A changing tech landscape is reaming Boston cabbies’ livelihoods. But can they rebalance the playing field?
By Clinton Nguyen
Ping. That’s the sound of a ride going out to an Uber driver, a taxi hail for the modern age. In the backseat of the car, my driver shows me the Uber driver app and its map. A circle radiates from his current position, scanning for riders. But for me it looks like we’re in the epicenter of a blue-tinted earthquake.
But then I think of the cabs waiting outside of hotels and bus stations. For them, they see Uber as disruption at its worst, a business that literally threatens livelihoods.
Matthew is a senior at Boston University whose theater major makes for an odd schedule. Evening studios and open mornings clear out a few hours at night so he can wheel around in his mom-loaned SUV and drive strangers and friends for a little bit of spending cash. It’s lucrative during some hours and less than passable during others, but for him the biggest dealmaker is the convenience. He makes his own hours and if he’s not feeling it one week, then no harm no foul.
He took about a month to go through the hiring process, which is admittedly a bit longer than Uber’s 10 days or less claim. He sent off a chain of emails, each one with its own separate issue, and had to get each addressed before he would be allowed to drive.
“It’s was very kind of an impersonal process as far as getting in touch with them. It’s all automated, it’s all done through email. It’s efficient, but it can be frustrating as an employee when you just want to talk to somebody.”
Its drivers only need to pass a cursory background check, have a driver’s license and have a mid- to large-sized four-door vehicle made later than 2006.
“It can be frustrating as an employee when you just want to talk to somebody.”
It still beats the drudgery of getting a license under an actual cab company. That process involves a $75 fee, some three weeks of classes to learn the lay of the land and a slew of paperwork to lease the hackney (the term for a for-hire vehicle) itself.
Students usually have neither the patience, nor or the geographical attention span, especially if they’re from out of state. And many of them not even approaching it from the same sort of mindset as the cab drivers in Boston.
For cabbies, it’s their livelihoods at stake. The Globe found that most people ion hackney training classes were immigrants looking to make the business their main source of income, people who they say “lack the language skills to qualify for many jobs but night cleaner, busboy, or dishwasher.”
But with Uber, it’s easy in, easy out. This frictionless market entry and exit is what makes it part of a bigger problem for cabbies and cab companies, and this digital walling makes it easy for the company to distance itself from its drivers, especially when incidents and crimes do occur.
Uber’s disassociation from its employee base, or rather, its benefits-less independent contractor base was highlighted in past incidents involving driver manslaughter, and assault. There was even an alleged kidnapping where a woman was driven around LA for two hours, her questions ignored and doors locked until her screaming shook the driver enough to bring her back.
There’s a certain levity in the way Uber addresses these issues; they respond with volume and numbers, they respond with the predictable Pollyannaish outlook expected of companies in damage control, but how do their background checks stand against the rigor of the taxi industry’s checks?
“Uber is on track to complete more than two million background checks in 2014,” Lane Kasselman, an Uber spokesman, told The New York Times.
But it should only take one bad case to make a $40 billion valued company eat crow. That, strangely, hasn’t happened yet.
Omar Ajdar is a Boston Cab Association hackney driver who’s been on the job for two years, driving full-time. He’s been a driver for two other companies: Metro Cab and Top Cab before settling with Boston Cab just a few months ago. He describes the life in the day of a city cab driver: it’s a grind where you start in the red and push to get out of it.
“I’m paid $600, $700 a week. But that’s not the whole picture, you have to ask me how many hours I’m working,” he said. “I put in 14 hours a day for all seven days to get there.”
He has to pay off a number of things before he actually starts making wages: the daily $105–107 to lease the hackney, the gas and the tolls, and it comes down to about $140 in costs a day before he starts making actual wages he can keep, before taxes.
Ajdar hustles hard, because that works out to about $31,000 a year if you count a week of vacation and sick days. And that’s shy over the $27,700 median wage for Boston-area cabbies.
I’m paid $600, $700 a week. But that’s not the whole picture. You have to ask me how many hours I’m working.
