Great podcast, there are two options that come to mind: either the people in charge are not very smart or they are mired in corruption; there's no other way to explain their actions.
I have tried to hear these podcasts before but this is the first time I have heard an entire episode. Personally, I have found these podcasts mildly frustrating because there are no CURRENT drivers (either FHV or yellow taxi but preferably both) on the panel. Yes, Abe was once a driver by he seems deep into retirement at this point. I don’t know Carolyn’s driving history but I respect her perspective on city government. As a driver I will share these thoughts which are missing from your discussion and I believe critical to truly get information that is worthwhile for drivers. Mind you, my own driving experience is limited to driving yellow for about 6 months as a sort of internship for an eventual NYC TLC Uber/Lyft driving career.
I first want to address Carolyn’s romantic vision of the yellow taxi industry and her cries over Uber and Lyft destroying that industry. The yellow taxi business was due for disruption. Owners of medallions and vehicles who had fleets out of garages were abusive to drivers like myself who did daily rentals. I didn’t do weekly rentals. I was a daily grunt renter, basically the lowest of the low at the time. Drivers like myself had to report to a garage, wait for a car whatever the garage manager granted you, and then you were expected to pay a daily rental at the end of the night. Although you were considered an “independent contractor” you were treated like an employee by being forced to rent on slow nights just so you could work weekend nights. Those slow nights were often horrible revenue producers. After rental expenses one night I recall making $16 after a 12-hour shift. The garage owners didn’t care. They just wanted their daily rental payment. Many Monday nights were not as bad as my $16 night but it was common to make less than $120 per shift. You’d also have to pay off the dispatcher in the form of “tips” just so you could get a decent car and/or your car earlier if you came in earlier before your 5 pm shift. I lived on Long Island, so I would have to commute daily to Long Island City to get my daily yellow taxi. I won’t get into any of the number of punitive charges garages would give drivers nor the aggravation drivers would go through if a dispatcher had a beef with a driver. Driving a yellow taxi from a garage daily was brutal but if you could survive that, you could survive almost anything in the TLC business. Uber and Lyft made it so much better for drivers. This is why you found many TLC drivers going from the yellow taxi business and not vice-versa. I won’t go into the numerous nuances of why that was great but suffice it to say very few people returned to drive a yellow taxi once they were an Uber/Lyft driver. I truly believe Uber has been good for drivers and it has been good for the NYC passengers, especially putting cars were there were none before. As Abe himself pointed out, yellow taxis are mostly below 96th Street on the East Side of and 110th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. They belong there. They have a place there. I would argue and have argued FHVs really have no business being there UNLESS there is extraordinary demand from the riding public (such as during a rainstorm or other peak times).
Electric vehicle requirements is and will continue to be a disaster. Unfortunately, the simpleton mindset of “electric vehicle good/gasoline vehicle bad” is hurting drivers who don’t know what they’re getting into, as Dawood pointed out with the example of the driver who recently purchased an EV. There will be THOUSANDS of stories like this with drivers paying relatively more for insurance, vehicle costs, and time waiting for electric charges on a woefully inadequate infrastructure. The shit hasn’t started to hit the fan yet on this issue but it will in due time and this will be a failure of the TLC, the ignorant and misinformed City Council, and possibly the Mayor’s office.
I’d like to address FHV rentals, which is not getting enough positive press and has even been so far as labeled as “predatory.” I have my own FHV vehicle license yet I was in a car accident where my car was totaled. While I was waiting for insurance to sort things out and get a new vehicle, I decided to rent from a very popular rental TLC-vehicle rental company. I was paying $504 every week for a 2020 Mitsubishi Outlander. Considering people are renting for $125/week the right to an FHV license, I was essentially paying $379 for the use of this vehicle. I didn’t have to pay for oil changes, maintenance, repairs, nor a DMV vehicle inspection. The rental company took care of all of that at no cost to me other than my regular weekly payment. They assumed the risk for increased in insurance premiums and all the other costs of vehicle ownership subject to inflation. Dawood states the profit margins come out to 5-10% and I’d say that’s about right. That’s almost the slim profit margins of supermarkets and no one accuses supermarkets of being “predatory.” This language is dangerous, especially when it came out of media communications from the chairman of the TLC. Would I do this rental permanently? Of course, not. I have an FHV vehicle license and eventually my costs go lower but I also assume risks major vehicle repairs and therefore any savings I may have had versus renting are mitigated that and even vehicle accidents, as I am learning. Renters don’t worry about these risks and some may feel emotionally better off with renting rather than outright owning. To each his own but I don’t feel rental companies are ripping drivers off and they are certainly not predatory. Keep in mind that a hardworking driver can potentially make (and still stay within fatigue rules) $2,000 to $3,000 above a rental of $504. That’s a yearly range of $100k to $150k revenue AFTER vehicle rental expenses and the only other expenses are gasoline and cleaning the vehicle. Not too shabby and there are actual drivers quietly making these numbers. That’s not a bad living and I doubt these drivers would claim to feel preyed upon.
