The Off-Duty Light: Should It Stay, or Should It Go?

It's now been several weeks since the Taxi & Limousine Commission -- at the end of November -- passed, by a vote of 7-1, a regulation that will  eliminate the off-duty light from the roof of New York City medallion cabs.  By May 1, off-duty lights must be out of sight, if not out of mind.

They'd been perched atop cabs for years, on both sides of the medallion number that, when illuminated, means a cab is otherwise available to pick up hails from the street.  An unlit medallion light has signified a cab has a fare and is thus unavailable.  A lit off-duty light has signaled a cabbie was either taking a break or had ended his or her shift and was heading back to their garage.

So, hey, the off-duty designation's been right up there with tradition and lore.  Kinda like the New York Giants baseball team was before they and the Dodgers moved to California at the end of the 1957 season.  What's going on here?  Is this déjà vu one more time, all over again?

The TLC majority said the off-duty light was confusing to the public and hard to see.  More importantly, they argued, cab drivers had used it to dupe the public as to whether they were actually free for fares or not, so that they could press desperate passengers to pay higher-than-legal fares.

It's no secret that some drivers are cheats.  How they do it is they have both their medallion and off-duty lights on, thus sending mixed signals as to whether they're available or unavailable to pick up fares.  That gives them an opening to negotiate with passengers about where they would be willing to go and how much they'd charge for going there.  That's illegal.  A passenger is only supposed to pay the figure the meter shows at the trip's conclusion.  But the public, feeling helpless, has often been willing to negotiate a fare price that's unfair to the rider.

That's been especially true on nights like New Year's Eve, when hopeful riders in the early morning hours sometimes outnumbered free cabs by thirty to one.  A cab would pull over with its off-duty lights on, and take the highest bid.  Illegal, but who was to stop them? 

On the other hand, a cab driver who, say, is legitimately off-duty and driving back to their garage at shift's end, does sometime stop to give rides to passengers if those rides are roughly on the way to their garage.  That's technically illegal as well, but probably shouldn't be -- because it's really just all-around practical sense, and in the interest of both the driver and the public.  In those instances the passenger   -- who's in search of a taxi in any case -- pays what the meter says, and is paying no more and no less than the legal rate.

No denying that there's been confusion.  Matt Flegenheimer, the reporter who wrote up the TLC's decision in the New York Times, showed himself among the confused by his fuzzy distinction between an available and unavailable cab. 

But will eliminating the off-duty light make things any clearer, for either resident New Yorkers or out-of-towners in the city for a limited stay?

Will doing away with off-duty lights prevent unscrupulous cabbies from turning off their medallion lights -- which, under the new guidelines, is meant to indicate they are unavailable -- and pulling over to people hungry for rides and negotiating a higher-than-legal fare? 

No way.  Nothing's gonna change (unless the TLC gets its own undercover inspectors out onto the streets at key times, and don't hold your breath for that).

"It's still going to go on," said Iris Weinshall, the city's former transportation commissioner and the lone member of the taxi commission's board to vote against the roof-light proposal. So if the new rules won't curtail "cherry-picking fares, why mess with it?" she reportedly said in an interview.

Here we have not only a city with some really significant problems, but a city in a country gone economically awry, where supposedly intelligent people are not even asking telling questions as to how the wage structure has evolved to radically favor the rich and well-placed in the course of this last century (at the expense of the rest of us).

To be engaged in mindless quibbling about off-duty lights on yellow cabs is, in context, the real tragedy.  Sure, the TLC commissioners get paid nice dollars for this waste of time, but the issue was much ado about nothing to begin with.

Book-in-Progress Excerpt: A Bizarre Drop-In

In my very first post here, back in mid-August, I mentioned the planned rewriting of my book-in-progress about my experiences as a yellow-cab driver in the rough-and-tumble 1980s.  As time's allowed, I've gotten into the third draft of that project, and now I'm about a fifth of the way in. It's been tough work, and I'm giving myself a few weeks away from it, a kind of rest-and-recuperation period to get my brain recharged.

