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 Cabbies Cry Foul By Matt Reed Outside the Delta Terminal at LaGuardia, cab drivers lean on each other’s hoods, chatting as they wait for their turn at passengers coming out of arrivals. As a group, cab drivers in New York speak more than 60 languages. But with each other they speak English, and today, talk turns once again to rising gas prices. Drivers had heard on a WINS radio news report earlier in the day that a Brooklyn Heights gas station was charging $4.14 a gallon for regular self-serve, an unprecedented amount. They worried that other gas stations would follow.
More expensive gas means less take-home-pay for cab drivers, most of whom work as independent contractors and rent their cab for the day. But rising gas prices and smaller profits aren’t the drivers’ only worry. There’s also chatter about the city’s proposal to put global positioning devices in cabs, devices that could track the whereabouts of every taxi in New York, and could potentially cost each cabbie thousands of dollars. This is a major concern for many cab drivers. Dozens of drivers staged a rally in October to protest the idea, said Bhairavi Desai, the co-founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, an organization formed in 1998 to address working conditions for taxi drivers. Putting an interactive “information monitor” in cabs would give passengers the ability to follow their trip’s progress through a backseat video screen, according to a March 2005 Taxi and Limousine Commission statement. “It will also provide an invaluable tool for both policy analysis and citywide transportation policy by allowing the TLC to study taxicab availability and usage patterns,” and help passengers retrieve lost property, the statement said. But the GPS devices – called Advanced Vehicle Locator by the TLC and used in cities like Chicago and Houston – would also help authorities track the whereabouts of drivers, Desai said. Desai said it is not a coincidence that this system is being tried out on an immigrant industry with a large percentage of Muslims. More than 38 percent of today's cab drivers are from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, and 91 percent of all cab drivers were born outside the United States, up from 74 percent in 1984, according to the NYC Taxicab Fact Book. Cab drivers waiting for passengers at LaGuardia sounded wary about the proposal. “This is like an office. We believe we need a little bit of privacy in the cab,” said Adel, a driver from Nigeria. “I think it is a wonderful idea as long as it doesn’t cross the line.” “They don’t like it all,” said Ali Mujahid, a spokesman for the Pakistan-USA Freedom Forum, a New York-based civil rights group. “[Pakistani] cab drivers are not convinced that the system is necessary.” Drivers who own their cab are particularly opposed to the idea, according to a TLC report. After conducting focus groups with drivers in 2004, the TLC found that reactions to the idea varied. But the report also found that the ability to turn off the GPS device when not on duty eased drivers’ concerns. Drivers who own their cab may be forced to pay installation fees for the GPS system, which could cost more than $5,000, Desai said. And drivers who do not own their cab, but rent each day from a garage, would see their daily rate go up as garages seek to make up for the installation cost, she said. The proposal is on hold for now. But whether the proposal becomes a reality may hinge more on pocketbooks than on privacy concerns, according to Joseph, a Haitian immigrant and a cab driver. “Instead of just putting the GPS in cabs to control where the driver is, they could put the GPS in to show the cabbie where to go [in the city] with customers,” he said. “Most cab drivers have the mentality of a few dollars…so, the only way the driver will have an interest in this is if they put it in there to help the driver make their business much easier.” |
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© 2006 NYC24 is a production of the New Media Workshop at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism |
