Most cab fares start with the same two questions. “How’s your day/night?” quickly followed by, “Are you just starting, or are you almost finished?” as if there was nothing in between. Now, I can’t speak for all taxi drivers, but I particularly hated when passengers entered my cab in the middle of a phone call, especially if I had to spend the entire trip — the next small, irrevocable piece of my existence — listening to the minutiae of their personal lives. Not only was it annoyingly uncouth, but it prevented me from charming them, working them for tips, or asking directions.
However, I think I can speak for many cab drivers when I say that — aside from drunks on the verge of puking — the most cringe-worthy fares were the emotional ones. There were the women who immediately burst into tears as soon as they got inside the cab, or the couples who chose a taxi as the perfect place to stage their break-up. Strangely, no matter how short the ride, the dumpee always made it through all seven stages of grieving by the end of the fare.
Still, there was one greeting that irked me more than anything else.
“It’s so much easier to get a cab in New York!”
Whenever someone complained this way, I’d reply “Really? What about when it’s raining?”
Or, “How about at 4:00PM, when the shifts change over?”
Or, “Can you get one in Queens, or in the Bronx, or do you really just mean Manhattan?”
It was undeniable that the sheer number of yellow cabs on the island of Manhattan dwarfed the number of cabs in my little 7x7 city — but I would often mention that there were in fact more taxis per capita in San Francisco than New York, a fact that people always found impossible to believe.
One thing I wouldn’t mention, though, was that San Francisco cab drivers made more money than their counterparts in NYC — until two years ago, at least.
Still, as good as things were, driving a taxi in San Francisco could be an incredibly frustrating experience. For every person desperate for a cab, there was a driver just as desperate for a passenger. Even back when the idea for Uber was just a scribble on a cocktail napkin, well over half the miles I logged on every shift were driven without a passenger. The San Francisco taxi system could be best described as an inefficient market — one that did a poor job of matching buyers with sellers.
There were many reasons for this, but the primary one was that it relied so heavily upon chance: There were around 25 different cab companies, with no central dispatch system to reach them all. The result was that calling one of these companies meant foregoing all the others, but passengers had no way of knowing whether the company they picked did, or did not, have an available cab nearby.
Taxi drivers understood the need to minimize the time and distance between fares, which discouraged them from accepting orders more than a few blocks away — or from even accepting them at all, especially at the times of highest demand, like weekend nights, New Year’s Eve, Halloween, or whenever there was a big convention in town. San Francisco cabbies also knew that the greatest demand for taxis was concentrated in the northeastern quadrant of the city, which included the financial district, the tourist centers, and the most densely populated neighborhoods — where young professionals were most likely to live, work, and play.
That part of the city was our Manhattan, and drivers were loath to leave its borders because a ride away from this part of the city meant too much distance to cover before the next fare, which would decrease their efficiency, and thereby diminish their earnings.
Passengers who lived on the southern and western edges of the city may have perceived a ride home as a good, high-cost, fare, and they were angered and bemused when so many of the city’s drivers’ infamously and predictably refused to take them. The law may have said that you could not refuse a fare — it’s called “refusal to convey” — but drivers knew they faced no real consequences in doing so, and fared better by avoiding these long, one-way, trips to the boonies. They also knew that the promise of a “really good tip,” almost always meant just the opposite. “A dollar? Really?”
Like a waitress turning tables at a busy diner, the name of the game was getting passengers in and out as quickly as possible, which meant dropping them off in an area of high demand and, for many drivers, it meant turning down fares that would take them out of the game, frequently driving off and leaving passengers standing at the curb, or worse, kicking them out of their cab altogether.
The next biggest topic — aside from complaints — was probably the medallion system: How does it work and do you have one? I didn’t, and I doubt I ever will. A medallion is what makes a car a taxicab. In San Francisco, it’s a small, numbered, aluminum plate that’s displayed on the dashboard of the each of the city’s 1,900 taxis. In cities like New York, and Chicago, it’s round, about the size of a CD, and is riveted onto the hood of the car. Here in SF, only drivers may acquire a medallion and, in turn, they typically lease that medallion out to a taxi company. (A whole other layer of murky sub-lease arrangements for medallion owners also exists — some perfectly legal, and some not — which sometimes result with San Francisco companies actually having no idea of who is driving their taxis.)
It used to be that medallions were considered a sort of retirement plan for SF cabbies. Guys would put their name on a list and, after 10 or 15 years of driving, when an old cabbie retired, or died, the city would transfer his medallion to the next guy in line for a small administrative fee. Medallion holders would then have the benefit of a monthly lease check of around $2,500 from a cab company, and the ability to drive just a few months each year to maintain their ownership status.
These drivers were like gold to taxi companies — attracting and holding onto them was the single greatest means of growing their fleet of cabs. And just imagine how reluctant the company might be to discipline, or even fire, such a driver due to passenger complaints.
A few years ago, right around the time Uber, Lyft, and SideCar were all starting up, the city decided to stop giving taxi medallions away. Much to the chagrin of drivers who’d spent years waiting, perhaps a decade, or even more, the city closed the list and began selling the medallions instead. While in recent years the price of a taxi medallion has fallen in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, San Francisco’s set price for a medallion has held steady at $250,000, and only the city can say how well they’re selling.
However, some medallion owners have recently launched an online petition accusing the city of forcing them to stay in the business — to continue driving, and making monthly payments on the loans they took out to buy their medallions — against their will. These drivers say they’ve been required to place their names on a new city list, waiting to be matched with a buyer, and allege that they will be compelled to wait as long as four years before being matched. To make matters worse, the largest SF cab companies are now significantly cutting the amount they’re willing pay these same drivers to lease their medallions.
Knowing all this, ask yourself, would you risk a quarter of a million dollars to invest in a taxi medallion?
When the city pulled the rug out from under all the drivers on the wait list — who had put in all those years with the expected reward of one day getting their medallion — understandably, they felt cheated. When the city did nothing to stop what those same drivers saw as an illegal, unfair, invasion by Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar, they felt betrayed. And the people riding in the back of their cabs probably asked them, just as they so often asked me; “Why are the cab drivers here always so angry?”
Even now, I probably fail to really appreciate the depth of their personal indignation. It’s just so easy to dismiss it, and to just lump their humiliation in with the everyday discontent and prickliness that the job invokes in so many cab drivers. But in light of the recent — often violent — protests in cities like London, Paris, Mexico City, Hong Kong, and others, are taxi drivers really just Luddites resisting technological progress, or is that an oversimplification? If their anger is legitimate, is it something worth fighting for? Or, would it be wiser for someone like me to join Uber, or Lyft, and go to the dark side?
