scream back at him. He then "got in the face" of the Hess Station guy and, in retaliation to the cabbie's too-closeness, the Hess Station guy lightly pushed him back. In response to his being lightly touched on the chest, the cabbie collapsed in a heap on the pavement, thus setting off the much ado.

"So were you arrested?" I asked.

He had not been. The paramedics could find nothing wrong with the driver, he said, so the cops saw no reason to make an arrest. And that was it. The driver miraculously regained his ability to walk and drive a cab and he drove away. The EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) drove away in their ambulance. And the cops drove away in their cruisers.

Someday I'm going to write a screenplay.

It will be a comedy.

It's going to be called Welcome To New York City.

And this will be the first scene in the movie.

********

Then again, maybe I'll just call it Click Here For Pictures From A Taxi.

The Heat Is On

There are certain people who, when you see them coming toward you, you're thinking, "Oh, please, don't get in my cab. Just keep on walking, don't stop, keep going. whatever you do, don't open the door, don't do that!" And then, as they do open the door, it's "Oh, shit." Because you already know they're going to be trouble and now your job description has been changed from "taxi driver" to "trouble-person-handler".

I had a character like that a couple of weeks ago on a Friday night at around midnight at 31st and 8th, just south of Penn Station. He lumbered toward me as I was waiting at a red light doing the semi-coherent shuffle - one foot forward, one foot to the left, one foot forward, one foot to the right - and came to a landing on my right rear door, which he proceeded to open a bit too slowly. He plopped himself down on the back seat and I was stuck with him.

He was in his early thirties, I would say, and seemed to be a mix of ethnicities. Maybe a little Hispanic, maybe a little Italian, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, it was hard to tell. He wore the black leather jacket of someone who might have signed up for membership in the rough side of town, like he could belong to a gang, but you couldn't be sure. His black hair was shaved in some areas and was long in others, very I've-gotta-be-me, probably the product of some East Village hair styling Picasso.

Most people, when they enter a taxi, they tell the driver where they want to go, but this guy just sat there as the rear of the taxi filled up with smoke from the cigarette he held in his hand. With some passengers a lit cigarette, currently forbidden by the nanny state, would be the subject of some negotiation as to whether or not it could stay or go. With this guy I knew instinctively that a hard line was the right approach.

"No cigarettes in the cab, sir," I said, not leaving room for discussion.

He tossed it out the window without protest. That was easier than I thought it would be.

"Where are you heading?"

Four seconds, five seconds... no reply.

"Where are you going?"

And then, in a voice barely audible, "one sisteen."

"Sorry, what?"

Slightly louder, "one sisteen."

"116th Street? 116th and what?"

Three seconds, four seconds... "Amsherram."

"Sorry, what? 116th and what?"

"Amsherram."

"Amsterdam?"

Three seconds... "Yeah." And then this: "I got plenny-a money, man," and he pulled out a wad of bills and held it up so I could see for myself in the mirror. I pulled out into the traffic on 8th Avenue and headed uptown.

Now, there are three things you worry about with passengers like this. First, he may be so stoned out that he's unaware of whether or not he has enough, or even any, cash in one of his pockets and then, when you get him to his destination, the new game is, "Let's Find Your Money". But the guy obviously had enough money, so that was not an issue, and that was good. Second, does the passenger really know where he wants to go? You get him there and then he announces that this isn't where he wants to be and he accuses you of "taking him for a ride". And third, is he a vomit candidate?

I looked him over carefully in the mirror and decided that, although it wasn't out of the realm of possibility, he was not likely to throw up. Pukers are almost always drunks. They usually display their condition by slumping over to one side, often winding up horizontally on the seat, and the alarm goes off for the driver when he realizes he can no longer see them in the mirror. This guy didn't do that. He remained upright and, although his head would droop forward, I didn't think he'd been drinking. I did think he was stoned and in a daze from whatever drug he'd been taking, but he didn't strike me as someone who was about to part with his dinner. So that was also good.