To keep Return Cabbie moving in the interim, I thought I'd post an excerpt from my rewrite.  At the moment, the excerpt below opens the book.

A Bizarre Drop-In

AS THE light changed to green and I was about to accelerate from a dead stop on Eighth Avenue in the 20s, a scrawny, disheveled Hispanic man of indeterminate age, his frayed shirt held by a single button, burst into the back of my cab, slamming the door shut.

"Go, go, go," he shouted, jabbing one hand and then the other forward while he kept spinning around in the seat, frantically looking through the rear window to see if who knows what was gaining on us from behind, glancing every other second through a side window as well, as if not wanting to be taken by surprise from either of those directions.

"Go, go, go," he shrieked as we picked up speed in a central lane, the late rush-hour traffic giving us some leeway to make progress.

I was in one of those moods, perverse to the point of wanting to get a better taste of what I now found on my plate.  There was no security partition in the cab to separate me from this all-too-berserk person, his hands gesticulating wildly not far from my face, but I didn't feel in any particular danger.  Startled, yes, and amused certainly -- I couldn't help but wonder what in fuck was going on in my visitor's head.  Still, I sensed an opportunity.  After all, the possibility of these kinds of strange encounters had been, for me, one of the initial attractions of the job.  I knew I wanted to keep some hold on the reins, but I decided to cut a lot of slack and see where things ended up.

As I slowed for a light, he again screamed, "Go, go straight, keep going, don't stop," urgency and terror tracking his voice.  There was a break in the cross-street traffic, so I went through the red light, now feeling a real buzz from the action.  I hit another red one block up and, as he scampered back and forth across the back seat like a restless caged animal, I gave myself over to his directives, running a second light and then a third.

There was usually a heavy police presence spanning the blocks I was passing, on up through the Port Authority bus terminal to the gritty western fringes of Times Square.  I wondered why I wasn't already being chased by a cop car.  Still, even if the law-enforcement bunch were to pull me over, I was confident I could convince them a madman had commandeered my taxi and I'd driven it in fear my life was under deadly threat.

Between 31st and 33rd streets, with Penn Station to our right and the main post office's elevated grand facade off to the left, the traffic brought us to a halt.  For the moment, there was no way I could move the cab another inch forward.  The guy in back, darting his sights toward the rear window and then looking front, cut short a wailing cry and flung open the left door, leaving it ajar as he ran out erratically among the stopped vehicles.

He sprinted thirty or forty feet and then started to climb onto a panel truck, in turn bracing himself and kicking his feet until he lay flat on its roof, holding on desperately as he waited for the traffic to start up.  Hearing the thuds, the driver just as quickly emerged, with a baseball bat in his hand, and, a sport, chose to beat the interloper with the handle-end rather than the meat of the bat.  The crazed man offered no resistance and absorbed the blows for as long as he could, at last losing his grip and dropping to the surface of the road.  In a flash, he ran off westward.

I got out of my cab to push the rear door shut.  The other driver got back into his truck, and laid the bat neatly in its place.  Nothing much out of the ordinary had really happened.  This was, after all, New York in the 1980s.  It was why the more sensible drivers kept their doors locked when in search of fares, opening them only when they felt relatively satisfied that a prospective passenger was someone they could trust.

The light had turned green, and I drove up Eighth.  As I crossed 40th Street I found myself looking to my left, drawn by some floodlights high up.  I could see medics and police straining on the Port Authority building's second level to remove the body of an apparent suicide who'd leaped from the top.  It couldn't have been our man, that quickly.  Two separate lost souls, in a sliver of time.

