Business Thoughts Of A Gentleman Cab Driver or Why I Don’t Jump On The Uber Bandwagon by Ray S. Ray A few months ago I was invited to a personal meeting with Rupal Bapat, the Deputy Commissioner of the City Of Chicago Consumer Services, and Alison Crane, an attorney with Jackson Lewis. Jackson Lewis is the law firm defending the city in a class action lawsuit. A cab driver named Melissa Callahan is suing the city in federal court, asking that cabdrivers be classified as city employees who must be paid the state’s $8.25 an hour minimum wage. According to a UIC study described in a 06/05/14 Chicago Sun-Times article, the city collects an estimated $30 million annual revenue from taxis while drivers earned less than minimum wage and more than ten percent were losing money. Ms. Bopat and Ms. Crane interviewed me about my taxi business practices and success as a celebrity driver. I explained that I was more of an artist than a business man, regaling them famously with descriptions of my life as The Singing Cab Driver. My insouciance to commerce and profitability has always baffled other drivers and management. At last I was able to see that WTF look of wonderment in the eyes of two attractive city executives. I even sang for them. When I arrived home I received a message from the driver I share a cab with. He’s giving up cab driving and pursuing UberX, the personal car ride service. That’s two taxi partners in four months that I’ve lost to UberX! This got me thinking and some things came to mind that I didn’t go into very deeply in my interview. First of all, to state the obvious, I am not your average cab driver. I’m The Singing Cab Driver. Calling me a cabbie is like referring to the Lone Ranger as a cowboy. Yes he rides a horse and wears a western costume, but that’s just how he gets around to do Lone Ranger stuff. Of course I drive a taxi. I’m The Singing Cab Driver! I have an entirely personal aesthetic agenda which supersedes but does not interfere with my duties as a public chauffeur. I make people’s day, shamelessly promote my life-as-art and get them to their destinations in one piece. It’s a long term performance art project and I am really in the business of “creating the legend of The Singing Cab Driver for me and my friends to cash in on.” I have been able to enjoy my leisurely “gentleman cab driver” lifestyle, however, only at the expense of other areas of life which most people find important. The last year or so I’ve lived off a gift from my late father. That will run out eventually and my full time vacation spent driving a cab just for fun will be over. I’ll be back to hustling. For the 22 years before that I probably taxied an average 50-60 hour week. I was barely able to pay the rent on a one bedroom apartment, often a few months behind. The only times I felt I was actually making money and getting a little ahead were when I leased a cab from a neighbor at a really reduced rate, was just living in rented rooms or had a girlfriend with a good paying job. Plus, as the years go by I’ve somehow grown older! As a younger man, I could drive 12-15 hour days if I needed to. Now my body can’t take sitting for more than a couple hours at a time. I don’t mean to paint a bleak Dickensian portrait, just want to emphasize that I am a poor example of success as a taxi driving businessman. I almost make up in generous tips for my singing what I fail to make for general cab driving. As a cab driver, I might barely have broken even. If at all. My life savings is usually in my pocket, and it’s often not enough to pay for tomorrow’s cab. Successful person? I’d say yes, if you define success as getting what you want out of life. I’m more about quality than quantity, if that makes any sense to you. As I so often say to passengers, I’m not in this for the money. I’m in it for the glory! If I wanted to make money, I’d have been doing something else all these years. For me it’s not a job, just a way of life. Cab driving is like fishing. Long hours away from home, sometimes very boring or quite dangerous. There’s no sure thing. Sometimes they bite and sometimes you’re just not in the right place or the people on the street are happy where they are. Spikes of income from lucrative shifts are often canceled out by slow shifts of streets full of empty cabs. Good work habits and long hours help but are no guarantee, and cheating is an attractive advantage when you see so many of your competitors get away with it. Like many middle class jobs, taxi driving has been evolving into a peasant class occupation for forty years. A lot of cabdrivers work for their next meal, or at least their next lease or rent payment. There’s no cushion or safety net except your own wits. And luck. Drivers who do make a lot of money driving a taxi are likely to be working the equivalent of two full time jobs. The first 40 hours pay for overhead, the second are profit. I drove briefly in the mid-1970’s, as a union-dues-paying employee of Checker Cab. In those days, the fortunes of the owner and the driver were shared. When the driver had a great shift, so did the owner. If business was slow, both suffered. By the time I drove with Yellow in 1977, the cab companies had gotten rid of their employee drivers and gone into the taxicab leasing business. The owners got paid up front, whether you made money or not. It was one of the first examples of a trend which is affecting so many more jobs now, from nursing to teaching to even city workers. P.J. O’Rourke once said the trouble with America is everyone wants something, and they all want someone else to pay for it. That describes taxi business in Chicago. The public gets entitlement to hire available, non-discriminate rides from any approved drivers at the lowest price mandated. (Drivers are forbidden by law to pass up or turn down any passengers, charge any more than the metered rate or refuse to take them to any areas.) The city profits while providing transportation service to the public at no cost to itself. ($30 million annual tax revenue from taxis more than pays for any administration.) Corporate medallion owners profit. (Every possible expense is passed along to the leasees.) “Independent contractor” cab drivers assume all the liabilities and pay for all the risks, without even a union to represent their collective concerns. Discourtesy or politely dropping off someone in front of their door might arbitrarily cost them their license or an expensive ticket. Over the years, I have seen the feudalistic relationship between city, management and labor improve slowly, then backslide. Transportation prices of planes, trains and buses have gone up but raises in taxi fares are so infrequent, small and delayed that by the time they happen, they are out of date. The city and taxi owners can’t ship jobs to foreign countries like other corporations do, where drivers would hustle and work for less than Americans expect or need. But the