Whether or not he really knew where he wanted to go remained to be seen. Now that I had a destination, I put my attention on navigation and made a left on 33rd and shot over to 10th Avenue, which changes its name to Amsterdam when you cross 59th Street. So we were on our way. For the next forty blocks or so the ride was uneventful. He seemed semi-okay. He was on his cell phone and was mumbling with someone who must have been able to understand what he was saying, although from what I could hear, it sounded unintelligible. When we reached 79th Street, he mumbled something in my direction.

"A hunriddafor," was what I heard, or something like it.

"Sorry, what?"

Three seconds, four seconds, and then, softly, "A hun'red." Three more seconds, and then, "An' four."

"A hundred and fourth street?"

He grunted agreement.

We continued up Amsterdam and arrived at our new destination in about three minutes. I pulled up on the right side of the avenue and stopped.

"Argunmuggawishkeygumma," he garbled, or some such sound that was completely undecipherable. I looked at him wearily in the mirror, having gotten to the point where I was just sick of dealing with the guy. Realizing I couldn't understand a word he was saying, he tried sign language and pointed to the right to indicate that he wanted me to make a right turn and continue driving toward Columbus Avenue. I complied. We drove slowly across 104th and finally, just before the end of the block, he made another sound that meant that I should stop the cab. I did so.

The fare was $12.70. He reached for his wad of cash and handed me two bills. One was a ten and the other... whoa, the other was a hundred dollar bill.

For a taxi driver, this is a moment of truth. Here is a passenger who is ripe for the taking. Semi-coherent, drugged-up, a dumb-looking thug with a fistful of money - it would be easy to take advantage of him. I held the two bills up so he could see them through the partition.

"Sir," I said, "you gave me a ten and a hundred."

He made some sounds and a gesture that meant that I should return the bills to him, which I did. He then handed me a twenty.

"Out of twenty," I said, and started to count out the difference from my own money. Before I could give it to him, however, he opened the door and told me to keep the change in words I could actually understand. This was a great tip and I said "thank you" at above normal decibel level to be sure he could hear me. He then closed the door and disappeared into the darkness of Columbus Avenue.

I turned the corner and my honesty was rewarded by an immediate fare of three kids from Spain who were en route to Times Square. You don't really expect to get another fare until you are back in Midtown, a ten minute hike, so it was like money found. The Spanish kids were tourists who were all agog at finally being in the Promised Land of New York City, a dream come true for them. We had a lively run downtown and when I dropped them off at 47th and 7th I was feeling a bit exuberant myself, except for one thing.

There was something about that last ride that was keeping my attention on it.

As I started driving around Times Square looking for my next fare, I reviewed everything that had happened with that guy. For one thing, the amount of smoke coming from his mouth just after he go in the cab was abnormally huge. When people enter a taxi with a cigarette burning (a rarity today) the entire back area never fills up with smoke within five seconds. People know you're not supposed to smoke in a cab, but this guy made it obvious. And when I'd told him to put it out, he suddenly didn't seem particularly semi-coherent as he complied immediately without protest. That was an outpoint. It didn't fit.

Then, although he couldn't coherently tell me where he wanted to go, he didn't have any trouble showing me all the money he was carrying. The only time a passenger shows you his money without being asked to do so is when he is an inner-city guy who is going to the ghetto and wants to assure you that he's not going to rip you off. People who are so stoned that they can't pronounce the name of the street they want to go to don't have the mental acuity to offer you assurance by showing you their cash. It was another outpoint.

Finally, at the end of the ride he had held up the two bills separately in his hand, so it would be easy to see what they were. Usually when a bill is mistakenly rendered by a passenger, the mistake is hidden by the other bills that surround it. In this case it was glaringly obvious that he was overpaying. It was also an oddity.

I drove around for awhile running the incident over in my mind. And then it hit me.

That guy had been a cop!

The Taxi and Limousine Commission or the Police Department will occasionally send out decoys to test the integrity of taxi drivers. Many years ago I had a middle-aged, conservatively dressed African-American man hail me in Midtown and direct me to drive up to Harlem. I went a block in the right direction and he then identified himself as a TLC inspector. I had passed the test and was actually given a receipt to prove it. So these things are done, particularly after something has hit the fan in the industry. And, indeed, something had hit the fan a few days prior to this ride.