Half-Time Observations

Having gotten behind the wheel again, for a number of nights during the summer, after a twenty-plus years' hiatus from driving a medallion -- "returning to see what's changed" -- I've taken a short break from the shifts.  I expect to drive again sometime in November but for the moment I'm getting in some "mini-vacations" (photography work-vacations) -- most recently to Ohio and Indiana.  And I'm giving myself time to step back and think over what I've found, so far, as a return hack.

Well, for one, the most obvious one -- the money was never anything to write home about, so no change there.  Early in the summer, before the rate increase (that took effect on September 4), my take-home pay ranged from $100 to $200 a night.  So the average on my 10-11 hour shifts came to about $150.  The rate increase has given that an uptick, and time will tell how long that holds (before the fleets and brokers find a way to rechannel some of our paltry earnings back into their bulging wallets).

On an ordinary night I've spent almost $45 topping up my tank at the end of my shift.  (So far, I haven't been assigned any hybrid vehicles.  A hybrid, I'm told, saves you about $20 in gas, though fleets are allowed to charge a higher lease fee on them.)  That contrasts to the Eighties, when I was usually out only $10-12 from gas charges, though at the time that seemed like a lot of money (and surely was).

Maybe it's my imagination, but traffic seems to back up more easily than it did those years before.  So, if I'm guessing right, it's gone from horrendous to worse.  The pedestrian islands (with their fake Parisian ambience) in Midtown don't help traffic flow (though they probably improve air quality) and traffic police may be understaffed in this economic downturn.  I remember being swallowed up on the evening of July 4 in the halting bumper-to-bumper traffic on Tenth Avenue, near the best vantage points for the fireworks.  The cops totally lost control of the streets to the throngs departing the show, and that left me able to inch only a few blocks uptown in a single hour. Fortunately, I had four good-humored passengers from Indianapolis suffering along with me as the meter ran (into big bucks).  Anyway, the good news is that we'd all gotten a close-up look at some really impressive fireworks.

Overall, though, the news is bad.  At least for those who value the richness and diversity of big cities like New York.

Driving a cab, around and around, you see the different neighborhoods and the people who live there and walk them and the kinds of stores that line the streets and what goes on there days and nights. 

What I've concluded is: Sameness has won, and we've lost big.  Homogeneity is the only word now for Manhattan (spreading all too soon to the outer boroughs).  Some could see this newness as pretty but it's on the ugly side of pretty.  And it's hard to imagine how we'd ever get back to real life.  It's no secret that with Giuliani and real-estate interests, homogeneity -- localized globalization -- replaced diversity in New York.  It was a relentless process, changing incrementally day by day, neighborhood by neighborhood, noticed only by those few who cared to see.  It's not just Times Square that's been Disneyfied -- that's just the tip of the family-friendly iceberg.  As Sarah Schulman wrote in The Gentrification of the Mind, "Avenue A went from the centerpiece of a Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood to the New York version of Bourbon Street in less than a decade."  No doubt, the throngs of upwardly mobile yuppies who've poured into Manhattan's norm of exorbitant-rate rentals thrive in this sanitized way of life.  Those like them are everywhere and they don't have to take notice of anyone else.  When you enjoy your free time screeching and bellowing like your television heroes, who needs what a mix of cultures can offer?

What does this mean for a New York cab driver?  Am I being nostalgic for all the wrong reasons?  Would I really like to return to the noir shadows of pre-Nineties crime and grit?  A time when cab driving in New York was sometimes rated as the most dangerous profession in America.

Given this today and that yesterday, weighing the choice of one or the other, then, well: give me back the back then.  Compared with the Eighties, the middle class and poor are today less well off in almost every essential aspect of life, and I'm not thinking merely of finances.  They now have effectively been banished to the rim of habitation outside Manhattan, performing one variety of service job or another (such as cab driving) for the rich and richer.  The quality of life -- the real "quality of life" -- has been watered down to the bland.   For cab drivers, there are few if any surprises during their 12-hour shift.  Work is hard, predictable and dull.  It is mindless drudgery.  You just push on, day after day.  And a shameful degree of servitude is now expected.  If you think this an exaggeration, I only wish you were right.  Give me the Wild West, if the only other option is a home of near-monotony on the range.

