Taxing Taxiing

Photo: raybdbomb

I recently got back from New York, and along with a trip to the Guggenheim and a stroll through Central Park, I naturally had to take in the city’s transportation sights. First was the new-look pedestrian-only section of Times Square, which, in a triumph for truth in advertising, now actually features a square. I don’t yet know what the traffic diversion has done as far as auto congestion (Broadway has been closed to vehicular traffic between 42nd and 47th streets).
But the closure scores an A+ for making the Square a better place to be, as New Yorkers would be happy to tell you if they could fight through the hordes of European tourists and actually visit it.
Second, I took a ride in one of the city’s famous (or infamous) cabs. My experience was perfectly adequate, if not quite a trip on the QEII. But to many, New York cabs are synonymous with poor upkeep, dismal service, fraud, and reckless driving.
And that’s when you’re lucky enough to find one.
Those who bewail the state of New York City taxi service should know that the problem is not due to cabbies being bad or dim-witted people; in fact, a 1991 survey showed 39 percent were college graduates. Nor is the problem some defect in the culture of their home countries. In many ways, cabbies’ oft-poor behavior is simply a response to the structure of the rules by which their profession is governed. Given the incentives, you or I would largely behave the same way.
Driving a cab is one of the most difficult and frustrating jobs that our society has to offer. Two pieces of evidence: first, 94 percent of taxi drivers responding to a 2003 New York survey were foreign born (this will not surprise New Yorkers). Clearly, native-born Americans with relatively less constrained employment opportunities avoid this very onerous and low-paying line of work, leaving it to immigrants whose options are, sadly, more limited.
More evidence of the woes of the cabbie: few drivers stick with their profession for long. The 1991 survey found that those climbing behind the wheel for the first time professed considerable enthusiasm; 49 percent said they planned to drive for “many years.” But only one in nine of those new cabbies was still driving full-time by the third year. That’s a pretty spectacular attrition rate. (Much of the info in these posts comes from a nice series of articles by Bruce Schaller and Gorman Gilbert. The pieces were published in 1995, but the fundamental story has changed little since that time.)
Hence, many cabbies are relative rookies, and this is a direct cause of the poor service cabs sometimes offer. Full-time drivers are much less likely than part-timers to receive summonses for bad behavior, and complaints drop dramatically for cabbies with more years on the job. In short, if the job were better, retention would be higher, drivers would be more experienced, and service would be better.
Why is cab driving so taxing a profession that it drives so many out of the business? What other factors lead to the poor outcomes we sometimes experience when we step off the curb and stick our hands in the air? And how are we the public in large part responsible for this state of affairs? More next time.