Shift changes, wind chimes and a new app: Taxi garages attempt to hail more drivers
Queens Medallion Leasing features massage chairs and an elliptical machine in its taxi garage. Team Systems Fleet promises gas at below pump price. Yakuel Taxi advertises Ping-Pong tables and wind chimes to relax drivers.
Taxi owners are trying to lure drivers back to their yellow cabs from companies like Uber and Lyft. And as of Sept. 4, there’s another tool: The Lacus app, which allows cabbies to work on demand and unlock cabs online, saving them hours per week of commuting to and waiting at garages where drivers rent their taxis.
Aleksey Medvedovskiy owns a taxi garage, NYC Taxi Group, and developed Lacus. He says it typically takes drivers 40 minutes to commute to the garage, where they can then wait for another half hour. “Drivers book about $50–60, on average, an hour” Medvedovskiy said.
Aziz Nizomov, started driving with Uber in 2014 and moved to yellow cabs to try Lacus. While he described the leasing system before as “hell,” now, he said, “it’s perfect… It’s really the future of yellow cabs.”
That day, the cab he drove last night is parked outside his home. Previously, he would have had to drop it at the garage at the end of his shift and commute home, arriving 90 minutes after he clocked off.
Nizomov, 26, takes night classes at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. He is the kind of driver Medvedovskiy hopes to attract: “college students … people that have primary jobs…. We did not have [them] for the last five or six years.”
Medvedovskiy developed the app in-house with a team of developers and designers. It has taken two years.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), which regulates the industry, has another strategy to attract drivers. Working with NYC Taxi Group, they are piloting a program allowing drivers to lease cabs on a 35% commission, rather than for a flat fee, normally around $100 per shift. It also removes the 12-hour minimum on shifts.
TLC Deputy Commissioner Allan Fromberg acknowledged in an interview that the city faced a “shortage of drivers, especially on yellow side.” Fromberg said the old leasing system could lead to “frustration and pressure imposed on a driver as he starts his day already in the hole.”
Still, this attempt to attract drivers has been met with reluctance by many garages: the TLC made the leasing option available in 2015, but NYC Taxi Group became the first to use it, this month.
The Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade represents a quarter of the medallion industry. Its spokesman, Michael Woloz, explained the reluctance in a statement: “Commission-based leasing, which favors driving during the most lucrative hours and was tried and abandoned decades ago, could result in less service during certain times.”
It also creates less reliable income for garages.
The competition for drivers has its limits. Kobir Ali, a yellow cabbie, said, “Nobody cares about taxi drivers … It’s a job, so it’s better than nothing. But they give us a car, we give them money, that’s it.”