The news had been widely reported that out of approximately 44,000 taxi drivers in New York City, about 30,000 of them had been ripping off passengers by hitting a button on the meter that automatically adds an out-of-town charge to the fare. This was according to the GPS tracking mechanisms that are now installed in every cab in the city. It was an astoundingly large number of drivers and the TLC chairman and other city officials were duly upset at the revelation.

So the heat is on. This was further borne out by stories I began to hear from other taxi drivers of tickets being handed out for offenses that are normally overlooked, such as failure to signal a lane change or discharging a passenger more than twelve inches from the curb. Also there were stories of other set-ups, such as decoy cops hailing New York cabs on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel in Hoboken to see if the driver will pick them up (a no-no since New York cabs can only pick up passengers within the city limits).

It was later reported that this initial report of widespread overcharging had been grossly exaggerated, by the way. Most of the instances of the out of town button being wrongly hit on the meter have turned out to be mistakes, and the number of cabbies who had done it repeatedly was closer to 3,000 not 30,000. Still, that is unacceptable as there is no excuse to ever rip off a customer and this sort of thing gives honest drivers a bad name.

So we'll see if the heat gets turned off.

********

Rumor has it that another way of getting the heat off is to click here for Pictures From A Taxi. Just a rumor, of course.

Inside "Taxicab Confessions"

As I walked out of my taxi garage one evening last June to start my shift, a smiling young lady approached me and handed me this flier:

I immediately called and was given an appointment for an interview.

Thus I was able to get my foot in the door of the famous American television program, "Taxicab Confessions". I've long been a fan of this show and I'll admit it's been a dream of mine to be one of their drivers. If you're not familiar with it, click here. What they do is equip a real taxicab with several hidden cameras and microphones and record conversations between passengers and drivers. Passengers are unaware that what's been going on in the cab - often things that reveal their innermost thoughts, problems, and realities - has been recorded and are asked at the end of the ride to sign a release form, allowing HBO (Home Box Office, an American cable tv station) to use the material for broadcasting. If they sign, it may get on the air. If they don't, it won't.

This show started in 1995, and due to its popularity it has actually become a little part of the experience of driving a cab in New York City. A passenger will sometimes be having an in-depth conversation with me and then suddenly pause and say, "Hey, this isn't Taxicab Confessions, is it?" Of course, it isn't. But sometimes it is. One night a passenger told me he'd once actually been in the Taxicab Confessions taxi and had spilled his guts out about his sexual proclivities to his driver. But he wouldn't sign the release. "I don't want the world to know about that shit," he said to me... "especially my wife!"

I will occasionally refer to the show when the moment presents itself. For instance, a young man once told me that when he'd been an undergrad at Columbia University he not only was a student, but he also had a little business of manufacturing fake New Jersey driver's licenses and selling them to underage students so they could get into bars, a felony for which, if he'd been caught, could have sent him to jail and ruined whatever he was planning to do when he graduated from the prestigious and ultra-expensive university.

"Wow," I said, "now that's a 'taxicab confession'!"

Another time I had a group of four half-drunk, twenty-something man-boys on board en route to the next whiskey bar. The guy sitting up front with me was explaining his modus operandi for picking up girls for all to hear. What he does, he bragged, is simply to approach girls in the bar one by one and ask them point blank if they'd like to come to his place with him to have sex. No chit-chat, no lines, and especially no buying them drinks. "Twenty-nine will tell me to go fuck myself," he said, "but the thirtieth one will say 'yes'." A lively discussion ensued concerning the pros and cons of such an approach and what the odds actually were. At the end of the ride, as I was being paid, I asked these guys if they'd ever heard of a show called "Taxicab Confessions"? Their jaws dropped and they started rollicking around like the alcohol-soaked glee club that they were. "Are you shitting us, man? Are we on that show?" they howled, obviously hoping it was so. "No, sorry, you're not," I replied, "but you could have been!"

