Taxi Driver (or How I Feel about Uber and the Sharing Economy)
Travis we salute you — The Clash
There are a million taxi cab stories a driver can tell you. I drove cab in San Francisco for sixteen years. Driving a cab I was able to pay my way through nursing school at City College. Now I'm doing something better than driving a "hack." I don't think this is an option available to Rideshare drivers slaving for Lyft or Uber. Before I go further I should attach a "trigger warning" that mine is a biased view, a partisan report. But I did do my homework.
Looking at Uber's colorful exploits I don't know if that's true of those trying to make some shake piloting their SUV's with a pink mustache. Rideshare is an industry cannibalizing the older industry, enabled by technology and exploiting the flaws built into the older system in what has been sexily termed "disruptive economy;" as if the tech lords with their apps have stormed the Bastille to share the wealth hoarded by the old guard. This is an old story, utilizing new means, but not everybody has seen through the con yet.
When I started driving a taxi the money was quick. The money was cash. I'd drive around the city in a Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, grabbing flags or answering dispatches on the radio. The radio dispatcher was an old cranky gent who would cuss you out if you didn't know what address or intersection he was calling out. In his view, if you didn't know San Francisco like the space between your fingers, you had no business driving in San Francisco. San Francisco is geographically small but complicated. In 1999 very view cars came equipped with GPS. I didn't have it and there was a bit of a learning curve. Then again a lot of people didn't have GPS in 1999.
I liked the job, but it was draining. I could feel lines getting carved in my face as I negotiated the twisty, hilly streets. Driving a taxi was merciless. I had an ice pick put up to my eye one night, a homemade machine gun was pointed at me another night. It took a few years before I realized just how much money gets taken out of your pocket by Uncle Sam.
Since I got paid straight up cash and drivers were considered independent contractors, by the time April rolled around I would have $50 in my pocket after rent and be looking at a bill of $2500: Due immediately. That doesn't seem like a hella lot of money to me now – back then it did. I would pay up in negotiated installments. One driver I knew, an African American lesbian with a "don't give a shit" attitude, told me she never filed. "Hey if I get arrested I get a bitch plus three hots and a cot." I couldn't argue with that logic.
The cab industry was and is dysfunctional, corrupt, sleazy. It was, nevertheless, a service to the community.
Luxor was a family founded business. Mary Warner emphasized an ideal in the Luxor fleet that we were a company that took paratransit, the publicly subsidized taxi script utilized by people with dependent incomes. We picked up from hospitals and had a sub-fleet of handicap vans. If you were poor or disabled, Luxor was at your service. I drove around guys with bullet holes dotting their bare torsos from General Hospital to the Tenderloin. I transported people dying of AIDs from St. Lukes to public housing. I picked up African American matriarchs who shopped at the Safeway on 16th and Portrero with their groceries and took them to Double Rock in Hunter's Point, one of the most notorious projects in the city.
Nobody ever hassled me. I'd help poor families carry their groceries into apartments that had their window mounted air conditioners stolen years before. I'd escort people who could barely walk to their top floor units when the elevators were out. I once picked up a woman, in my cab, post stroke, and took her to the hospital saving the $1000 ambulance fee and didn't charge. When I drove Sunday days, I took black ladies in beautiful hats to Methodist or Baptist church. I provided a useful service. So far the ride share companies' community service programs are still in Beta, though they've been rolling for profit a while.
I did okay driving cab. I quit while I was ahead, and I never ignored, and cannot forget, the downside.
First off you're a sitting duck. Drivers were assaulted and killed, ripped off and blamed for their surly attitudes. The city didn't have your back. If there was a budget short-fall, taxi fees were jacked up and the police got more enthusiastic about giving you tickets. Every once in a while, something got kicked down. Meter fares were increased for instance, but this would get neutralized when the city dumped more medallions (vehicle licenses) on the street to meet the demands of a population that didn't get how the taxi industry worked.
People would complain about not being able to get a cab in the outer Sunset. So the city would create more cabs. Those cabs would crowd up the east side of the city where all the business was. They wouldn't diffuse out to the avenues. Why? Because somebody wants a cab out there once every couple of hours, not every five minutes. Driving around in the avenues was a way of keeping food off your table. And you did drive, constantly, if you wanted to make any money. I always made some money because I always drove. Like a shark looking for minnows.
The drivers, in their fur trapper individualism, didn't understand the value of collective labor. In the slow winter you were scraping for rice and bean money while some cashiers would walk home with $2000 in untaxed income due to driver kick backs for a decent vehicle on a good night. When the ride share scam — I do mean SCAM — started a bad situation became worse.