Thank you for the podcast. Please try to get current drivers to join you folks.
Thanks for this incredibly detailed response, fantastic! How about you, would like to join the next podcast? Seems like you can speak well to the industry and the experience as a current TLC driver. Open invitation (email info@automarketplace.com and we can set it up!)
Working for a garage is sort of like Military Basic Training. Those who served our country understand what I mean. After Basic Training you are ready to go out and do service while rising in rank.
Now you are ready to put down some money and buy a medallion. You're now on your own. You can now work when you want and answer only to the law(TLC). Your financial value rises each time you make payments on your license.
After you are even and out of debt, you can retire and have an income to help you in your senior years.
Well, that's the way it was for 75 years, until one very wealthy politician decided we shouldn't have this right anymore. So he uses he financial power to upset it. He even says publicly he will do this, and he did.
He ruined it for many taxi owner drivers and and Ride share drivers also.
Where is your future with Uber? What will you retire on? You will retire on used cars while the Uber Stock holders are laughing all the way to the Bank and beyond!
I have a lot of respect for what past generations of taxi drivers like yourself did with respect to the yellow taxi industry and the medallion system, Abe. Let’s look at what a medallion REALLY is, according to Wikipedia: “The medallion system is a government-created intentional constraint on the supply of taxicabs, and because cities have historically increased the number of medallions at a slower rate than the growth in demand for taxis, medallions have generally been considered a valuable investment, though recently the increased supply of cars for hire created by ridesharing companies has been eroding the value of medallions.” I think we can agree that definition is correct as you implied that the mere whim of a politician was able to change government policy and eventually the law to allow for rideshare to disrupt the yellow taxi medallion system, a system which basically only served a small portion of land (arguably below 110th on the West and 96th Street on the East sides of Manhattan). Theoretically (and in TLC fantasy world) the yellow taxi system was supposed to have served the entire population of New York City but, for all intents and purposes, it served the elite (and, arguably, non-Black population) of Manhattan. I’m not going to get into racist practices of yellow taxi drivers but there are countless stories of Black customers not being serviced by yellow taxi drivers. I’m also not accusing you, Abe, of racism. I don’t know you at all and I’m speaking in general. Needless to say, the yellow taxi business was not perfect and did not serve all of NYC, not by a long shot. Couple this with the fact that the value of medallions rose and fell on government policy and, yes, it was only a matter of time before a politician like Mayor Bloomberg (who was then and still is a well established businessman and as Mayor looked for practical solutions to problems within NYC) allowed Uber to come into NYC with impunity. But this didn’t occur only in NYC, this happened around the world and disrupted the medallion systems in other cities both in the USA and abroad. For those municipalities that did not have a medallion system but instead had their own form of limited disbursement government licenses to drive in a particular areas they, too, suffered from the “invasion” of rideshare. My point is the value of a medallion to rise from $10 in the 1930s to over a million dollars 8 or so years ago was due to the GOVERNMENT restraining its access. Look at what happened to the green cab system after Mayor Bloomberg tried to introduce that so you could at least get a cab on a rainy night. Yellow cab owners fought tooth and nail through the Albany legislature to prevent green cabs from coming into their precious, elite zones of Manhattan. Again, government intervention kept inflating the value of medallions. Medallions themselves were not inflated due to organic growth (like most successful businesses). Medallions were inflated because some government officials said, “Despite the fact that we have barely increased the number of medallions since inception yet the population of Manhattan has exploded, we’ll keep it at a relatively low and artificial number.” The lobbying (and lobby and campaign dollars!) by medallion owners became, simply put, corrupt. Putrid, really. Mayor Bloomberg saw this and wanted change. Heck, he was beaten by yellow taxi owners (a group that was now acquiring more individual medallions and consolidating both wealth and power ala Taxi King) himself on green cabs because NYC did not and still does not control the number of medallions. This is a New York State function.