Now, I am the kind of person who likes to categorize data. I enjoy it when someone asks me to name my top ten movies of all time, or to list my favorite pizzerias, or whatever. I suppose that theoretically, at least, there could be a list of the "best taxicab confessions" I have ever had in my cab. And if there was such a list, I know immediately what confession would be at the top. Not because the confession itself was so outrageous, but because it was uniquely in a sub-category of its own. It was a gourmet item, a connoisseur's treasure.

It was a taxicab confession about a Taxicab Confession. And to put the cherry on it, it came from a celebrity. For fear of being sued, I'm not going to name this celebrity, but here's the story, anyway, the short version.

Quite a few years ago there was an episode of Taxicab Confessions, taped in Las Vegas, in which a young man and a young woman were in the back seat making out while the driver tried to find out who they were and what they were up to. It was obvious that they were really into each other - in fact you might say that she was ga-ga about this dude and that he was goo-goo about this doll. As the driver kept prying, we learned that the young man was a member of a certain rock band and that the girl, who had just been in attendance at one of their concerts, had more or less been plucked from the audience by this guy. So they really had known each other for only about an hour and yet they were on their way to a hotel, presumably to consummate their acquaintanceship. When the driver revealed to them at the end of the ride that they were being videotaped by Taxicab Confessions, the young man eagerly signed the release form, exclaiming that it was his favorite show.

Fast forward a couple of years to the year 2002, as I recall. Quite late one night I picked up two thirty-something guys in Hell's Kitchen and started driving them to their destination, the Soho Grand Hotel, about a 15 minute ride. One of them was quite friendly and conversational, which opened the door for me to begin a Taxicab Confessions-type interrogation. Knowing that they were en route to a hotel told me that they were not New Yorkers, so I asked why they were in town. The talkative one said he was doing some recording. In fact, they were just coming from the recording studio. That made it easy for me to ask him who he was, and he told me his name and the name of his band.

Bingo! It was the same band as the guy who had been in that episode of Taxicab Confessions a couple of years earlier. "Oh," I said with considerable interest, "you're in that band?" He replied, correcting me, that he wasn't just in that band, he was the main man of that band, the lead singer and the songwriter.

Years of experience have given me a good sense of what I can get away with with certain types of passengers, and I knew I could have some fun with this guy. I immediately went into my imitation of a John Belushi sketch character from the early days of Saturday Night Live.

"Well, EXCUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!" I squealed, mocking him. "Excuuuuse me! I did not know! You're not just in the band, you're the main man in the band! Excuuuuuse meeeee!"

He took it well. Both he and the fellow sitting next to him (who turned out to be his bodyguard and never said a word through the whole ride), laughed at the well-deserved ribbing which, in its own way, created some rapport between us. The conversation continued. I told him that, probably because I haven't been keeping up with rock bands since the Beatles broke up, I wasn't familiar with his music or with his group except for one thing: that time a member of his band was on Taxicab Confessions.

"Oh, yeah, that," he said disdainfully.

"What do you mean?"

"That guy got himself fired because of that," he said. "I hope he enjoyed his five hundred dollars."

This was shocking to me. Why would this guy have been fired because of that? Was it because plucking pretty girls out of the audience was considered to be bad public relations? Hell, that was the kind of behavior we expect from rock bands. That would be good public relations. But his answer was something I never would have thought of.

It was because, he said, the guy wasn't really in the band. He was a hired back-up musician who was touring with the band but, by his statements and by signing the release form, he represented himself on national television as being "in" the band, something he actually was not. The five hundred dollars is what Taxicab Confessions pays people whose material is actually used by the show.

I continued to give my rock star more good-natured ribbing about what a mean guy he must be to have fired the poor fellow just because of this. I reminded him that I never would have recognized the name of his band if it hadn't been for that episode.

"Oh, he's all right," he replied. "He wound up with Fiona Apple."

So there it was. A taxicab confession about a Taxicab Confession. Gourmet, indeed!

