New York Taxi Driving Tales Ch. 04

I'm not really a cab driver. I'm just waiting for something better to come along. You know, like death.
-- Judd Hirsh as Alex Rieger in the television show, Taxi.

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Milton Friedman would probably be fascinated by the New York taxi industry as an example of government regulations continually being challenged by market forces. The point of it was always to make money, and customer service often went by the wayside.

Of course, with COVID-19, all aspects of the industry, including the ride-hail side of it, are having a very difficult time. It's not clear what will emerge on the other side of the crisis. I do know that yellow taxis, which used to fill New York streets, are far scarcer now. At one point earlier this summer, 75% of drivers in the city were not working.

I haven't done a lot of research on this; I've depended mostly on my own memory. This is not supposed to be a thesis about the economics of the industry. Yet I've been struck while writing it how complicated the information can get, and I'm sure I've missed some things too.

New York is hard to figure out because there are four major types of for-hire cars out there: yellow cabs, green cabs, car services, and the new ride-hail companies. Each one has its own practices and finances, and it's hard to understand all of the details involved in each one.

The Medallions

As far as I know, the city's first attempt to regulate the number of taxis on the streets occurred in 1937. Before that, there was an abundance of cars in service. The first wave occurred with the rise of the automobile in 1920s. Then, as later, there was a concern that traffic congestion would overwhelm Manhattan streets. I think at one point there were more than 30,000 vehicles on the road,

During the Depression, a lot of unemployed men tried their hand at owning and driving their own taxis. It was decided by the new regulations of 1937 that only cars with "medallions" sold by the city could cruise for passengers and also wait in cab lines by hotels, railroad stations, and later, at the airports.

Somehow, in a move that only a public bureaucracy could understand, exactly 11,787 medallions were sold. These little tin plates were bolted into the front hood.

For decades, there was a distinction made between medallions sold to individual owner-drivers and those sold to fleets. Starting in the 1980s, the economic recovery resulted in a huge run-up in the prices of medallions. Starting at about $10 in the 1930s, the cost of one could go as high as $1.3 million by 2014. I will have more about that at some later point.

Car Services / "Gypsy Cabs"

From the beginning, there were loopholes in the law. Because of New York's sprawling geography, "car services" were allowed to operate. These also had to be licensed and regulated by the Taxi and Limousine Commission (originally the Hack Bureau of the Police Department), plus they had to carry appropriate insurance.

They were not allowed, supposedly, to pick up passengers on the streets or at cab stands. One had to phone in a request for service, and a car was dispatched by radio. One loophole was that there was no limit on their numbers. I believe that ultimately there were 40,000 of them against the nearly 12,000 yellow cabs. For a long while, they hired drivers just like the regular cabs. They mostly operated in The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, although higher-end limo outfits served Manhattan too.

In the late 1960s, a major change occurred. The number of hold-ups and even murders of cab drivers in the outer boroughs scared off the already skimpy yellow car coverage. The car services stepped in and, quite illegally, they began to pick up passengers on the street. There were so many of them around that they provided adequate coverage at most times of the day. I remember that one company had stickers on its cars that said, "We're not yellow; we go anywhere."

They were sometimes referred to as "gypsy cabs," although there were only a few (and there still are) who went completely outlaw and did not register for T.L.C. license plates. In The Bronx, I still see true gypsies at some corners, and the drivers will be standing outside their cars saying, "Taxi, taxi." They are in effect a fifth component of the New York industry.

Beginning in the late 1960s, there was little attempt at enforcement regarding the lack of medallions for car services. I suspect the city's officials, including those in the police department, decided to mostly leave them alone so that they could provide the only taxi service available in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

Today they usually do a combination of radio calls and street pick-ups. The financial deal for the drivers changed too, with most of them now leasing or owning the cars and also having to pay a "base fee" in order to have radio access.

I've found that at times when I have had to call them recently, the price charged will be much more vague than it was when calling in the old days of thirty or forty years ago. There is often a kind of understanding -- or haggling one might call it -- that goes on between the driver and passenger, not the dispatchers as it once was. For some reason, the use of meters was banned for these cars, although I never understood the point of that.

Anyway, they are still out there, but at a reduced level since COVID-19 started. For a while on, say, Fordham Road, they were easily recognized because so many of them were black Lincoln Town Cars. More recently the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord have been popular.

The Green Cars

A big change starting gradually in the 1980s and continuing well into the twenty-first century was the economic improvement of the city and the related boom in tourism.