On the Road Again

It felt like a cross between a surreal experience and an up-front perspective for reality TV.  I was at the garage, and getting handed the keys to a cab, and walking out to the lot to initialize my meter.

It'd been a while ... like twenty-two years.

But, as they say, you never forget how to ride a bike.

Then it was out onto Northern Boulevard at 3:30 in the afternoon and after a few blocks, catching the ramp for the Queensboro Bridge's upper level.  It felt good, in an odd way, to be taking the wheel of a cab again.  Hey, I had done it!  I listened to the hum of the four tires on the bridge as the Manhattan skyline got larger and still larger.  Then the illusion of the open road fell away and I exited, swinging sharply eastward along 59th Street, stopping at the light so very briefly and keeping an eye out for fares and, seeing not one, pacing my way up First Avenue.  Just like old times.

For some reason I had expected to get a fare right away, and I didn't, and that was good because I didn't really want to.  I just wanted to glide around for a bit, like a Sunday driver, and it was a Sunday, July 1. Even before crossing the bridge I'd told myself I would take the day on the slow side.  I didn't care how much money I made.  I just wanted to experience the whole thing again, to get safely through the shift and see how long I could comfortably drive before my body tired.  Even when I was a medallion driver all those years earlier, I'd have to really push myself whenever I came back after taking a month off from the job -- bringing along several candy bars to be ready to deal with my body when it started to shake within five or six hours.

It took me several blocks to find a passenger, a guy who'd just bought an air conditioner at one of the large home-appliance stores.  He hoped we'd be able to store the box in the trunk, but I couldn't figure out how to spring it open -- my garage hadn't shown me the basics of the vehicle (having focused instead on my knowing the meter and information box), and that'd plague me for the first hours of the shift.  Fortunately, the guy said, "No problem, I'll just slip it in next to me on the back seat."

He lived in Queens so we headed right back across the bridge and then a long, long way up 21st Street, crossing Broadway, crossing Astoria Boulevard, going under the swift road to the Triborough Bridge.  Arriving, I told him the fare total and got ready to take his cash.  But moments passed and I realized he was processing his credit card in the back.  This was a new experience for me.  We hadn't had that facility in the 1980s.    Then my info box showed it was validated and I pressed the "C" on the panel, completing the deal.

I lucked out on the next fare, picking up a guy just a few streets down, who wanted back to Manhattan, near St. Patrick's Cathedral.

So there it was -- I was back into the mode.  One fare after another.  Not too fast, not too slow. 

Second Avenue sloped down through Midtown like it always had.  Swinging downtown through Times Square was a little different -- gentrified, infested with pedestrian malls, trying to look like social-democratic Europe when in fact being the hotspot of runaway capitalism -- in any case, I could deal with it.  The history of Times Square was a succession of changes.  Look at the old movies, you'll see, Camel cigarettes' smoke-ring and all. 

I got through the first two hours.  I was proud of myself.  In the fourth hour I pulled over and found a spot at a taxi stand near the Dil E Punjab Deli, at 170 9th Avenue.  I was looking forward to this, I had staked out the place; it was a hangout, and a respectable one, for Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi cab drivers, taking a break from their hacking while in Chelsea.  It was a nice meal.  Three vegetables, rice, bread, a little sweet and a beverage --highly recommended! -- and I ate it at my leisure standing up.

A driver there showed me how to work most of the interior instruments of my cab, so, like other drivers, I now could get the lights on and handle the essentials.  Some forty-five minutes later another hack pulled alongside me and asked me if I was aware my off-duty light was on.  I wasn't.  I must have screwed up the works when I had first tried to put on my night lights.  I hadn't noticed a fall-off in fares, but I was grateful for the help.

Six hours into the job my body still felt good.