One of the reasons why taxi drivers bleed money at the start of each day is because of the medallion system in place that has roots back to when the first medallions were instated in New York City in 1937.
Medallions are the badges that you see on the back of taxis today. They indicate that, yes, this vehicle is approved by the city and the police to service folks from point A to point B.
When taxis were all the rage after World War I, they were dangerously unregulated; Depression-era cab companies regularly used cutthroat tactics to gain ridership, like aggressive price cutting. You couldn’t know who was vetted and who wasn’t.
There were too many cabs, too few riders to gain traction. But that changed when the city added a hard limit on the number of medallions, closer to the demand that riders needed post-Depression.
While this is New York’s story, it closely mirrors that of Boston’s, where medallions were also established at the same time, albeit with a lower supply: 1,525 with 260 added in 1997 after a decade-long legal furor.
Because medallions existed in a fixed supply and demand for them increased from mostly immigrants who would find it their only source of livelihood, prices for Boston medallions skyrocketed up to $700,000 per medallion in mid-2014, from $500,000 just a year earlier..
And that’s why there’s a heavy lease on licensed hackneys. Cab drivers are paying off vehicles they’re required by law to lease. Uber was never tethered to this chain. That’s one part of the uproar.
“I’m paying rent for this car I’m driving to find customers. Somebody’s driving his own car, he doesn’t pay nothing. If you give him a dollar, he wins,” Ajdar said. “We gotta fight on the streets, but we gotta fight honestly.”
Ajdar says that the regulators, the Boston Police, weren’t doing their job.
Donna Blythe-Shaw, a spokesperson for the Boston Taxi Driver’s Association, said that Boston Police have laws to uphold and they’re turning a blind eye to what she considers “unlicensed hackneys.”
“Under two statutes and the ordinance of the city, it’s illegal for UberX to be operating. Why are these laws not properly enforced? The law says you can have a $500 fine issued and any vehicle can be impounded,” she said.
And her explanation for the police’s lack of oversight is that it’s the people’s choice for transportation, and regulation would step on a lot of toes.
“We know that the reason for all of this is because Uber seems to be popular. And you know what? Pot is popular. But it’s illegal,” she said. “Is this because of Wall Street and because it’s popular enough that there might be political outcry?”
Blythe-Shaw says Uber drivers are usurping the usual haunts that cab drivers have been laying claim to for years.
“If it was my world, Uber wouldn’t be able to operate near the places where [cabs] do business. And they compete across the street from all the cab stands. They hang out across the bars. [Cabs are] struggling to make a living and Uber has created a complete chaos,” she said. “It’s a wild, wild West out there, and they need to be reigned in.”
While Uber has been making a proverbial killing with the ridesharing market in Boston, it’s never been a worse time to be a traditional Boston cabbie.
Cabbies are plagued by mysterious fees added on top of their daily expenses with no proper documentation for them. And a Boston Globe investigation found evidence of bribery and undocumented expenses in the Boston Cab Association to which no higher up is admitting guilt.
The cab market is turning into a dogfight, with its largely immigrant employee base struggling on two fronts: one on the streets and one in their receipts. From what Blythe-Shaw says, neither side is fair. But the city is attempting, very slowly, to make amends.
On Oct. 10, 2014, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh appointed 24 members to the Boston Taxi Advisory Committee, almost a year after he promised to make one. They’ve met twice, but so far only they’ve only established goals and focus groups. Competing parties can use it as a channel to play nice and get some laws passed. Eventually.
The committee’s main goals are safety and accessibility, said Chris Evans, the committee chair.
“I think the other issue is just ensuring drivers are properly vetted. Getting into a car with someone you don’t know is always an interesting trip,” he said. Interesting is putting it delicately if we’re looking at the company’s number of incidences and how it handles background checks.
“We want to make sure people who are driving the public around are people who should be driving,” he said.
But until then, those phone pings in mom’s car will continue. The Matthews of the world will continue to exist, so long as it’s easy for them to enter the ridesharing market. But hopefully those pings won’t be death knells, hopefully they won’t mean the end of a healthy competition.