By the 2010s the yellow cabs dominated most of Manhattan and the airports, and they rarely cruised in the rest of the city. If a yellow car dropped someone off in the outer boroughs, the driver would immediately head back to Manhattan by an expressway because the pickings were so good down there. I always thought that was a waste of time and gasoline, but apparently, that is not how most of the drivers thought of it.

The solution for this was supposed to be the "green cars," which are officially called "borough taxis." This was a weird compromise originally suggested by Mayor Ed Koch but it was finally implemented around 2013.

The idea was to bring the car services back into the fold by selling a special medallion that was good for street pick-ups everywhere except for three exceptions. These were the West Side of Manhattan below 110th Street, the East Side below 96th Street, and at the airports. (I used to see them lined up outside Mount Sinai Hospital in the evening, just three blocks north of the boundary line.

It was decided that these borough taxis would be identified by their lime-green paint jobs. There was a strange compromise in that these green cars could answer radio calls like before as well as having a meter to be used for street hails. I haven't had much experience with them, but I have been on rides where the meter wasn't turned on and the older idea of haggling about the price was in effect.

A few green cars are still around, but they never lived up to the promise of having a completely parallel but legal medallion system. As before, there was no real enforcement, and many of the car services continued to operate without the new type of medallion. Then, soon after, the app-based ride-hail companies like Uber and so forth started to make the whole thing moot.

I haven't used Uber that much myself, but I have been with other people who did use them. It struck me how easy it was to book one even in The Bronx, for decades a stronghold of the regular car services. Uber and such also had a more predictable -- although fluctuating -- price structure compared with the anything-goes policy of the older services.

Paying the Drivers -- The Shifts

I didn't realize this when I was driving in 1978-79, but the pay system I was under was about to change forever.

When I started, I was considered an employee and I got a commission or a percentage of the weekly "bookings." This went up to 49% eventually, minus union dues and a couple of other annoying fees. (The union, then part of the AFL-CIO, was completely toothless. I never met my shop steward, or even knew his name.)

Gasoline was paid for by the company, which was one of the things that was about to change.

Back then, there were day and night shifts that had overlapping hours during the early mornings. The day shift had to begin by 6:00 AM, although one could come in as early as midnight. I did originally start at six every morning, but I eventually began coming in earlier than that on certain days

At the very beginning, in February, 1978, I chose the day shift because it seemed safer than being out after dark. The hard part was finding paying passengers. It was particularly difficult during some times of the day. New York was at a low point economically then and tourism was a small fraction of what it would later become.

There were periods during the weekends, especially when the weather was nice, when the supply of taxis in Manhattan far outstripped the demand. But the weekdays had lulls too, like before the morning rush hour which started to get rolling around 7:30 AM. Then there was another lull of about two hours after the morning rush.

During these slow periods, the only alternative was to wait in a cab line. Among them were The Port Authority Bus Terminal, the two railroad stations (mostly Penn but sometimes Grand Central), or one of the bigger hotels (the New York Hilton was a particularly busy one). On some weekends, during the summer, the line in front of the bus station could stretch down Eighth Avenue for at least three blocks.

The day shift was supposed to end at 3:00 PM when the night shift started. In reality, with over two hundred cars in my fleet to refuel, it took a long time for the midday shift change to occur. It seemed to drag on for a couple of hours, from about 2:00 PM to about four o'clock. Cars would be lined up out the gate and around the block.

The night shift was supposed to end at 6:00 AM, but in practice most of the drivers were back long before that. Thus it was usually easy for incoming day drivers to get assigned a car as soon as they arrived.

Getting out on the night shift wasn't so easy, because there was that long period of waiting around in mid-afternoon for the day-shift cars to come in and get refueled. It was also, in terms of pay, a "dead" time for the drivers. One was present at the garage but not getting any wages from just hanging around.

The big fleets would say in their employment ads, "Large fleet, get right out." For the night shift, that was total bullshit.

It was from this long wait that the idea of the television show Taxi was created. Supposedly it was based on night-shift "characters" at the Dover Garage in Greenwich Village. There was even a 1975 article in New York Magazine titled "Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet" which influenced the show.

Possibly there was some truth to that, but I never saw such in the way of friendships at the two Long Island City companies I worked for. I would be hard put to remember from day to day who my fellow drivers were. For one thing, the employee turnover was constant.

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I realize that I've been going into a lot of detail about the economics of the industry. I'm going to take a break here and try to cover more of that plus some other things in later articles.

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