For a while during the evening, things slowed.  I went down Seventh Avenue, across Christopher and up Eighth without a fare.  Then I did it again, and the second time around a black guy hailed me on Christopher near Eighth. 

"Will you go uptown," he asked.

"I'll go anywhere you want," I said.  "Where exactly do you want to go?"

"I wanna go to East Harlem," he said, and after a slight hesitation asked, "How much will it cost?"

"I don't know," I said, and didn't, having not made the trip in two decades, at a time when the fare rate was a lot different.  "You probably know it better than I do.  The cost will be whatever the meter shows."

"All you drivers are the same," he said.  "If I don't know what it'll cost, how can I know if I can pay for it.  You all just want to set me up to rip me off."

"I can't help you there," I said.  "Would you like to get out here?"  If so, you don't owe me anything."

He stared at me, got out and slammed the door shut.  Nothing broke, so that was that. 

My next fare was another black man.  He wanted a midtown hotel and was a model passenger.  That was good.  I didn't want to play hard with my racial psychology too early in my return to hacking.

I put in the hours and it was just basic work all the way through.  Everything considered, things were a bit tame, nothing like the edginess of the '80s, but I knew my observations were still premature.

In my ninth hour I got a long, long ride out to Queens.  Three people, with one bringing the other two home before we got to her address.  It was a hefty fare -- about $65 -- and I was worried she'd pay me with a credit card.  Anything over $25 meant they'd have to sign a receipt, and I hadn't done that yet and wondered if I knew how.  No worry, she paid in cash, with a nice tip.

Already being in Queens and in my tenth hour of a maximum twelve-hour shift, I decided to call it a night.  I got back to the vicinity of my garage and gassed up the cab -- $35 right outta my pocket.

Then to my garage, printing out my totals and handing them in, and settling accounts with the dispatcher.  If I figured things correctly, I made only $100 on the night, less than I thought I had.

Still, I wasn't disappointed.  Things had gone smoothly.  I got the subway back to the West Village and stopped in at my neighborhood bar for a nightcap, where Greg, the bartender on duty, treated me well.

Hooking Up With a Garage

Through the grapevine, I'd been given the name and telephone number of a taxi fleet in Queens looking for drivers to fill its cabs on slower shifts. 

I phoned Wailing Management cab company at 31-08 Northern Boulevard.  They urged me to drop by sometime soon, in an early afternoon, to be interviewed and fill out some forms.

It was already near the end of June and time was rushing by, so I made sure to get there the next day.  They liked the looks of me and me of them, leaving the preliminaries to go smoothly.

I told the dispatcher Milton (or was it Harry -- I mean, who can tell their Harry's from their Milton's without a real bit of practice) I hadn't driven a cab for a long while and that the taxi school didn't get around to teaching us all the details on how to operate the taxi meter.  He called over Paul, who was waiting to be assigned a car for the night, and asked if he'd show me the ropes.

We went out to the lot and used one of the free cabs parked there.  Paul was a veteran driver who did some writing on the side, and he appreciated how important it was for me to be able to handle the meter with some degree of ease.  He did his best to help me get it all down pat, but let's be honest: it was complicated stuff -- involving a lot more options than I faced in the '80s.  Back then, cabs didn't process credit cards ... there was no flat rate to the airports ... and you doubled the fare rate as soon as you crossed the city limits -- plus you didn't have to sign on or off on an information box.  Through the 1990s it was all about entering info on trip sheets.  Now there are no trip sheets, which is both a good and bad thing.

Unlike in grammar school, I paid close attention, as Paul outlined the procedures in the limited time we had.  I mostly picked it up, remembering the fundamentals and then some.  I knew I didn't have it all down and I hoped I wouldn't get passengers early on who wanted to go to Jersey or Yonkers.  But I told myself that if I did, I'd just do my best and negotiate the foggy bits.

The dispatcher (Harry or Milton) told me to phone in whenever I was ready to take a shift.  "We have 200 cars here," he said.  "You shouldn't have any trouble getting out."