Now here's a critical difference between the taxi industry and the ride share "sharing economy." The taxi industry was regulated. It was regulated poorly but it was still regulated. The industry did background checks. You could be an ex-con and drive. You couldn't be a sex offender and drive. If a driver committed a crime there was a procedure to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute. If you sexually assaulted anybody you were out of a job, and the industry was careful not to hire somebody who was a risk in that area.
In order to legally drive a taxi cab you had to take a two-week long class and you had to pass two written exams, one with the SF Police. You also had to submit your driving record from the DMV and keep points off your license. With Uber I don't believe that's the case. Uber is packaged as a fun way you can make a supplemental income on the weekends. It's not. First off, you have to use your own car, and pay for the insurance. In the taxi industry you lease a vehicle for a fixed fee every shift. After you pay the lease and the gas, what is in your pocket is yours (minus whatever you want to tell the government about). You don't own the medallion unless you pay into the waiting list and sit back and wait for your number to mature. When your number comes up you own a cab. This process took, at the very least, about ten years.
Once you owned a cab, however, you could then lease it out to other licensed drivers and take half of the lease money for every time your medallion was leased. Medallions belonging to different cab companies basically share the lease on the company name, the vehicle used and the dispatch service, originally a radio service, then a digital interface. In other words there was a system that, if you played your cards right, even had a retirement package built in, courtesy of the city. Uber doesn't have a system other than a bunch of finance sharks trying to make a killing through exploiting the desperate, and getting the gullible members of the shrinking middle class to buy into the cool convenience of yet another killer phone app, without looking too deeply into the issue, or what the cool ass new tech shit has destroyed.
You need a cell phone to utilize rideshare, just like you seem to need a portable device of some kind to negotiate modern life. I got my first cell phone in 1999. Kept the same version until 2015. The tiny brain of my hand size cell phone theoretically could access the Internet, but I'd have died of old age before even the Google home page uploaded. That was all right. I just used my Metro PCS device for text and telephone. It's not that I'm an unqualified Luddite. My reluctance to embrace the wireless revolution was more of a matter of trying to manage my distractions.
As it was my new job made it efficacious to be reachable. Now utilizing a phone app is essential in the ride share field. It's tricky to watch a screen when you're a driver who has been negotiating the specialized niche of commercial chauffeur driving, and not hit anyone or anything. When we migrated to digital dispatch from radio calls, the majority of my fares were flags, partially out of fear of hitting someone while trying to figure out the non-"intuitive" box, competing for space with my meter, in order to take dispatches over the system. I got the hang of it eventually.
The industry even utilizes phone apps now like Flywheel, but a lot of the public still seems to prefer Uber and Lyft, largely out of a preference for the apparent novelty. With Rideshare people with no experience or training with driving and interfacing, or the barest minimum in training, are expected to jump right in – and multi-task away on the city streets. The consumers think it's great but this has led to problems.
Uber, Lyft, Airbnb are all part of what is called a "sharing economy." The "sharing economy" is consumer driven in theory. What that means is it tends to embrace the doctrines of the Silicon Valley with it's techie whiz kids and catered meals and "fun" work places. The core thinking is that a better product, a better tech, obsolesces the older clunkier system. In other words, all of human history is dedicated to time saving so YOU CAN GET MORE DONE EASIER. A better business model. In the Nineteenth Century this made a lot of sense — if you were a farm wife. In the Twenty-first century, I'm not so sure. Time utilization has gotten so efficient that we've almost destroyed time itself. Paradoxically people still manage to go from youth and vitality to age and sickness, only to get nickled and dimed by their health plans anyway.
A lot of people I know, who have never driven taxi cabs, love just how awesome it is that they can click their phone app and get an Uber at their door step in minutes, so they can use all that time they've freed up to be able keep looking at their phones. What they seem to be missing, while looking at those phones, is all the bad press this delightful service has been getting for the past six years. To whit:
On New Year's Eve 2013 Uber driver ran over and killed six-year old Sofya Liu as she and her family were legally walking in a Polk Street crosswalk in San Francisco. The driver was "arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter and gross negligence." The family sued Uber and the driver. Uber's response was to argue that the Uber driver, Sayed Muzzaffar, was not an employee, merely an "independent contractor." The company at that time had no requirement for liability coverage. The driver had been logged onto Uber's rideshare app at the time of the incident.
Reported on February 9, 2015 in The Boston Globe: "An Uber driver was arrested for indecent assault and battery against a passenger on Sunday morning..."
In 2015 the Austin, Texas Police Department told an NBC news affiliate that they were investigating no less than seven sexual assault claims filed against Uber and Lyft.
The Kansas City, MO. Police Department told their local NBC news affiliate in 2015 that there had been no less that seven sexual assaults associated with ride share services in the space of a year.
