While sitting in his cab, he pointed out some relatively new apartment buildings on Bushwick Ave and said, "See those buildings there? Back in the '80s this used to be a giant abandoned lot filled with homeless people.
It was like a tent city. And around the corner, on Johnson and Morgan, there's a traffic island there that used to be the biggest open-air drug market in the city. Bob continued, a little mystified, "It's crazy how this neighborhood has changed.
Another buddy of mine from the garage -- who shall not be named to protect his marriage -- sends me picture messages practically every day of girls showing him their tits in the back, and sometimes the front, of his cab. What the fuck man? Why didn't that shit ever happen to ME? Anyway, that's about it. I hope you're all doing great. Posted by M. Tuesday, October 23, Strike Two.
But it was also about an intangible, something that cabbies often feel they are denied. It is called respect. It is called dignity. As a driver, you have no control. McDonagh said that he has driven a cab on and off since It was hard to see how effective any work stoppage of preset length could be; most New Yorkers can survive without taxis for 24 hours and not break into cold sweats. The drivers were also not helped by the de facto strikebreaker role that City Hall played.
To help maximize taxi availability, it allowed drivers who worked yesterday to charge special rates that gave them more money than usual. Recent immigrants for the most part, they perform a tough, lonely duty that few native Americans want to do anymore — even those Americans who are perpetually out of work.
Rogoff, a Baruch College professor who has studied the taxi industry. They are the butt of lame David Letterman jokes. They endure brain-numbing innovations that only City Hall suits can devise, like those maddening Elmo messages of a few years ago, the ones that screamed at passengers to buckle up and take their belongings. Now we have a new requirement that drivers accept a credit card system that forces them to pay an unheard-of 5 percent fee on each transaction.
They must also install, at considerable expense, G. What it can do, in the spirit of Elmo, is blare enough commercials all day long to make anyone batty. If these devices malfunction, as some inevitably will, drivers must get them fixed fast or find themselves effectively forced off the road. Granted, some cabbies are their own worst enemies.
They could win a lot of friends by paying more attention to passengers and ditching their cellphones, which far too many of them use while driving, in violation of city rules. But a more fundamental concern yesterday was those two little words. Tuesday, October 16, Hi! How've you been? I've been hesitant to post here lately, mainly because I've been too busy for the past two months promoting the book which is, of course, available for purchase using the handy little Amazon link to the right, hardy har har.
And I certainly don't want to let anyone down, but I have to say, if blogging paid the bills, I'd probably do it a lot more. Writing this blog has indeed given me so much, but the truth is that for the past year or so, the book advance and some overdue settlement money from a long-ago accident are what's helped me get by, with some supplemented income from driving a cab.
Call me selfish, but this is the way it is. I live in New York , for fuck's sake. Still, I've been extremely lucky. For the past two months, I've been doing non-stop interviews to get the word out about my book.
I was really happy that people were so interested, but it was weird and exhausting running around like that, answering the same questions over and over and over. Eventually, I got used to it. Plus, it was easier than driving a taxi! In fact, it wasn't totally unlike those long shifts when every single passenger that got in my backseat quizzed the shit out of me with the same exact list of questions "How'd you get into this?
Where'd you grow up? How old are you? What's it like to drive a taxi? What's next? What's funny is that I was being asked about driving a taxi so much that I had no time to actually drive a taxi. The side-effect of all this, however, was that after a little while, I needed a little break from thinking about, talking about, and -- yes -- writing about the damn taxi business.
Which is another part of why I neglected this blog so badly. Of course, I still find the job fascinating, and I find myself always coming back to it, no matter how hard I might try to get away. In fact, I just finished reading a great book about the history of the taxi industry in New York. I highly recommend it -- it's called "Taxi!
It really put me in my place, in a good way. But, despite my obvious addiction to all things taxi, I'm finally working up the nerve to move on to other things. This whole thing, driving a cab in New York, started in the spirit of seeking out adventure. There was no intention to start a blog or write a book or do a hundred interviews and somehow become the spokesperson for an industry I only entered three years ago.
And there was never any intention to make a career out of it and do it forever. I want to hang on to that original mindset for the next thing I do and not worry about all the other stuff, because then it feels like a trap. Of course, I'm still working on deciding exactly what my next step will be, but I'm so excited by the idea of embarking on a brand new adventure.
I've got a few ideas that I'm kicking around, but I'm not ready to talk about anything just yet. And lastly, I haven't totally quit driving a cab. I don't think I ever will, to be perfectly honest. Now that the journalists are bored of me, I can pull a normal shift again if I need the cash. Which will be soon. And then there will be something to blog about.
Thursday, September 13, The best night ever. I had an amazing night on Tuesday. So many people came out and the store sold out of my book! The whole thing was pretty damn special. To give some context, NYC taxi drivers have been maltreated for years, and a large part of that has come down to the taxi medallion system.
Medallions were government-created constraints on taxi drivers and cabs; a city would only issue so many medallions, which enabled taxi drivers to operate a cab. Most cities increase the number of medallions at a much slower rate than the growth for medallion demand, which means medallions were essentially an investment tool.
The problem came when medallions in NYC hit a peak of over one million dollars in value before being undermined by rideshare companies that allowed anyone to become a driver. Many cab drivers, who were often immigrants or minorities, had taken out predatory loans to help fund their goal of earning a taxi medallion, only to find that massive investment became worth nothing. Medina was the go-to …. Home Book a Ride Lost and Found. Featured Posts. Ada Robinson, 37, originally from Hong Kong attempts to hail a taxi.
Stephen Yang Fear of catching the coronavirus has some cabbies and ride-share drivers discriminating against customers.
NYC cabbies avoiding Chinese neighborhoods over coronav Since he began driving a taxi in , his customers have run the gamut from mediterranean … Read more…. A New York City Council commission released a report Friday recommending a publicly managed fund to bail out thousands of taxi drivers … Read more…. NY House Dems call on city to bail out thousands of cab Now, thanks to plummeting … Read more…. The solution would come at a relatively modest cost and would help redress an injustice from which the city benefited financially: a creditor-driven bubble in the price of medallions — the permits that allow people to operate cabs — that led many drivers into debt bondage and even prompted some to commit suicide.
The city should take action. There are about 12, taxi medallions in use in New York, sold originally by the city but now traded mostly among taxi drivers and owners of taxi fleets. Medallion brokers often arrange for sales and their financing. Cabdrivers, typically immigrants, took out loans to pay for the medallions, and to obtain the loans they often had to offer as collateral everything that they and their next of kin owned.
Identifying a debt bubble in real time is not always easy. But with the market for taxi medallions, creditors, brokers and the city were in a position to see what was going on — and yet they allowed the frenzy to continue and often made large sums of money from it.
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