When Uber and Lyft arrived on the scene, old-time taxi drivers thought it was just a fad. But I knew things were changing.
By Driver 8
On a typical weekend night in San Francisco, limousines and town cars filled the streets. They’d trawl the downtown districts poaching fares from cab drivers, sometimes even blocking taxis from the entrances of the more expensive restaurants, clubs, and attractions.
Anyone enjoying a night out on the town — unsuspecting tourists, and young professionals alike — would have to run a gauntlet of hawking limo drivers, illegally attempting to lure them into their cars before they could reach the curb and hail a taxi. Falling prey to these opportunists meant paying exorbitant sums for a short ride, long before anyone had heard of “surge pricing.”
The limo drivers’ practices resulted in the occasional fist fight with an angry cabbie, but little more — the cab drivers’ complaints about them were largely ignored by a distracted city, and by the police, who had bigger fish to fry.
Then, a couple of years ago, it seemed as though these limousines, town cars, and black SUVs were multiplying — they were everywhere — and it wasn’t just on weekends anymore.
Something else was different, too. Now they all had a big “U” displayed in their windows.
Soon also, a noticeable amount of people were driving around with ridiculous looking, pink, furry mustaches attached to the front of their cars. They were everywhere you looked. If it was just a humorous trend, nobody let me in on the joke. Eventually, it became clear; the limousines were Ubers, and these mustached cars were people using their personal vehicles for something called Lyft.
As I learned more about them, I’d admonish my passengers from even considering getting into one of those cars. I’d argue to anyone who’d listen, “they’re not insured,” “it’s against the law,” “I had to go to taxi driver school before I could do this job — these guys are untrained,” “they don’t even live here — they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” “if you get in a wreck, there’s no one to sue,” and simply, “those furry pink moustaches are absurd!” But, my arguments failed to persuade. People here were curious, and they were hungry for change.
Whether driving my personal car, just walking down the street, or driving a taxi, every time I saw one of those pink moustaches, I’d flip off the driver. If I had passengers in my cab, I’d let my arm dangle out the window and make sure to obscure my hand from their view as I gave my one-finger-salute. I’d yell, “Scab!” out my window as I passed, which only served to elicit looks of bewilderment.
It wasn’t the behavior of a mature adult, and I now look back on it with discomfort. However, I’m even more embarrassed to confess that I snatched more than one of those giant pink mustaches from the front of a car, and carried it proudly, like a fresh scalp, to the cab yard at the end of my shift. Looking back on it now, if I knew who to apologize to, I would.
The old timers, and the taxi guys with their medallions, they didn’t seem to see the threat posed by these interlopers with the same sense of urgency that I did. After all, they’d lived through the dot-com bust, and they’d survived the 9/11 attacks, which completely shut down air travel and tourism. More recently, they’d even made it through the Great Recession.
To them, this was just a passing fad. It was nothing, and they’d survive this too. It would either fizzle out on its own, or the city would put a stop to it. But, I wasn’t one of these lifers, and I felt like I was under siege.
Like the majority of taxi drivers I was “gas and gate”: I didn’t own a medallion, and instead paid a “gate fee” to the cab company — the daily lease for the use of the taxicab and medallion — and covered the cost of my gas.
Gate fees averaged around $100 per shift, which meant that I started each day in debt — not just for my gas and gate, but for various cash tips to dispatchers, and others too. Sometimes, it felt like everyone had their hand out.
I would then spend the next 11 hours trying to earn all that back and more (at least if I wanted to go home with any money in my pocket). If I had a date, if it was a slow Monday night, or if I wasn’t feeling well, I didn’t have the luxury of taking the night off, of going home early, or of calling in sick. If I didn’t show up, or if I didn’t stick it out — driving through the lonely, dark and empty streets of the city — I still had to pay the gate. And even if I did stick it out, there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t go home with less money than I started out with.
The only ones who were guaranteed anything were the cab companies and the medallion owners. No matter what, they always got paid.
In fact, I never actually lost money on a shift — at least in part because I was never one to refuse a fare. I never complained when someone wanted to pay with a credit card, and I took as many dispatch orders as I could, even though a high percentage ended with the caller having already driven off in the back of another company’s cab. I didn’t play the airport lottery, like so many of my peers did — spending their entire shift hanging out at SFO, hoping for that one long fare that would make their whole night. And you wouldn’t find me waiting in an endless cab line outside a downtown hotel either. Perhaps this meant not making as much as some of the drivers I knew, but I never lost money on a shift either, like so many other guys did.