A Cape Cod Uber driver is indicted for sexual assault in late 2015.
An Uber driver in Boston, arrested for "allegedly" raping and assaulting his passenger in 2014 has been linked, via DNA, to five other sexual assaults.
Of course Uber claims that they do background checks. I personally haven't seen the forms and I would never apply because, quite frankly, I'd feel more morally sound selling heroin than I would driving for this sleazy company. Of course my favorite by far Uber horror story is this one.
That's a Forbes article, not exactly a commie America hatin', anti-business publication. That's Forbes talking about an Uber driver taking a hammer to San Francisco bar tender Roberto Chicas' face over a dispute over the route home back in 2014. I've gotten into arguments over routes with fares. I would let them win and go the slow expensive route because the customer is always right! They'd get pissed and act like dicks when they saw the meter and cuss me out for cheating them, but I wouldn't hammer them in the face.
What is even more horrifying is Uber management's attitude toward any criticism of their company by ANYONE. But especially by women. Sarah Lacy, a Libertarian Feminist and in general unregulated tech industry cheerleader who admired the way Uber CEO Travis Kalanick "ran headlong into the buzzsaw of dozens of powerful taxi lobbies" and powerless drivers, but had an issue with the "sexism and misogyny" that she saw in Uber's culture.
In particular an Uber ad campaign that said "We ought to be called 'Boober'" and emphasized the pick up and hooker options available to male Uber drivers and male Uber clientele. Apparently BuzzFeed had alluded Uber was working with a French escort service and this inspired Lacy's outrage. Lacy finished her piece by saying she had proudly deleted Uber from her phone. I'm not particularly fond of Sarah Lacy's ability to feel the pain of upper middle class white women not wanting to be seen as sex objects but inability to even guess at what working class and immigrant taxi drivers have to deal with, but Uber's response to her op-ed piece made my skin crawl.
At a dinner in New York in November, 2014 Uber Senior Vice President of Business, Emil Michael, told a business luncheon that included a BuzzFeed journalist and Ariana Huffington, that Uber would spend a "million dollars" to investigate Lacy and " 'Give the media a taste of its own medicine.'" He went on to say that Uber would target Lacy in particular and "could ... prove a very specific claim about her personal life." In other words, Uber would use its power to personally smear any individual member of the press that wrote bad copy about them. Michael went into details about using technology to follow the woman and her family around until they did something unsavory. It was a perfect example of evil meets stupidity, potentiated by the utilization of Orwellian technology on the part of the private sector to destroy enemies. The reporters present went to press and the story went viral. Uber issued half assed apologies.
But really what is happening to the taxi industry is a symptom of a growing global pathology; a belief that an unregulated system provides better service and better opportunities. In reality what has happened is Business emperors, and the Right Wing Engineers that enable them, all got their copies of Atlas Shrugged lodged so far up their collective asses that the binding is crushing their collective pineal glands.
The Sharing Economy is not a liberated business making everybody rich without the oppression of Big Government. It's an ugly business model enabled by Big Government indifference, the ultimate goal of which is industry monopoly and a general population reduced to serfdom except for the "clever" aristocrats. Of course Uber execs think they can market pussy to the bro culture, and piss all over some "uppity bitch" who dares say otherwise.
You exploit the hell out of your employees, you destroy the industry you're replacing, an industry that had some protections for the workers and the fares, you replace an industry that was aware of the communities in which it thrived, with an industry that isn't aware and doesn't feel it needs to be of those same communities, why the hell you going to listen to feminists and respect women? You don't respect anything but yourself and your need to accumulate wealth. Sexual conquest is an expression of that.
As a cab driver I was able to work my way through nursing school and now am better positioned to give back to the community. I'm not in nursing for the money. The money's nice but, hopefully, when I die I will be able in the last moments of lucidity be able to say I did do things for others, not just myself. And I managed to get a few real adventures under my belt in the process — thanks to driving a taxi cab.
I don't for a minute think I would be able to afford getting to this position as an Uber driver. Uber is not the experience of driving a cab or taking a cab. Uber is not a restaurant with history and character. Uber is a tacky food court. Uber is not a scrappy underdog weekend baseball team that made the majors. Uber is a genetically programmed super team, made up of under paid hired guns. Ultimately Uber is neither good business, nor good planning. It's what happens when you give pirates the treasury. And that seems to be what the "Sharing Economy" is all about. Being a rich asshole is celebrated. Socio-pathology is rewarded, in an industry that can't even claim they've gone public. The wealth is not shared. It is hoarded and acquired in an irresponsible fashion. This is to the detriment of all but a tiny elite with feverish egos. And, as always, it is others that will have to foot the bill.