Let’s look at this romantic vision of garages being “boot camp” before you go on to own a medallion, Abe, because garage owners started screwing drivers, too, and splashed cold water on the dreams of taxi drivers who wanted to make driving a career. Garages used to do a 50/50 split of fares with drivers. Back then BOTH the driver and garage shared in the risk and rewards of how the shift went, assuming the driver was honest and didn’t take off-meter fares. At some point the system changed to flat fare rental charges for the drivers. Garage owners no longer had to worry whether the driver was honest or not because they now got their daily flat rental fee. It also reduced the independence of drivers because now garages were forcing “independent contractor” drivers to drive as many shifts as possible, lack of business for the driver be damned! This is how I came to make my $16 one night. How am I supposed to save for a then $800,000 medallion making $2-9/hour on Monday and Tuesday nights yet the owners got their $330 for those two nights? How do I get out of driving lousy nights when it’s not busy? How do I get to choose between a hybrid vehicle that uses $15 of gasoline a shift versus a Crown Vic that uses $45 of gasoline unless I BRIBE some burly Russian who is monitoring how much I tip him? How do I get out from under this because I don’t have independence (i.e., freedom) nor do I have the financial means to acquire a medallion license?
So, under that somewhat corrupt and underserved canopy now comes Uber and it was brilliant. It was so damn brilliant that drivers left the garages in DROVES! Heck, many of them heard of the great Uber fares back in 2012 that they bypassed the garages and livery bases altogether and went straight to Uber! I was one of them in 2014 but due to my utter lack of street knowledge I had to start with yellow taxi as more of an internship. I’m still with Uber and now Lyft. Has rideshare been perfect? By no means. Have they tried to REDUCE fares (and thus my earnings) over time? Absolutely! Am I now at the whim of government intervention to have higher pay through some complicated formula of utility rates, etc.? Yes. However, do I have the potential to now make $2,500 to $3,500 in revenue WEEKLY if I work hard? Yes, I do and yes making gross revenue of upwards of $180k is possible with standard rideshare without violating fatigue rules. Men and women are doing that today. They can save their earnings, invest in their retirement, control their investment products, buy property, whatever. Could it all go away if you have a runaway TLC giving out EV vehicle licenses to infinity and thereby they cause an oversupply of rideshare vehicles? Sure! There’s a reason why drivers rushed away from the yellow taxi and garage system to rideshare: their lives sucked working for guys like the Taxi King, who Mayor Bloomberg put in his place at that Knicks game.
I’m sorry, Abe, but the game changed and drivers had to do what was best for them and their families in New York City. Technology does that. You can’t blame a brother for wanting his own manna from Heaven. I would agree that Uber in NYC is very unique than the rest of the world because of the city government intervention. The jury is still out on Uber left unabated in the rest of the world however drivers are still driving and it’s a purer form of supply-and-demand economics. These chapters of the NYC FHV and yellow taxi transportation industry are still being written. See what happens. Thank you for your reply.
Thank you for your response, Abe. It was an honor doing this debate with you and, I’m afraid, we’re both right but we’re taking this from two different generations. I wish you the best.
Great podcast, there are two options that come to mind: either the people in charge are not very smart or they are mired in corruption; there's no other way to explain their actions.
You're the only one speaking up about this, it's unclear why everyone else is silent.
🙏 Abe’s NYC Taxi News also has some great content - https://nyctaxinews.com/ and Carolyn is a great follow on -Twitter/X (@ NYC_TMODA)
Thank you
I have tried to hear these podcasts before but this is the first time I have heard an entire episode. Personally, I have found these podcasts mildly frustrating because there are no CURRENT drivers (either FHV or yellow taxi but preferably both) on the panel. Yes, Abe was once a driver by he seems deep into retirement at this point. I don’t know Carolyn’s driving history but I respect her perspective on city government. As a driver I will share these thoughts which are missing from your discussion and I believe critical to truly get information that is worthwhile for drivers. Mind you, my own driving experience is limited to driving yellow for about 6 months as a sort of internship for an eventual NYC TLC Uber/Lyft driving career.