With all my years of experience and with my knowledge of and affinity for the show, I felt I had a decent shot at being chosen to be a Taxicab Confessions driver. So a few days later, at the appointed time, I showed up at an office in Chelsea with my friend Annie at my side for support. I was greeted by a staffer who provided me with a bottle of water to offset the effects of the hot afternoon, and explained what would be happening. First, there was a questionnaire to be filled out about my experiences as a taxi driver. And then I would be miked up and interviewed on camera by Harry Gantz, who along with his brother Joe is one of the co-creators of the show.

Harry Gantz

The whole thing took about half an hour and was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Here, finally, was a place where I had a resume. Harry Gantz, as you might expect from someone who does Taxicab Confessions for a living, is friendly, inquisitive, and easy to talk to. Plus he looks a little like Fred Astaire, don't you think?

Being inquisitive myself, I found out quite a bit about how they do the show. Since here you are reading a taxi driver's blog, I thought you might find this of interest:

1) First of all, the show is for real. The passengers you see in the back seat are not set up in any way. They are indeed picked up off the street, always very late at night, with no knowledge that they're about to participate in a television documentary.

2) The taxi drivers are not actors, they're licensed cabbies. We had to bring our hack licenses with us to the interview to prove that we were the real thing.

3) In order to get material that would be useful for the show, the drivers tend to be unabashedly prying. They are helped in this endeavor by a director who is in a van that follows the Taxicab Confessions taxi wherever it goes. The driver is connected to the director via an earpiece through which he receives suggestions as to how to steer the conversation (steering the taxi he does on his own). If you ever watch an episode in which the driver has short hair, look carefully at his left ear. You will see the earpiece. The director has a tv monitor in the van and can see and hear everything that is going on.

4) Although the show is for real, there are two things about the way it's done that could give passengers an idea that something is going on. First, there is a large interior light inside the taxi that is always on. This isn't the normal dome light that all cabs are equipped with. It's a narrow, custom-made lamp that extends halfway across the interior of the cab, just above the windshield on the passenger's side. It's there to provide sufficient illumination for the hidden cameras. Second, the taxi moves at an extraordinarily slow pace. I've seen it several times on the street and I could always spot it because it goes at about half the speed of all the other vehicles on the road. The reasons for this are that if the taxi gets too far away from the van, they lose contact with each other and, probably more importantly, one of the problems they have is that sometimes a "good ride" (one that is providing potentially usable material) ends too soon. So they drive slowly in an attempt to get more stuff that might make it onto the air.

5) They go through an enormous amount of footage that they don't use. Either the material isn't good enough or the passenger won't sign.

6) The drivers who are initially chosen go through a filtering process in which they drive around in the cabs they normally use (not the Taxicab Confessions cab) with hidden microphones in place and suggestions being given by the director in the van, but without any television cameras set up. If they make it past this stage, these drivers are then used for real.

Now, I wish I could end this post by telling you that I was chosen and can be seen in an upcoming Taxicab Confessions show, but unfortunately I never got the call. I wasn't given a reason for this, but I can't help but wonder if my problem wasn't my gender. The flier I was initially given actually encourages female drivers to apply, and, if you've watched the show, you will have noticed that a disproportionate number of the drivers are women. I say "disproportionate" because the rarest kind of taxi driver in New York is a female taxi driver. You could watch cabs go by on the street all day and never see one. Yet, on Taxicab Confessions, at least half of the episodes have female cabbies behind the wheel.

So, Harry, listen up. You were probably too embarrassed to ask me to do this, but you shouldn't have been. Of course I'd be willing to cross-dress to do the show.

You've got my card. Give me a call!

********

But before you do, click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Taxi Driver Cop, Part Two

If you've been reading this blog for awhile you know that I'm big on the karma vs. coincidence thing. I'm not an extremist - I do think there's such a thing as coincidence. Let's say an asteroid has been on a collision course with Earth for a billion years and it comes down on YOU. That's a coincidence. But if you've been playing a favorite song in your head for an half an hour and then the person who sings that song from out of nowhere suddenly gets in your cab, that's karma. It's a your universe being senior to the physical universe or the universes of others thing. There's an energy involved.

