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.