I first want to address Carolyn’s romantic vision of the yellow taxi industry and her cries over Uber and Lyft destroying that industry. The yellow taxi business was due for disruption. Owners of medallions and vehicles who had fleets out of garages were abusive to drivers like myself who did daily rentals. I didn’t do weekly rentals. I was a daily grunt renter, basically the lowest of the low at the time. Drivers like myself had to report to a garage, wait for a car whatever the garage manager granted you, and then you were expected to pay a daily rental at the end of the night. Although you were considered an “independent contractor” you were treated like an employee by being forced to rent on slow nights just so you could work weekend nights. Those slow nights were often horrible revenue producers. After rental expenses one night I recall making $16 after a 12-hour shift. The garage owners didn’t care. They just wanted their daily rental payment. Many Monday nights were not as bad as my $16 night but it was common to make less than $120 per shift. You’d also have to pay off the dispatcher in the form of “tips” just so you could get a decent car and/or your car earlier if you came in earlier before your 5 pm shift. I lived on Long Island, so I would have to commute daily to Long Island City to get my daily yellow taxi. I won’t get into any of the number of punitive charges garages would give drivers nor the aggravation drivers would go through if a dispatcher had a beef with a driver. Driving a yellow taxi from a garage daily was brutal but if you could survive that, you could survive almost anything in the TLC business. Uber and Lyft made it so much better for drivers. This is why you found many TLC drivers going from the yellow taxi business and not vice-versa. I won’t go into the numerous nuances of why that was great but suffice it to say very few people returned to drive a yellow taxi once they were an Uber/Lyft driver. I truly believe Uber has been good for drivers and it has been good for the NYC passengers, especially putting cars were there were none before. As Abe himself pointed out, yellow taxis are mostly below 96th Street on the East Side of and 110th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. They belong there. They have a place there. I would argue and have argued FHVs really have no business being there UNLESS there is extraordinary demand from the riding public (such as during a rainstorm or other peak times).
Electric vehicle requirements is and will continue to be a disaster. Unfortunately, the simpleton mindset of “electric vehicle good/gasoline vehicle bad” is hurting drivers who don’t know what they’re getting into, as Dawood pointed out with the example of the driver who recently purchased an EV. There will be THOUSANDS of stories like this with drivers paying relatively more for insurance, vehicle costs, and time waiting for electric charges on a woefully inadequate infrastructure. The shit hasn’t started to hit the fan yet on this issue but it will in due time and this will be a failure of the TLC, the ignorant and misinformed City Council, and possibly the Mayor’s office.
I’d like to address FHV rentals, which is not getting enough positive press and has even been so far as labeled as “predatory.” I have my own FHV vehicle license yet I was in a car accident where my car was totaled. While I was waiting for insurance to sort things out and get a new vehicle, I decided to rent from a very popular rental TLC-vehicle rental company. I was paying $504 every week for a 2020 Mitsubishi Outlander. Considering people are renting for $125/week the right to an FHV license, I was essentially paying $379 for the use of this vehicle. I didn’t have to pay for oil changes, maintenance, repairs, nor a DMV vehicle inspection. The rental company took care of all of that at no cost to me other than my regular weekly payment. They assumed the risk for increased in insurance premiums and all the other costs of vehicle ownership subject to inflation. Dawood states the profit margins come out to 5-10% and I’d say that’s about right. That’s almost the slim profit margins of supermarkets and no one accuses supermarkets of being “predatory.” This language is dangerous, especially when it came out of media communications from the chairman of the TLC. Would I do this rental permanently? Of course, not. I have an FHV vehicle license and eventually my costs go lower but I also assume risks major vehicle repairs and therefore any savings I may have had versus renting are mitigated that and even vehicle accidents, as I am learning. Renters don’t worry about these risks and some may feel emotionally better off with renting rather than outright owning. To each his own but I don’t feel rental companies are ripping drivers off and they are certainly not predatory. Keep in mind that a hardworking driver can potentially make (and still stay within fatigue rules) $2,000 to $3,000 above a rental of $504. That’s a yearly range of $100k to $150k revenue AFTER vehicle rental expenses and the only other expenses are gasoline and cleaning the vehicle. Not too shabby and there are actual drivers quietly making these numbers. That’s not a bad living and I doubt these drivers would claim to feel preyed upon.