occupation has been made attractive to those who immigrate from many other lands, with varied ethnic and language differences. Thrown into a highly competitive capitalist job as rivals fighting for survival, afraid or suspicious of city and police authority, organization even for their own mutual benefit would prove most difficult and unlikely to succeed. Wealthy medallion holders are able to hire lawyers and lobbyists to address their needs and wants in city hall. Drivers, the individuals who actually provide service to the community, are divided and conquered as soon as they lease a cab. Example: Mayor Emanuel’s 2012 taxicab reforms raised the lease rates companies charge drivers as much as 31%. But taxi fare rates have been frozen since 2005. Example: The 2012 city ordinance prohibits drivers working more than 12 hours a day. Who benefits from this? The public? Drivers? You can’t regulate sleep or awareness by decree. Most drivers, like workers in any field, will get enough rest to be alert to do their jobs safely and professionally. Stressed out people are distracted from important things whether they get enough sleep or not. They are usually the ones who cause accidents. And there’s always a minority who are going to cheat and disregard any rule that gets in the way of their desires. Who gains from the 12 hour rule? Well, the cab companies can now charge two drivers $148 per day ($74 each, two shifts) rather than one driver $101 for a single 24 hour shift. That’s about a 47% increase in profit for the company, while the drivers and public are not in any tangible way safer or better off than they were before the ordinance went into effect. For the seventeen years I drove for Yellow, fellow drivers and I never even heard of someone who leased for less than 24 hours. Now many garages I’ve encountered will only lease 12 hour cabs. Taxi driving in Chicago is probably not a first choice occupation for even most immigrants. Now, with the proliferation of network applications dispatching rides, Chicago taxi drivers don’t just compete with each other for the same passengers. They compete with limos, private vehicles and suburban taxis who use these services and often charge reduced rates. I watch these drivers picking up street business as well. And almost every night I see suburban taxis cruising the neighborhoods, painted to look like Chicago cabs to deceive unwary passengers. Which brings me back to UberX. I understand why two of my friends have ditched cab driving for this ride service. I can’t even guess how many other chauffeurs are doing the same. They want to make money. Why spend so much on a cab lease, have restrictions on where they can pick up, how long they work, with mandatory physicals and drug tests at their own expense? With UberX they can make money just driving their own uninspected vehicle. Which, unlike a taxi, they can park on the street in front of their residence without getting a ticket. Moving violation? They only get one traffic citation, as opposed to a cab driver, who often gets two, one against his drivers license and one his chauffeur. They can also pick and choose which fares to accept or neighborhoods to go to. Picking up people from the street is not allowed, but there are ways to get around that. And, like derivative funds, bundled mortgages and corporate campaign donations, it’s legal. If I hadn’t invested so much in my persona as “The Singing Cab Driver”, I might be doing it too. I am considering using Uber taxi for dispatching, but am reluctant to affiliate with a service that offers another option to customers which undermines me and my fellow professional chauffuers. Something seems unfair about all this, covered by the scent of “too-good-to-be-true”. It’s piracy. An elitist system is being promoted as a democratic “free market” enterprise, bypassing rules and regulations, while driving down the price of a ride to undercut mostly dedicated professional drivers who were struggling to make a living in the first place. The drivers end up competing in a race to the bottom, hoping to make a better living underbidding each other while still assuming all the risks and liabilities. Kind of like hiring scab (non union) strike breakers before a union can exist at all. I am not afraid of change. There are short term improvements possible for public and drivers and huge profits for those who own the networks. But high tech networking businesses have a pattern of creating far fewer, usually less paying jobs than they destroy. You get what you pay for. Some people had bad experiences with dirty cabs or unprofessional drivers. Would the public demand higher fares so the industry would attract a better class of professional drivers? Of course not. Most people are fine with things the way they are. Most people have acceptable or great taxi service. Those who are willing to pay more, have always paid more. Now those who want to pay less, pay less. Nobody wants to pay more than they already do for anything. If they could get something for free, most would probably take it. There are no bargains in this universe, however. Someone pays for everything. Quite often it’s someone you won’t see or even consider. And there’s a line where a deal becomes “too-good-of-a-deal.” Once the line is crossed, the transaction is leaning toward theft or slavery. Of course, the price might be paid by riders in a future where the city doesn’t bother regulating personal hired transportation services that use algorithmic networks to charge whatever the market will bear. Or robots drive you to the airport, lingering at certain billboards and suggesting what stores you should stop at along the way. Why hasn’t the city jumped to prohibit UberX and such services, like some other cities have? Is this the beginning of complete deregulation? An experiment to adopt one of these services as a central city dispatching center? Or perhaps a ploy to take the wind out of an effort to form a taxi driver union tied to Melissa Callahan’s lawsuit. If or when the city decides to crack down on private ride services, all those chauffeurs will be back fighting each other over available taxis and business again. Cab drivers as city employees? The City of Chicago doesn’t even want parking meters! That was chump change. The city wants chumps. To pay tickets. And taxes. I predict, however, that taxi drivers will soon go the way of bank tellers replaced by ATM’s. When automated cars are approved for city streets in the next decade, public chauffeur will likely be one of the first jobs to go. The vehicles themselves will be expensive at first, but free of human error and associated liabilities. Meanwhile, The Singing Cab Driver abides and prevails on the road to glory, ever alert for speed traps, red-light cameras and race-to-the-bottom cross traffic.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 08:06:13 +0000
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