Outta-towner 1: Tampa: Searching for Tim Fasano

Comparatively speaking, Henry Morton Stanley had it easy.  He just had to trek through 700 miles of disease-rampant, dense tropical forest in Africa until, in 1871, he at last found the missionary-explorer Dr. David Livingstone living near Lake Tanganyika in what is today Tanzania. 

Would H.M. Stanley have been able to find my man?  If he thinks so, let him try.

Needing a break from New York, I had decided to fly down to Tampa and stay in St. Petersburg four nights so I could catch up with friends in the Tampa Bay area.  I'd been reading the blog "Tampa Taxi Shots" and thought I would try to hook up with its author while there.  Maybe I'd knock out a short profile on him for "Return Cabbie" and in the process get some feedback on how the cab business in Tampa compared with what New York hacks come up against.

So I emailed Tim Fasano at the address he gave in his blog, proposing a meeting, but heard nothing back.  I gave it three or four days and emailed him again, a day before my departure, and still nothing.

I knew he drove for United Cab, and added stopping by his garage to my Tampa to-do list.

I arrived in Tampa last Thursday evening, picked up a rental car and, after dropping my stuff off at my hotel room, phoned a friend.  We made plans to link up within the hour.  I headed off over the Gandy Bridge to meet up with him, only to run into a horrendous thunder-and-lightning storm.  Torrential rainfall flooded the highway and power was intermittently knocked out, blocking the route and sending me back to my hotel.

That put me behind the eight ball for the first half of my Tampa Bay stay, as I rescheduled get-togethers and places I'd hoped to visit.  In the end, I got out and about quite a bit, including to the Salvador Dalí Museum, but didn't reach the United Cab garage -- under the big Gulf Coast Transportation sign at 1701 West Cass Street -- until around noon on Monday, just a few hours before my scheduled return flight to La Guardia.

Gulf Coast has a garage and office and sizeable lot, and runs both United Cab and Tampa Bay Cab.  It probably wasn't the right time of day to expect a shift change but I did run into a few drivers coming in and waiting to go out.  Not one of them knew Fasano, so it wasn't going to be my lucky day.  I learned that drivers had a choice to lease their cars for 12 or 24 hours but not much else.

Who knows, but maybe I'll get back to Tampa again one day.  In the meantime, Fasano goes onto my "missing persons" list. 

But if there is a next time, my luck could change.  The hand behind "Tampa Taxi Shots" might have returned an enquiring wave.  I can see myself approaching him in the United Cab lot, putting on a serious face, and saying, "Mr. Tim Fasano, I presume."

Pass or Fail?

  

A week to the day after taking the TLC exam, I went back out to the taxi school at LaGuardia to find out my test score.  Anything less than a 70 and I'd have to retake the thing again, at my own expense, further corroding my minuscule bank account.

I was both excited and apprehensive.

An office worker asked for my name and the new hack license number I'd been assigned several weeks earlier.  She also wanted to see my MVD license as a further validation on my identity.

"I'd be happy with just a 70," I said, both to her and myself, as she ran her finger along the list of test scores in search of my result.  Her hand came to a halt and she hesitated a moment before looking up at me and asking, "What did you expect as a score?"

I felt like she was preparing me for the worst and I didn't know how to respond.

"Well," she continued, "as I'm sure it's no surprise, you handled the language questions without a blemish, but ... on the geography part you scored ... a whopping 86.  Were you really that worried?"

What, me worry?

My new hack license arrived in the mail a few days later.  It was a tiny thing, compared to the licenses we carried around in the 1980s.  Also, the woman who'd photographed me at the TLC office hadn't been particularly clever at setting an adequate flash output -- the photograph on my new hack license pictured a nondescript, haggard person in a darkly lit room.  Not that anybody, including me, particularly cared.

With June near its end, I was now free to begin to look for work.