Thank you for the podcast. Please try to get current drivers to join you folks.
Thanks for this incredibly detailed response, fantastic! How about you, would like to join the next podcast? Seems like you can speak well to the industry and the experience as a current TLC driver. Open invitation (email info@automarketplace.com and we can set it up!)
Working for a garage is sort of like Military Basic Training. Those who served our country understand what I mean. After Basic Training you are ready to go out and do service while rising in rank.
Now you are ready to put down some money and buy a medallion. You're now on your own. You can now work when you want and answer only to the law(TLC). Your financial value rises each time you make payments on your license.
After you are even and out of debt, you can retire and have an income to help you in your senior years.
Well, that's the way it was for 75 years, until one very wealthy politician decided we shouldn't have this right anymore. So he uses he financial power to upset it. He even says publicly he will do this, and he did.
He ruined it for many taxi owner drivers and and Ride share drivers also.
Where is your future with Uber? What will you retire on? You will retire on used cars while the Uber Stock holders are laughing all the way to the Bank and beyond!
OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE WHAT I'M SAYING
I have a lot of respect for what past generations of taxi drivers like yourself did with respect to the yellow taxi industry and the medallion system, Abe. Let’s look at what a medallion REALLY is, according to Wikipedia: “The medallion system is a government-created intentional constraint on the supply of taxicabs, and because cities have historically increased the number of medallions at a slower rate than the growth in demand for taxis, medallions have generally been considered a valuable investment, though recently the increased supply of cars for hire created by ridesharing companies has been eroding the value of medallions.” I think we can agree that definition is correct as you implied that the mere whim of a politician was able to change government policy and eventually the law to allow for rideshare to disrupt the yellow taxi medallion system, a system which basically only served a small portion of land (arguably below 110th on the West and 96th Street on the East sides of Manhattan). Theoretically (and in TLC fantasy world) the yellow taxi system was supposed to have served the entire population of New York City but, for all intents and purposes, it served the elite (and, arguably, non-Black population) of Manhattan. I’m not going to get into racist practices of yellow taxi drivers but there are countless stories of Black customers not being serviced by yellow taxi drivers. I’m also not accusing you, Abe, of racism. I don’t know you at all and I’m speaking in general. Needless to say, the yellow taxi business was not perfect and did not serve all of NYC, not by a long shot. Couple this with the fact that the value of medallions rose and fell on government policy and, yes, it was only a matter of time before a politician like Mayor Bloomberg (who was then and still is a well established businessman and as Mayor looked for practical solutions to problems within NYC) allowed Uber to come into NYC with impunity. But this didn’t occur only in NYC, this happened around the world and disrupted the medallion systems in other cities both in the USA and abroad. For those municipalities that did not have a medallion system but instead had their own form of limited disbursement government licenses to drive in a particular areas they, too, suffered from the “invasion” of rideshare. My point is the value of a medallion to rise from $10 in the 1930s to over a million dollars 8 or so years ago was due to the GOVERNMENT restraining its access. Look at what happened to the green cab system after Mayor Bloomberg tried to introduce that so you could at least get a cab on a rainy night. Yellow cab owners fought tooth and nail through the Albany legislature to prevent green cabs from coming into their precious, elite zones of Manhattan. Again, government intervention kept inflating the value of medallions. Medallions themselves were not inflated due to organic growth (like most successful businesses). Medallions were inflated because some government officials said, “Despite the fact that we have barely increased the number of medallions since inception yet the population of Manhattan has exploded, we’ll keep it at a relatively low and artificial number.” The lobbying (and lobby and campaign dollars!) by medallion owners became, simply put, corrupt. Putrid, really. Mayor Bloomberg saw this and wanted change. Heck, he was beaten by yellow taxi owners (a group that was now acquiring more individual medallions and consolidating both wealth and power ala Taxi King) himself on green cabs because NYC did not and still does not control the number of medallions. This is a New York State function.