So what happened merely 30 minutes after my pathetic attempt to be a taxi driver cop with the fake cab (see my last post) cannot be written off as coincidence. Karma, baby!

It was a bit after 4 in the morning, the time of night when I'm looking for "one more fare" (the shift ends at 5 a.m.). I was cruising up 6th Avenue, approaching 15th Street, when something caught my eye on the right side of the avenue. There was a yellow, medallion taxi stopped in what should be a moving lane and a twenty-something guy standing there with a bicycle on the cab's right side, opposite the driver. I pulled up a bit behind them and stopped, thinking maybe the guy wanted to put his bike in the trunk and for some reason the driver didn't want to do that and maybe I would get the fare for myself. I have no problem putting bicycles in trunks.

But what was happening was actually the beginning of some kind of a confrontation. The guy with the bicycle started screaming at the driver. I couldn't hear what he was saying nor could I even see the driver of the cab. But I could see that for some reason this guy with the bicycle was extremely angry. Right away I decided that I wanted no part of him and locked my doors. I was about to pull away and continue up 6th, but before I could do that, the situation escalated. He started whacking at the taxi's windows with his arm, perhaps trying to break them.

For me - and this is one of the things I like about driving a cab - it was one of those little instantaneous moments of truth. I could drive away. Or I could stay there.

I stayed there.

I had no idea what this guy was so pissed off about, but now it didn't matter to me. He was attacking a taxi and that zone of human activity is mine, so I was on the side of the taxi and its driver. Even so, I had no intention of getting out of my cab and confronting the guy. I just thought that the presence of another yellow cab might act as a deterrent to him.

To the contrary.

He then lifted his bicycle in the air and slammed it against the side of the taxi, breaking the side view mirror off. I'm not sure what category of crime this would fit into - assault with a deadly bicycle? - but it was felony stuff, no doubt. I expected him to then take off, but instead he just stood there and removed his bicycle chain from its prior location, around his neck, and held it in his hand in anticipation of the driver coming out of his cab to attack him, which would have been the all-too-common response to the stimulus. The "thinking" here is that sufficient motivation has been given to warrant a violent reaction, so what he really wants to do, pummel the driver into a paste, could be justified as "self-defense". Psycho.

But, amazingly, the driver did not get out - he just stayed in his cab. The two-wheeled assailant stood there for a quarter of a minute or so and then, deciding that the game was over, walked his bike across 6th Avenue and turned south toward 14th Street when he set foot on the sidewalk. I backed my cab up to the intersection of 14th Street and saw him pick up his bike and begin to walk down the stairs of the subway station there.

The need for justice runs deep in the human psyche. In the relative scale of criminal activity what I had just witnessed was not that big a deal, although it wasn't nothing. Yet I felt something stir deep within that demanded the situation be rectified. Even so, in this society, one is entering a minefield when action is taken. Considerations of physical danger, retribution, lawsuits, lawyers, legal fees, and enormous stress set in the moment one decides to take it upon oneself to do something about it. But there is one thing you can always do, although in these situations it never seems to work.

You can call the cops.

That's what you're supposed to do, right?

So I got out my cell phone and called 911. Inevitably, whenever you dial 911 with a need for immediate assistance, the person on the other end seems to be in no rush at all. I believe it's a game they play. As I tried to communicate the urgency of the situation, the driver of the cab, an Indian fellow, finally emerged from his vehicle, also speaking into a cell phone, and walked toward me. As I explained to him that his assailant had gone down into the subway and that I was calling the cops, the guy suddenly reappeared on the street, bicycle in hand, and began nonchalantly walking down 14th Street toward 7th Avenue. The window of opportunity for having this guy arrested was rapidly disappearing.

What happened next could be described by some as a modern urban miracle. There is an axiom of life in the city that is as unshakable as "you can't fight city hall" and "shit happens". It is this: "you can never find a cop when you need one".