Still, there were a lot of things that had to go right, for me (or any driver) to make money. First, you needed simply to get out in a cab, at a decent hour, and on a decent day, which was no easy task for the lowly drivers like me. Because the taxi companies needed to put all their cabs out on every shift (busy, or not), new drivers got stuck with the worst shifts.
These companies exerted a good deal of pressure on drivers to get them onto the shifts that were hardest to fill, the ones with the lowest income potential. These shifts might require the driver to start work as early as 3 in the morning, or to start work later on a weekday evening, like maybe 6:30, once most of the lucrative after-work commute had ended. Starting so early, or late, also meant working the slowest predawn hours — those few hours when the entire city was asleep all at once.
Meanwhile, since they had more clout, the medallion owners weren’t subject to these same constraints. They were generally able create their own schedules, often at the expense of the gas and gate drivers. Further, because of the revenue stream that medallion holders received from leasing their medallions out to the cab companies, they faced less financial pressure arising from actually driving their cabs.
On top of the deference given to medallion holders, some companies were also known to schedule more drivers than they needed — like a discount airline selling more seats than it actually has available. Then there were all the extra, unscheduled drivers, hoping enough people wouldn’t show up for work that there would be an opening for them to fill. The net result was that you could sit around for hours at a time, just waiting, sometimes in vain, for your name to be called. The smart drivers — smarter than me anyway — would often volunteer to take the worst piece-of-shit cab on the lot, just to get out right away. As a cab driver, I hated losing 10 hours a week, or more, just sitting around waiting desperately to go to work, when I could have been out driving and making money. But what I hated even more was waiting around for hours, and finally just going back home empty handed because I couldn’t get a cab to drive.
At last, when your name was finally called, you got to go wander around a yard full of identical taxis, trying to locate the one with your number on it, and discover what you’d be dealing with for the next 11 hours. If you were lucky, you’d find it was a gas-sipping hybrid. However, if you were a new driver, it would probably be a beat-up gas-hog with 300,000 miles on it, which foretold a $45 gas bill at the end of the shift.
The previous drivers normally left their cabs filthy — I’ve found chicken bones, pizza crusts, rotten black bananas, bras, beer cans, liquor bottles, crack pipes, vomit, and even weapons in cabs I was assigned to drive — that, in addition to the staple of iPhones, keys, high heels, laptops, and forgotten luggage. (I was almost surprised to have never found an overlooked child in the back of one). Every cab I ever drove had the same funky bong-water-and-stale-french-fries smell inside, which an entire forest of Christmas-tree-shaped, pine-scented, air fresheners could never completely overwhelm. On the upside, however, I never had to buy another pen or cigarette lighter; as long as I was a cab driver, they were in never-ending supply.
Then, of course, there were the mechanical issues: Dead batteries, flat tires, broken meters, burned out “taxi” lights, and barely functioning brakes, which were now all suddenly yours to contend with. At that point, you had to decide whether to commit to losing time from your shift to address those problems, or to just take the cab out as-is and start making your gate and gas, or to wander back inside and wait even longer in hope of a better taxi becoming available.
Somehow, all of that stuff was tolerable — it was just part of the game. I always said that driving around San Francisco at night was the greatest show on earth; that they oughta sell tickets. Each shift was filled with promise. As long as I was busy, and as long as I could find plenty of passengers — even while these new Uber and Lyft drivers were stealing them right out from under us — I was happy. Despite all the frustrations, and despite all the dysfunctionality of the cab industry, I liked driving a taxi, and for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t wake up each morning with an overwhelming sense of dread and the urge to call in sick.
It was all good, until it wasn’t.
Somewhere along the line, decades ago, San Francisco taxi drivers grew tired of being told how to dress for work, of being required to go and pick up all the customers who’d ordered a taxi. They decided it was better to become independent contractors — and to have more freedom from the cab companies — rather than to remain being their employees.
Back then, could they have understood that by giving up their employee status, rather than competing only with other cab companies’ drivers, they would be pitting themselves against every other cab driver in the city? Could they have possibly predicted that this choice would later draw lines between the medallion holders, and the gas and gate drivers, each group with their own competing interests?
Back in those days, how could they ever have known that this decision would make it virtually impossible to organize, and to unite against a revolution they couldn’t possibly foresee — a revolution that would not only threaten their livelihood, but threaten them with extinction?
Part 4: “After My Very First Night, I Knew I’d Never Drive a Taxi Again”