Let’s look at this romantic vision of garages being “boot camp” before you go on to own a medallion, Abe, because garage owners started screwing drivers, too, and splashed cold water on the dreams of taxi drivers who wanted to make driving a career. Garages used to do a 50/50 split of fares with drivers. Back then BOTH the driver and garage shared in the risk and rewards of how the shift went, assuming the driver was honest and didn’t take off-meter fares. At some point the system changed to flat fare rental charges for the drivers. Garage owners no longer had to worry whether the driver was honest or not because they now got their daily flat rental fee. It also reduced the independence of drivers because now garages were forcing “independent contractor” drivers to drive as many shifts as possible, lack of business for the driver be damned! This is how I came to make my $16 one night. How am I supposed to save for a then $800,000 medallion making $2-9/hour on Monday and Tuesday nights yet the owners got their $330 for those two nights? How do I get out of driving lousy nights when it’s not busy? How do I get to choose between a hybrid vehicle that uses $15 of gasoline a shift versus a Crown Vic that uses $45 of gasoline unless I BRIBE some burly Russian who is monitoring how much I tip him? How do I get out from under this because I don’t have independence (i.e., freedom) nor do I have the financial means to acquire a medallion license?
So, under that somewhat corrupt and underserved canopy now comes Uber and it was brilliant. It was so damn brilliant that drivers left the garages in DROVES! Heck, many of them heard of the great Uber fares back in 2012 that they bypassed the garages and livery bases altogether and went straight to Uber! I was one of them in 2014 but due to my utter lack of street knowledge I had to start with yellow taxi as more of an internship. I’m still with Uber and now Lyft. Has rideshare been perfect? By no means. Have they tried to REDUCE fares (and thus my earnings) over time? Absolutely! Am I now at the whim of government intervention to have higher pay through some complicated formula of utility rates, etc.? Yes. However, do I have the potential to now make $2,500 to $3,500 in revenue WEEKLY if I work hard? Yes, I do and yes making gross revenue of upwards of $180k is possible with standard rideshare without violating fatigue rules. Men and women are doing that today. They can save their earnings, invest in their retirement, control their investment products, buy property, whatever. Could it all go away if you have a runaway TLC giving out EV vehicle licenses to infinity and thereby they cause an oversupply of rideshare vehicles? Sure! There’s a reason why drivers rushed away from the yellow taxi and garage system to rideshare: their lives sucked working for guys like the Taxi King, who Mayor Bloomberg put in his place at that Knicks game.
I’m sorry, Abe, but the game changed and drivers had to do what was best for them and their families in New York City. Technology does that. You can’t blame a brother for wanting his own manna from Heaven. I would agree that Uber in NYC is very unique than the rest of the world because of the city government intervention. The jury is still out on Uber left unabated in the rest of the world however drivers are still driving and it’s a purer form of supply-and-demand economics. These chapters of the NYC FHV and yellow taxi transportation industry are still being written. See what happens. Thank you for your reply.
Uber Guy,
I'm not going to argue with the soap box stand you are taking.
There are honest and dishonest people in all businesses.
This includes Uber and other ride share drivers also.
The honest medallion owners were getting something for the years of work. There was a future.
The ride share drivers have no future.
Which one do you think is better for the hard workers of the industry?
The medallion taxis did the best they could to cover the whole city.
More medallions should have been given to those who wanted to fill the gaps.
Instead Uber took advantage of the situation with profits for the stock holders.
The creator of Uber walked away with over a billion dollars.
This, after the medallion owners were robbed of the same.
That money could have gone to the UBER Drivers. Not to say it belonged to the medallion owners
who paid the City of NY for the rights.
Don't forget that in the last medallion auction the City of NY took millions of dollars
from the buyers. They were promised the American Dream. The new medallion owners borrowed the money
and gave it to the Bloomberg Administration. Then the Bloomberg Administration turned their backs and kept the money.
They already knew what the real future was to be.
I'm done, I have nothing else to say!!!
Thank you for your response, Abe. It was an honor doing this debate with you and, I’m afraid, we’re both right but we’re taking this from two different generations. I wish you the best.
Thank you!