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Looking for a Story with Wheels

Looking for a Story

After my horrendous first night as a Lyft driver, back in February of 2014, I just wanted to give up, go home and fill out an application at Trader Joe’s. But the decision to use my personal car as a taxicab in San Francisco was about more than just making a few extra bucks.

I was looking for a story.

What started out as a lark rapidly took on a life of its own. Originally, I wanted to document the Uber/Lyft trend, explore San Francisco, have some interesting adventures to write about, make a zine about the experience and move on with my life. But as I delved further into the vehicle for hire debate, I found myself in the front seat of a story that was bigger than just gypsy cabs.

The city was going through a period of major upheaval. The extravagant displays of tech money only served to magnify the abject poverty that was laid bare.

The tension was palpable. On my first day driving for Lyft, there was a five-alarm fire in the Mission Bay. As I desperately tried to navigate the city and figure out the app, a small trail of smoke over a construction site quickly spread across the sky from Mission Bay into SoMa, downtown and the Mission.

It all seemed to make sense.

The confusion. The madness. The fires.

San Francisco had become a war zone.

There were battles raging across the city. Between long-term residents and fresh transplants. Between tech workers and non-tech workers. Between renters and owners. Between people leasing their apartments to strangers on the internet and the neighbors who didn’t want to live next door to Airbnb flophouses. And between tradition taxicabs and these new services that paired random drivers and passengers through apps.

Inspired by Gonzo Journalism, I charged headlong into the fray, with a stack of Moleskins. The narrative practically wrote itself. Like a prospector who’d struck it rich, I just held my pan in the creek and collected nugget after nugget of golden material.

My passengers had no clue their words and actions had any significance to me. But they were actually telling the story of the new San Francisco as they complained about the weather, the fog, the hills, the filth, the bums, the dating scene and how there aren’t enough restaurants open late at night when the bars close.

Most of all, they talked about money. VC capital. Billion dollar valuations. Funding rounds.

Everyone had an app.

It was 2014 and startup culture was all the rage. Overly hyped apps were popping up weekly to make people’s lives more convenient. And commerce was the driving force behind this new tech boom.

One night I was driving up Franklin and this guy stuck his head out the window and screamed into the wind, “I’ve made thirty million dollars so far this year!” Then he commandeered my stereo and really got the party started…

Despite its popularity, I assumed the whole “rideshare” phenomenon was a passing fad. Since it was technically illegal, how long could it possibly last?

Around the time I was finishing up the first Lyft zine, I had a dream that City Hall passed a law outlawing Uber and Lyft. I woke up in a panic. All my work! The writing! Designing a 60-page zine! Wasted!

In reality, this was only the beginning of a massive shift in public transportation, as well as employment, by changing how those two things are defined.

The rise of Uber and Lyft was founded on a semantic loophole. By creating a new denotation for taxis – ridesharing – they were able to barge into cities around the world and disregard local regulations. Since they claimed to be a technology company and not a taxi company, the rules governing taxicabs, they argued, didn’t apply to them.

Utilizing doublespeak, these young entrepreneurs disguised their nefarious intentions behind innocuous smokescreens. Like, “sharing.”

Of course, nothing is shared when you Uber and Lyft. Or when you Airbnb. If you’re paying someone to drive you to work, whether it’s in an unmarked sedan or a multi-colored vehicle with a toplight and a phone number on the side, if a meter is running, you’re taking a taxi. The same is true if you’re charging people money to sleep in your bed.

Now that it’s been a few years, anyone with half a brain knows the “sharing economy” is just a predatory business model designed to push workers’ rights back to the 19th century. But its proponents were able to sustain their bullshit long enough until the services were entrenched in the public mindset. By the time politicians were able to include these new definitions in transportation laws, the concept of riding in strangers’ cars had become such a huge part of daily city life that it was too late to eradicate Uber and Lyft.

The will of the people ensured their success.

While this drama played out in the media and in courtrooms and boardrooms and wherever else dirty deals go down, I tried to document the experience on the street through zines and multiple blog posts.

After blogging on several platforms, the editor at Disinfo.com approached me about contributing to their site. Then, a few months later, I started writing for Broke-Ass Stuart’s website.

When “Night of the Living Taxi,” a blogpost about Flywheel’s successful attempt to beat Uber and Lyft at their own game on New Year’s Eve went viral, several media outlets contacted me, including Joe Fitzgerald-Rodriguez from the San Francisco Examiner.

We must have had a good chat because a few weeks later, he asked if I was interested in writing for the newspaper.

Michael Howerton, the Editor in Chief at the time, was looking to revive the Night Cabbie, a column from the Nineties written by an anonymous taxi driver. Howerton’s idea was to present a modern take, from the perspective of an Uber driver.

By this time I’d already switched a taxi. And it was becoming obvious that nobody cared about taxi drivers. People wanted to read about Uber and Lyft drivers. The hip new thing.

I didn’t want to lose my shot at a column, though. So I read everything online by the Night Cabbie. Most taxi drivers around the National/Veterans yard were familiar his work. As it turned out, he actually drove for Veterans. Used to be finance guy. Late Night Larry, who also worked in the Financial prior to driving a cab, was the one who encouraged him to drive a taxi when he got burnt out and needed a change.

Once I revealed the possibility of reviving the column, everyone had advice, usually criticizing some aspect of how the Night Cabbie documented the taxi driving experience and pointing out what not to do.

Since the only way to pull off the column would be to present both sides of the reality, I cobbled together a counter pitch:

“I Drive SF is a hard-edged take on the current state of driving for hire in San Francisco, from the perspective of a nighttime taxi driver who chose the cabbie’s life after ten months of driving for Uber and Lyft. With comparisons between the ride-hail and taxi experiences, interesting rides and encounters, unavoidable commentary on the impact of the latest tech boom and various historical and cultural observations on the changing city. Sprinkled with maybe too much personal information: accepting a life in Oakland, my high blood pressure, thrash metal, manic interactions with longtime cab drivers and the wife’s existential quest to find a job with meaning… A portrait of the Bay Area in flux.”

Two weeks later, I met Michael for coffee in Mint Alley.

The first installment came out on May Day. We both agreed that May Day was the perfect date to inaugurate a newspaper column about driving a taxi.

Just like that, I had my story, along with a forum to reach a wider audience. And that’s when things got really ugly …

[Excerpted from the zine Behind the Wheel 4: The Thin Checkered Line, available here. Also compiled in the Dispatches from Behind the Wheel Omnibus, available here.]

From Uber/Lyft to Taxi: It’s the Cabbie’s Life for Me

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My first column for the San Francisco Examiner

“So, why aren’t you driving for Uber?”

Heading down Post Street, I wait for the light to change at Jones and practice my double bass drumming on the steering wheel along to the Slayer CD blasting from the stereo in my taxicab. It’s rush hour. Union Square is a sea of brake lights.

There’s something counterintuitive about driving into a traffic jam, but for a taxi driver, that’s where the fares are. After three months behind the wheel, I’ve become Zen with downtown traffic. I embrace the challenge of gridlock. So when the light turns green, I charge headlong into the congestion.

At Taylor, I kill the tunes and roll down my window. Listen for the whistles from hotel doormen that reverberate through the streets. I cruise slowly past the J.W.

Nothing.

At Powell, I check the cabstand in front of the St. Francis. Too long. Glance towards the Sir Francis Drake, but the faux Yeoman Warder is minding his own business.

Across the street, an arm goes up. Businessman heading to the W. Traffic is snarled as I creep towards Montgomery. But I’m getting paid to cross Market.

After dropping him off, I cruise Moscone. Another flag. This one back to Union Square. From there, a long fare to Monterey Heights. Nice enough guy. Works in finance. Insists on taking the 280, despite going so far out of the way. Whatever. His nickel.

We start chatting.

Eventually, he asks the million-dollar question: “So… why aren’t you driving for Uber?”

I tell him I did the Uber/Lyft thing for ten months before switching to taxi. He’s surprised. They always are.

“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” he asks.

Even though I get asked the same thing multiple times a night, I’m never sure how to respond. For me, there were more reasons not to drive for Uber and Lyft than to continue driving for Uber and Lyft. I wasn’t making enough money after the two start-ups went to war for market dominance and began slashing prices. After ten months, my bank account was overdrawn, my credit cards were maxed out, I was riddled with self-loathing and, due to the insurance risks, I constantly worried I’d have to declare bankruptcy if I got into an accident. My car was getting ragged out enough already. The backseat looked like I’d been transporting farm animals.

I was basically subsidizing multi-million — or, in Uber’s case, multi-billion — dollar companies. And for what? Empty promises and a sense of community?

What bullshit. I never felt like anything but an underpaid, untrained and unregulated cab driver.

From the beginning, I was appalled by the self-entitled culture that spawned the phenomenon of “ridesharing” and the consequences it’s had on the livelihoods of cab drivers. It wasn’t easy participating in the destruction of a blue-collar industry. After all, I’m a descendent of coal miners, janitors, store clerks and army grunts. In college, I was required to read The Communist Manifesto three times.

Being an Uber/Lyft driver is not in my nature. To be successful at it requires personality traits I will never possess: the ability to cheat and scam. And a complete lack of conscience.

Since the only time you make decent money is during surge pricing, you have to take pride in ripping people off. The rest of the time, you’re barely making minimum wage, so you need to be somewhat stupid as well. You’re basically running your personal car into the ground and hoping to luck out with a ride that’s more than five bucks.

Some drivers have figured out how to make the system work for them and earn more money referring drivers than they do actually driving themselves, but isn’t that just a bizarro take on the pyramid scheme?

Despite Uber’s political spin or Lyft’s cheerful advertising campaign, using your personal car as a taxi is not sustainable. Each time I got behind the wheel of my Jetta and turned on the apps, I had to overlook the absurdity of what I was doing. It never ceased to amaze me that people would be so willing to ride in some random dude’s car. But since my passengers acted as if the activity were perfectly normal, I went along with it.

Once I realized what I’d gotten myself into, I wanted to document the exploitative nature of this predatory business model. I wanted to expose the inherent risks associated with inadequate insurance, the lack of training and the vulnerability of not having anyone to contact in an emergency. I wanted to shed light on the reality of being a driver, dealing with constant fare cuts, enforced jingoism and the tyranny of an unfair rating system. I wanted to reveal the lies. All the dirty lies. I started a blog and even published two zines about my experiences.

Naïvely, I thought reporting on these issues from the perspective of a driver would make a difference. I was wrong. People hold on to their faith in the corporate spirit even when it’s against their best interest. That’s what I figured out from all this.

Oh, and that I really like driving the streets of San Francisco.

So I signed up for taxi school and went pro. Now I make more money, feel more relaxed and no longer have to worry about declaring bankruptcy if I get into an accident.

But I don’t tell the guy any of this. Now that I’ve been a real taxi driver for three months, I try to deflect the Uber/Lyft question. I’m not proud to have driven for them as long as I did. In fact, I’m mostly ashamed of it.

So I say, “The way I figured it, people hate taxi drivers so much, they must be doing something right.”

I laugh. He doesn’t join me. Instead, he tells me how much he prefers Uber. From 101 interchange to the Monterey exit, he regales me with a litany of horror stories about the taxi industry before Uber and Lyft came to town. They wouldn’t take people to the Richmond or Sunset districts. The cabs smelled horrible. The drivers were rude. They wouldn’t accept credit cards. And when you called dispatch, they never showed up.

I listen to his jeremiad patiently. It’s all I can do. I’ve heard these complaints repeatedly since I started driving a car for hire in San Francisco. As much as I want to apologize for the past transgressions of taxi drivers, I can’t help but wonder why he’s in a cab in the first place. Oh, Uber must be surging like crazy.

“Honestly,” he says at one point, “I don’t take cabs because I don’t want to deal with fucking cabbies.”

I want to tell him I actually enjoy being a cab driver. That I feel more connected to The City than I ever did with Uber and Lyft. And I admire the veteran cab drivers, many of whom are longtime San Franciscans. They have the best stories. Becoming a cab driver was like joining a league of disgruntled gentlemen and surly ladies. The buccaneers of city streets. Taking people’s money for getting them where they need to go. By whatever means necessary. I want to tell him to fuck off. That he’s badmouthing my friends. I’ve met some amazing cab drivers since I started hanging around taxi yards.

But I keep my mouth shut. Drive. Do my job…

After a while, though, the guy’s vitriol gets to me. When I drop him off, I’m bummed beyond belief.

At least he gives me a decent tip. I turn the Slayer back on. Full blast. Take Portola down the hill. Should be plenty of fares in the Castro. Especially if Uber’s still surging.

This article is an amalgam of two articles that previously appeared in two very different versions. One on Broke-Ass Stuart’s Goddamn Website and the other in the San Francisco Examiner.