Life Behind The Wheel: The Daily Struggle Of Cab, Uber Drivers

NEW YORK — Like much of the city, the street in front of Nicolae Hent’s modest Middle Village home was quiet and empty on the Thursday morning after Christmas. In an alley out back, Hent’s taxi hummed as he polished its windows with Windex. The spray resembled the steam of hot breath in the crisp air.

Hent eased his 2011 Ford Crown Victoria from the alley and drove it to LaGuardia Airport, a usual first stop on his long driving shifts. The route took him past the home of Nicanor Ochisor, his close friend and fellow cabbie who died by suicide last March.

From the airport, he traversed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, speaking with some of the same passion that he’s shown outside City Hall recently, where he’s joined other drivers at protests since Ochisor’s death. But his vigor didn’t stop him from noticing an unusual noise as the sedan sauntered through lower Manhattan.

“Any time I have a noise, it bothers me,” he said.

When he started in February 1988, driving a New York City taxi seemed like a good opportunity for Hent, who had immigrated to the U.S. from communist Romania about three years earlier.

Hent invested in the industry by buying his own taxi medallion in 1990 and supported his wife and two now-grown daughters on his income. He previously planned to retire this year.

But what was once a good living became a daily struggle with the advent of Uber and other ride-hailing services. Hent says 60 cents of every dollar he earns gets eaten up by expenses such as maintenance, inspections and insurance. His cut of the $94,000 in revenue he made in 2017 was less than $25,000, he said.

Hent still has more than eight years left on the mortgage on his medallion, which he bought for $125,000. Now 62, he’s uneasy about his future in the job to which he’s dedicated most of his adult life.

“I feel stuck,” he said. “I feel the city of New York robbed me 100 percent.”

To Hent, the city has done too little, too late to help the taxi industry now that companies such as Uber and Lyft have flooded the streets with cars. He blamed the weak leadership of Taxi and Limousine Commissioner Meera Joshi, whom he called the worst taxi chief in city history.

Meanwhile, eight professional drivers have taken their own lives within the past 14 months, many of them facing crushing financial pressure.

“Delay, delay, delay — that’s what they are doing very well,” Hent said.

A TLC spokeswoman defended Joshi, saying the commissioner’s tenure has seen many improvements for the industry and the removal of outdated regulations. For example, the spokeswoman said, under Joshi the TLC has approved a pilot program allowing traditional cabs to offer flat upfront fares, as ride-hailing apps do. Joshi plans to leave her post in March, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Saturday.

“Under Commissioner Joshi’s leadership, the TLC has made a tremendous amount of advances in safety, consumer protection, driver protection, and accessibility, as well as gained significant new access to for-hire vehicle data, which is an important gain for public policy,” the spokeswoman, Rebecca Harshbarger, said in an email.

Hent’s shift in his cab usually lasts around 12 hours, starting with an airport run in the late morning and finishing by midnight. He said he typically gets about 30 fares in that time.
It used to be as many as 50. Earlier in his career he could find passengers at any time of day across the city, he said. Now the pickings are much slimmer.

“Usually I come back home when I have the money, what I have to make,” he said. That’s at least $1,800 a week to cover his expenses.

“If you don’t make it one day, the next five days, maybe you’ll recover,” he said. “But if you don’t make it two days, you’ll never recover.”

Aziz Bah also saw promise on the road when he started driving for Uber in 2014, when ride-hailing apps were burgeoning.

The Corona father of two quit his job at Time Warner Cable, rented a 2013 Chevy Suburban and started working on Uber’s pricey Black SUV service. That generally gives drivers more down time than the standard UberX mode, Bah said.

In the beginning, Bah, 43, could make $400 or more in just eight hours behind the wheel, he said. Now, he said, drivers have to work twice as hard for about half as much money in a highly saturated market. He sometimes waits as long as two hours between rides.

While Bah's earnings vary, in one mid-December week he made about $933 for 28 and a half hours on the job. More than half that amount is eaten up just by the $500 weekly rent he said he pays for his vehicle.

Business is good during the bustling holiday season but much leaner in the sleepy summer months, Bah said.

“People will just kind of hit a brick wall, because they are out circling, circling, all day, nothing happens,” said Bah, who immigrated to the U.S. from Senegal in 2000. “... We try to save now, even though there’s no money to be saved, to be honest.”

At LaGuardia, Hent navigated his taxi through trench-like lanes improvised to accommodate work on the airport’s $8 billion renovation. His car squeezed past black vehicles with Taxi and Limousine Commission license plates, many of which are likely working for Uber, Lyft or another app.

Those plates are omnipresent on city streets. Later, Hent passed one stopped in a no-standing zone on West Street near the World Trade Center. He said he worries about getting a summons for doing just the same thing.

Bah worries about tickets, too — he said he gets a lot of them when he parks his SUV while waiting for a ride to be hailed. When he doesn’t park, he’s forced to circle the streets burning fuel.

Hent and Bah both expressed distrust in the powerful forces that oversee their work, including the TLC and the giant ride-hailing firms. They said the city’s much-heralded freeze on most new for-hire vehicles has not improved their livelihoods, or traffic, in its first four months.

To Bah, that’s because large fleet owners went on a car-buying spree before the cap took effect. The number of TLC-licensed cars working for high-volume ride-hailing apps did risefrom 78,100 in July to 82,247 in October, commission statistics show.

“There are a lot more cars right now because everybody just jumped in,” said Bah, who is also a steward for the Independent Drivers Guild, a labor group for app-based drivers. “Even people that didn’t want to jump in right away saw it as like, ‘Hey, let me jump in before they close it for good.’”

The TLC supports the freeze and is studying traffic congestion, traffic safety, driver income and other topics with the city’s Department of Transportation while it’s in effect, Harshbarger said.

Bah, who also drives for Lyft and Juno, is hopeful that the TLC’s new minimum pay rules for app-based drivers will make things better. The drivers guild pushed aggressively for those rules, which establish a minimum pay rate for each trip.

But Bah said drivers worry the app firms will try to “penalize” them by forcing those on pricier services such as Uber Black to accept cheaper pooled trips, which are shared by several passengers. Uber, though, says no drivers are required to accept pooled trips and there’s no penalty for choosing not to take them.

“Uber supports the (City) Council's driver earnings bill to ensure that full-time drivers in NYC — whether driving with taxi, limo or Uber — are able to make a living wage,” company spokeswoman Alix Anfang said in a statement.

Another threat looms in the congestion surcharge on trips to and from Manhattan’s core that Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law last year. Cabbies and app-based drivers alike consider it another financial burden on their already heavily taxed businesses.

Taxi drivers will be “toast” if those fees are implemented, Hent said. But some relief came last month when a state judge blocked them from taking effect after Hent and other medallion owners sued.

“The judge said, ‘OK, hold it.’ I am proud of that,” Hent said. “Cuomo cannot be a dictator the way he wants.”

Spending just a couple hours in a car, let alone a dozen, can make one’s back ache and strain the bladder. Hent takes walks in the airport and stretches in his seat to ease the physical stress, though he said it has taken a toll on his sciatic nerve.

He also plays tennis in mornings and on weekends. He takes Sundays off, but hasn’t had a vacation in the last two years.

Asked if he likes his job, all things considered, Hent paused.

“I have to make a living,” he said.

(Lead image: Nicolae Hent of Middle Village, 62, has been driving a taxi since 1988. He had immigrated to the U.S. from communist Romania about three years earlier. Photos by Noah Manskar/Patch)