What happened was that, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, I found a cop when I needed one. A cruiser was coming along on 14th Street. I flagged it down, explained the situation to the officers, and they took the Indian driver in their back seat to go hunt for the guy with the bicycle while I kept an eye on his taxi (which he left with the engine running). Within a minute three or four more cruisers arrived on the scene and the guy and his bicycle were under arrest. An officer returned to me to take my name and a statement, thanked me, and said they had all they would need. I wished the Indian driver good luck and was on my way.

The whole incident took about 10 minutes.

And I'm thinking as I zipped up 6th Avenue, still looking for one more fare, wait a minute, this never happens. Some anger management clown with a sense of entitlement in the area of taxi drivers bashes in a cab and then gets arrested?

This never happens!

But it did.

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It kind of makes you want to click here for Pictures From A Taxi, does it not?

Taxi Driver Cop, Part One

Somewhere along the line, many years ago, for some reason I decided that the taxi industry in New York City was "mine". There was enough about it that was a right fit for me to make me not look at its problems as being somebody else's problems. I developed a willingness to be at cause in this particular sector of human activitiy. You could call it a sense of responsibility.

And that's how I became a taxi driver cop.

I find that if I happen to see something very wrong that involves a taxicab on the street, my impulse is to do something about it if I can, within limits. You don't want to put yourself in danger, of course. But if possible, I will act.

And that's what happened last Tuesday night at 3:30 a.m. I was taking a twenty-something female, who'd been working late, to her home in Brooklyn from Midtown. As I glided down Broadway without traffic something caught my eye a couple of blocks north of Houston Street. It was a fake taxi cruising down the avenue just in front of us.

There are a few of these guys out there. They buy themselves a Ford Crown Vic, the vehicle that is the most used as a taxicab in New York, paint it yellow, put a rooflight on top, and do their best to make it look like a legitimate cab. These vehicles may actually be a legal cabs in some other part of New York State, such as Westchester County, but it is totally illegal for them to be used to pick up passengers from the street in the city. That is strictly the province of the New York medallion taxis. (Click here to see my related post, Interview With The Vampire.)

I can tell at a glance when I see one of these guys. Some of the little things that most people wouldn't recognize as outpoints, such as the medallion number or various markings on the cab, are obvious to me.

I pointed the taxi out to my passenger. This would be a good topic of conversation.

"Do you see that cab in front of us?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Would you get into that cab if it stopped for you on the street?"

"Yeah, I guess so, why?"

"That's a fake cab!" I exclaimed with a bit of dramatic emphasis.

"It is?" How can you tell?"

"Well, for one thing, it's a '97 Crown Vic. Cars that old aren't on the streets as taxis anymore. Also, the medallion identification letter is wrong. See how he's got the letter "I" between the other three numbers? We don't use that letter in the medallion identification system."

"Oh, wow!"

She was impressed, but I thought I could do more. We had stopped for a red light and were able to pull right up next to the fake cab. I looked into the compartment and saw that the driver was a white man in his forties. I had never seen this guy before and decided to let him know that I knew what he was up to. Yeah, let him know that he might think he's clever in stealing business from legitimate taxi drivers, but we know what he's doing and he won't get away with it forever. It was Taxi Driver Cop time.

I called over to him through our opened windows.

"Hey!"

He looked over at me, a bit sheepishly I thought, probably wondering if in fact I was an undercover cop. My passenger was taking it all in with great interest and I have to admit that it did cross my mind that this little macho display might be the kind of thing that turned her on, you never know about women.

"I see what you're doing," I barked in accusation. "You'd better not pick anyone up. I'm watching you!"

I don't see the point in making an attempt to be courteous to a person like this. Here's someone who's blatantly stealing business away from cabbies who are playing by the rules. And, what, we don't have enough competition amongst ourselves wihout him? Fuck him.

He looked at me with a kind of blank expression on his face. This was odd, because I'd expect his reaction to be one of either hostility or fear, but if anything he just looked a little confused. And then he spoke.

"We're making a movie!" he said. And he pointed down Broadway to the next block.

I looked down the street. Parked along the curb were several huge movie trailers and some heavy equipment that are used in big-budget productions. This "fake taxicab" was a movie prop!

I looked back at the driver. He looked back at me with an expression on his face that I believe could be interpeted as meaning, "What are you? An idiot?"

I exhibited one of those shit-eating smiles that people are known to put on their faces when they have just made complete jackasses out of themselves.

"Oh," I said... "never mind!"

It took another fifteen minutes to get the passenger to her house in Brooklyn. But somehow it seemed like an hour to me. You know that expression about how time flies when you're having fun? Well, it turns out time crawls when you're having humiliation.

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However, time really flies if you click here for Pictures From A Taxi. Or so I've heard.

How To Get A Taxi Driver To Slow Down

Being that I am perceived by so many to be the last English-speaking, American white guy to be driving a cab in New York City, I have often found myself serving as the default complaint department for the entire taxi industry. And the complaint I hear most often is about a ride from hell in which a cabbie drove 90 miles per hour on a highway, zigzagged between huge trucks, tailgated every vehicle on the road, and yet somehow arrived at the destination without an accident.

Interestingly, whenever I hear this story it is told by the survivor with a big smile on his face. Apparently danger is great fun if you come out alive. Nevertheless, I always ask these two questions:

1) Did you put on your seat belt?

2) Did you ask the driver to slow down?

Invariably the answers I get to both questions are, "Uhhh... noooo... ha-ha-ha-ha."

Now as far as the seat belts are concerned, what can I say, obviously anyone should have put them on when being transported by a maniac, and there's no point in belaboring the point. But it's this other question that intrigues me. What is it that stops a person who clearly feels his life is in danger (which it is) from speaking up?

Well, from what I can best perceive, it's fear. Fear that the comment will further anger the driver and that will make him drive even faster, and then there will be an accident for sure. So people just say a silent prayer and hold on tight to their rosary beads and the hand straps.

These passengers, however, do understand, even if it's just on an instinctive level, that asking a driver to slow down is entering a minefield of taxicab etiquette. The truth is that, although a cabbie routinely receives substandard wages and a lower social status than his job deserves, one thing he always feels he has is his professional pride. Like being insulted by a passenger who gives directions to simple destinations (see my last post), being asked to slow down clearly implies that the driver is deficient in the one thing at which he knows he has superhuman powers: the ability to drive an automobile.

And for the most part, this is true. In New York City, anyone who has been driving a cab for two years or more is very likely to have mastered the craft of controlling a car to a level that is not understood by the average driver. It's an ability not only to be at cause over his own vehicle, but to be able to predict the motion of all other particles in the playing field - cars, buses, police cars, trucks, fire engines, ambulances, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, maniacs on roller blades, pigeons, and dogs - and make adjustments to his own motion without even thinking about it. It can be compared to a pianist whose fingers can play concertos while what he's actually thinking about it is just how much emphasis he should give to a note that is still two minutes away.

Indeed, one of the most treasured compliments ever given to me as a driver was from a passenger in my cab who turned out to be an instructor of racing car drivers. He was aware of the nuances in my driving and commented to me about it. Music to my ears!

But what can you do when the driver you are stuck with appears to be not a maestro but a madman? Aside from calling your family to tell them that you love them, here's the solution:

1) Compliment the driver on his driving skill. I mean, heap it on. Say something like, "You know, I've been watching the way you've been moving through traffic and I gotta tell you, you have awesome driving ability. It's like you're an acrobat in the circus or something. Really amazing."

2) And then say this: "But, listen, I think I ate something a little while ago that's not agreeing with me. I'm feeling like I may get sick. Would it be possible for you to drive a little slower please? "

It will work, I guarantee it. You've removed the pride button and you've given him his own personal reason for cooperating with you. The three most feared things in the life of a taxi driver are death, paralysis, and somebody throwing up in your cab.

The funny thing is, I've been giving this advice to passengers for years and then recently I had a passenger ask me to slow down because she was feeling a little nauseous!

Irony!

But that's what life is like, isn't it?

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And life is also like this: clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi.