Monday, April 16, 2007
Taxis Have Rules In New York City. You Can Read Them Here.
Click to see driver rules, owner rules, all the rules. (Lots of rules).
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Taxi Economics I
My wife finally succeeded in making me sit down and do our taxes.It's something I've rued and not wanted to do, what with my wages from "Children's Services" that ended in June, the couple of thousand I got from the union annuity fund, the pension loan I never repaid, the paltry pension itself, the insanitizing work sheet the IRS has for all that - it all seemed a very complex mess even to organize it and bring it to someone else to "do" so now that I've organized it I'm "doing" it myself.
In figuring out the self employment bit I came upon some rare knowledge - what I have actually been paying not to lease a taxi per shift, but that part that is strictly for the medallion. While my receipts show a sales tax of $3.18 every night I work, the lease itself varies and averages out for me to $126 per shift. Obviously the variable is not the car(s) although they vary greatly. By deduction the variable must be the medallion, though they all are pretty much the same, their market values fluctuate throughout a week, pricier on Friday night, cheaper on Monday night and so forth.
I called up the calculator on my old Dell and figured it out. - On average I rent the car(s) - different each night- for $37.97 per shift average. Then there is the sales tax - $3.18 every night, leaving an average nightly medallion lease of $84.85.
This is a lease by the shift. Other deals have slightly lower per shift costs for the medallion, but you get the idea. Gas averaged $35.00 a night. Let's say my gross, tips included, more or less (for me a slow old man, it's a bit less) matched these expenses. That would be about right. Probably if I were younger, stronger and less scrupulous I could make more. Before the last fare increase of late November TLC was saying the cabbies made an average of $150 profit per shift. I don't know what their figures are for now.
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Canadians Are the Greatest
I've often thought it and said it to people but now I can really tell the world- Canadians are the greatest people there are. Friendly, outgoing, conversant, polite, laid back. Certainly the Canadians who visit my city, New York and hail my cab and ride are.
Canadian Flag
Photographic Print
Adams, Peter
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Canadian Flag
Photographic Print
Adams, Peter
Buy at AllPosters.com
visit
www.acsmustbestopped.com
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
He'll Never Learn...
Lyceum, Don Quixote
Art Print
Nicholson Pryde,...
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Framed
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To dream the impossible dream
to fight the unbeatable foe...
Yup, I Passed A Test To Get This Job- Taxibiz Questions (I)
People are always asking me about the workings of the taxi business. While I want this weblog to be entertaining and fun and frankly I want to sell you posters and prints I will from time to time try to post some Q and A type stuff about the workings of the taxi business. Here I have a link to a sample test all drivers of Yellow Medallion taxis in NYC must pass before they get their licenses.
Taxi drivers go to school to prepare for this test and some go to school to prepare for the school to prepare for this test. The real school however is the job itself, the streets and the passengers who often end up teaching the cabbies geography of New York City.
Later I will explain the money workings of the business, including how much cabbies typically earn.
Taxi drivers go to school to prepare for this test and some go to school to prepare for the school to prepare for this test. The real school however is the job itself, the streets and the passengers who often end up teaching the cabbies geography of New York City.
Later I will explain the money workings of the business, including how much cabbies typically earn.
Sample Exam - Answers Taxi drivers in New York City are tested and required to attend a class of at least 24 hours duration prior to getting licensed to drive yellow taxis. Yellow taxis are the only taxis licensed to pick up passengers without pre arrangement (street hails).
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Monday, April 9, 2007
Driving A Taxi Is Like Going To School/I Get Schooled On The Hays Act, Jazz and Betty Boop
A couple of nights ago I had this passenger who told me she is working on a Phd. on Betty Boop and the Hays Act. She was fascinating and I decided to go google this stuff up. I learned that the Betty Boop cartoons were more or less equal to today's music videos. The cartoons featured the greats of Jazz. She was one hot wild and crazy young woman until they outlawed marijuana. Now I am not an advocate of marijuana, nor alcohol nor overeating. Marijuana is illegal and as a licensed taxi driver and before that a Child Protective worker I don't smoke the stuff. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has though and he said he liked it just fine.
jumpy vague blurry otherworldly nighttime cell phone videos from taxi frontseats
Passengers have been kind enough to sit in front and take these for me.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Lost And Found/Drunkwagon Chronicles (II)
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My wife calls Saturday Night la noche de los borrachos (night of the drunks.)
A few Saturdays back I took a young lady from a club downtown to her place in Brooklyn and I scooted over the Brooklyn Bridge and caught another fare near Church and Canal. He was standing up straight and didn't seem to be overly impaired so I raced the other three cabs to him and got him.
He gave me his address at 90th near Columbus and then he dropped off the radar for a while. I was listening to the great jazz on WBGO anticipating going home soon, as this was going to be my final fare of the night.
I heard a cell phone ringing and ringing. There was no answer. Finally after about five calls the guy answered the cell phone. He said "Honey I don't know where the f_ck street I am but I'm in a taxi. Be home soon."
He fell off the screen again so to speak but the phone rang again and again till I stopped and got out of the taxi. The guy was sprawled out over the back seat and the cell phone was on the floor. I picked it up and it rang again. I answered it. It was the young lady I had dropped off in Brooklyn. She was not happy. I explained that I was transporting a drunk and that I would call her when the job got done.
The guy vomited politely out the passenger door, paid me plus a good tip and staggered towards his apartment house.
I arranged to meet the lady on Sunday. My wife was ticked off because I never move a bone on Sunday for her. I gave the lady her phone she gave me ten dollars.
Two passengers out of an upscale strip joint./Drunkwagon Chronicles (I)
Outside an upscale strip club at around 4AM one freezing cold windy morning. His face was a mixed message of "better living through chemistry" and "where the f$ck am I?" Her face was very plain in its message> "It's cold out here. Show me a taxi and show me the money."
He was in his white business shirt and power tie, shirt undone, belt lost, no jacket, no coat, no hat and that blank blank face. She was dressed only a little better, having chased after him to the street and now guiding him to my taxi. Through the rear view mirror and by words and noises I could tell she was priming him - getting him to a point where he would have to have sex, with her, right now. She wsa talking about "$500" and he was talking about "Where is the other one? I thought you said $300."
She said to me. "Two stops, one at tenth and Broadway the other in Bayside." At tenth and Broadway he said "I can't do $500." and she said "Bayside." We left him on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. There is a doorman so he didn't freeze to death that night.
new york
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I Knew The Real Ignatowski
>
Saturday, December 17, 2005
I Knew The Real Ignatowski
People may think that that old TV show Taxi is all made up. Well, it is fiction but there is a shadow of reality to it. I know. I drove out of the Dover Garage for years and the real Ignatowski ( and the real Reiger and the real Mr. Cunningham) were still there. The show had already been a hit for years but it dawned on me when I learned the real boss's name was Cunningham that there was maybe more to it than met the eye.
The scene in Taxi where the cabs roll into the garage was shot on Hudson Street in the West Village. (A high rise stands on the spot today) but for years Villagers would hike a couple of blocks at shift change time and get a sure cab to anywhere they wanted to go.
Driving on the night line out of Dover had to be an education for anyone, and it was one for me. This was the last bastion of the educated English as a first language New York cabbie. Shape up was the time we sat around waiting to be called for our cars to go out into the evening and try and make our hundred dollars, or if we were lucky or extra hard working, more. There was a crew of old timers who would come around the garage at around ten at night. They'd play poker and wait for the early quits to come in. They'd go out off the books, no trip cards, behind a bribe to the night dispatcher and go hustle for a few bucks between one or two and five in the morning. Several of these guys slept in the parking garage upstairs.
Everet was a big fat aging cabbie with a gray stubble and a faint bad odor who usually ran the poker game that he held in the shop late at night. He would also provide the night dispatcher with a gratuity and then, as the house, he would proceed to fleece the hapless oldtimers, compulsive gamblers receiving various pensions and disability checks from other lives, and who came faithfully because to them, it was the only game in town.
Everet was the real Ignatowski. You might say at this point it couldn't be but Everet hadn't always been a panting, wheezing morbidly obese old man. No, I had the privilege of seeing Everet's earliest hack license and it was the spitting image of the TV character Ignatowski, or should I say the character was the image of Everet.
Now I was no psychiatrist, I was only a nightshift cab driver, but I knew not only that Everet was nuts, but that he was paranoid. I knew this because he would hold forth as to how the cops, Cunningham and "the 'mafiosi' from around here" were tracking his movements with microphones and satellite devices (this was 1983). As a student of life at that time, I took it upon myself to get to know the real Ignatowski. He would drive one or two nights a week and never be out of cash.
As time went on Everet told of his former life as a professional criminal. How he had been in on a fake billing scam that ripped off one of the Fortune 500 companies that used to populate Manhattan, and how he and two confederates got off with almost a million dollars before they got caught. He also told me about his younger days as a break and entry man, and his knowledge of locks and safes sounded impressive to the ears of this novice. Everet lived in a rent controlled apartment in a building next to the precinct on Charles Street, around the corner from the garage. I visited there a few times.
He had around ten cats, and the place stank. He had piles and stacks of old porno mags that he would buy from the second hand hawkers on Second Avenue near Saint Marks early in the mornings. He had boxes and cartons of cat food, spaghetti, jars of spaghetti sauce and cartons of powdered milk. He said his rent was faithfully paid a year in advance. Twice in those years I accompanied him to the big Pathmark down on Pike Street (actually that's the foot of First Avenue by another name) near the East River and the New York Post plant. He would stock up on his stash items and head back to Charles Street. Somewhere Everet had buried several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everet could not hold a conversation without touching on the following topics; The Italians of the West Village, their collective connections with the precinct and his landlord, the microphones that were always placed in the taxis he would get (and it was a different cab every night). And the satellite trackers he said they all had. Cunnigham would look at a screen and know where all his taxis were at any given moment, Everet assured me and anyone else who would listen. Another pervasive theme of conversation was the two dollar daily fee to the union, and how he hated it. When the garage failed in its first attempt to shake the union off time Everet began another steep decline. For a few months the garage had stoppped collecting the fee, which was payment to the Lease Drivers Benefit Fund, but the union got a judge to order the fleets to collect and turn over the money, including retroactively. Everet refused to pay up, and so Cunnigham had no choice but to send him away. (He still loitered on most nights and ran his poker game.)
In those days there were Israeli and Russian run garages up Ninth and Tenth Avenues that ran yellow painted old police cars and were not very selective as to their driver staff, as the cars would continually break down, and the owners were reputed to routinely refuse to return deposit moneys. There was a cohort of drivrers with very bad records (some with fake hack licenses) who circulated among these garages. These were the wide open days of Mayor Ed Koch, when the streets of Manhattan had become an open air crack bazaar. But I digress.
Everet joined this sad crew rather than ante up the few dollars he owed the union. You could not honestly say that most of Cunnigham's cars were death traps. The legit fleets, like Dover were in fact the desired places experienced cabbies would want to work out of, even with the brutal hours long shape up and these fleets could be selective. But again, I digress.
One evening I was drivng down upper Fifth Avenue from a run to Harlem when I saw Everet standing in the second traffic lane next to a broken down yellow painted cop car. He abandoned the heap and got into my cab. He had a mission at Pathmark. It was on this trip, to Pathmark that Everet told me some intersting things about his past life: After the scam got busted, he was sued civilly by the corporation as were his partners. One paid up, and another one was found in the Hudson River wearing a suit of bicycle chains. His share of the stash, Everet said, had never been found. But Everet inherited this friend's girl and car.
One day I was talking with Dan Monohan, the last full time Irish driver in Dover about the folklore of the place, it's history and the television show Taxi. He asked me who I thought had hit Everet's friend and put him into the river. The answer was unavoidable to me.
Two years later I got a passenger who was telling me about the bizzare cabbies he had met in his years in New York. One was an old fat guy with a gray stubble who wheezed and stank. He handed to the passenger a leaflet denouncing the Taxi and Limosine Commisssion for allowing the mafia to hound him and ignoring his complaints. The leaflet urged the passengers to call the Commisssioner and demand an explanation.
I met Dan again and he told me that Everet was out to get me because I had taken polaroid snap shots of him laid out on a sidewalk drunk and was handing out copies to all of the Italians on Hudson Street.
I knew the real Ignatowski.
Some names have been changed to protect privacy.
Check out
www.acsmustbestopped.com
Saturday, December 17, 2005
I Knew The Real Ignatowski
People may think that that old TV show Taxi is all made up. Well, it is fiction but there is a shadow of reality to it. I know. I drove out of the Dover Garage for years and the real Ignatowski ( and the real Reiger and the real Mr. Cunningham) were still there. The show had already been a hit for years but it dawned on me when I learned the real boss's name was Cunningham that there was maybe more to it than met the eye.
The scene in Taxi where the cabs roll into the garage was shot on Hudson Street in the West Village. (A high rise stands on the spot today) but for years Villagers would hike a couple of blocks at shift change time and get a sure cab to anywhere they wanted to go.
Driving on the night line out of Dover had to be an education for anyone, and it was one for me. This was the last bastion of the educated English as a first language New York cabbie. Shape up was the time we sat around waiting to be called for our cars to go out into the evening and try and make our hundred dollars, or if we were lucky or extra hard working, more. There was a crew of old timers who would come around the garage at around ten at night. They'd play poker and wait for the early quits to come in. They'd go out off the books, no trip cards, behind a bribe to the night dispatcher and go hustle for a few bucks between one or two and five in the morning. Several of these guys slept in the parking garage upstairs.
Everet was a big fat aging cabbie with a gray stubble and a faint bad odor who usually ran the poker game that he held in the shop late at night. He would also provide the night dispatcher with a gratuity and then, as the house, he would proceed to fleece the hapless oldtimers, compulsive gamblers receiving various pensions and disability checks from other lives, and who came faithfully because to them, it was the only game in town.
Everet was the real Ignatowski. You might say at this point it couldn't be but Everet hadn't always been a panting, wheezing morbidly obese old man. No, I had the privilege of seeing Everet's earliest hack license and it was the spitting image of the TV character Ignatowski, or should I say the character was the image of Everet.
Now I was no psychiatrist, I was only a nightshift cab driver, but I knew not only that Everet was nuts, but that he was paranoid. I knew this because he would hold forth as to how the cops, Cunningham and "the 'mafiosi' from around here" were tracking his movements with microphones and satellite devices (this was 1983). As a student of life at that time, I took it upon myself to get to know the real Ignatowski. He would drive one or two nights a week and never be out of cash.
As time went on Everet told of his former life as a professional criminal. How he had been in on a fake billing scam that ripped off one of the Fortune 500 companies that used to populate Manhattan, and how he and two confederates got off with almost a million dollars before they got caught. He also told me about his younger days as a break and entry man, and his knowledge of locks and safes sounded impressive to the ears of this novice. Everet lived in a rent controlled apartment in a building next to the precinct on Charles Street, around the corner from the garage. I visited there a few times.
He had around ten cats, and the place stank. He had piles and stacks of old porno mags that he would buy from the second hand hawkers on Second Avenue near Saint Marks early in the mornings. He had boxes and cartons of cat food, spaghetti, jars of spaghetti sauce and cartons of powdered milk. He said his rent was faithfully paid a year in advance. Twice in those years I accompanied him to the big Pathmark down on Pike Street (actually that's the foot of First Avenue by another name) near the East River and the New York Post plant. He would stock up on his stash items and head back to Charles Street. Somewhere Everet had buried several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everet could not hold a conversation without touching on the following topics; The Italians of the West Village, their collective connections with the precinct and his landlord, the microphones that were always placed in the taxis he would get (and it was a different cab every night). And the satellite trackers he said they all had. Cunnigham would look at a screen and know where all his taxis were at any given moment, Everet assured me and anyone else who would listen. Another pervasive theme of conversation was the two dollar daily fee to the union, and how he hated it. When the garage failed in its first attempt to shake the union off time Everet began another steep decline. For a few months the garage had stoppped collecting the fee, which was payment to the Lease Drivers Benefit Fund, but the union got a judge to order the fleets to collect and turn over the money, including retroactively. Everet refused to pay up, and so Cunnigham had no choice but to send him away. (He still loitered on most nights and ran his poker game.)
In those days there were Israeli and Russian run garages up Ninth and Tenth Avenues that ran yellow painted old police cars and were not very selective as to their driver staff, as the cars would continually break down, and the owners were reputed to routinely refuse to return deposit moneys. There was a cohort of drivrers with very bad records (some with fake hack licenses) who circulated among these garages. These were the wide open days of Mayor Ed Koch, when the streets of Manhattan had become an open air crack bazaar. But I digress.
Everet joined this sad crew rather than ante up the few dollars he owed the union. You could not honestly say that most of Cunnigham's cars were death traps. The legit fleets, like Dover were in fact the desired places experienced cabbies would want to work out of, even with the brutal hours long shape up and these fleets could be selective. But again, I digress.
One evening I was drivng down upper Fifth Avenue from a run to Harlem when I saw Everet standing in the second traffic lane next to a broken down yellow painted cop car. He abandoned the heap and got into my cab. He had a mission at Pathmark. It was on this trip, to Pathmark that Everet told me some intersting things about his past life: After the scam got busted, he was sued civilly by the corporation as were his partners. One paid up, and another one was found in the Hudson River wearing a suit of bicycle chains. His share of the stash, Everet said, had never been found. But Everet inherited this friend's girl and car.
One day I was talking with Dan Monohan, the last full time Irish driver in Dover about the folklore of the place, it's history and the television show Taxi. He asked me who I thought had hit Everet's friend and put him into the river. The answer was unavoidable to me.
Two years later I got a passenger who was telling me about the bizzare cabbies he had met in his years in New York. One was an old fat guy with a gray stubble who wheezed and stank. He handed to the passenger a leaflet denouncing the Taxi and Limosine Commisssion for allowing the mafia to hound him and ignoring his complaints. The leaflet urged the passengers to call the Commisssioner and demand an explanation.
I met Dan again and he told me that Everet was out to get me because I had taken polaroid snap shots of him laid out on a sidewalk drunk and was handing out copies to all of the Italians on Hudson Street.
I knew the real Ignatowski.
Some names have been changed to protect privacy.
Check out
www.acsmustbestopped.com
(Apparently) The Taxi God Rides Again.
Monday, July 17, 2006
(Apparently) The Taxi God Rides Again.
I have spoken here about my former life as a taxi driver and how I am now once again working in that noble occupation. I spoke about how even when I was a convinced atheist it did seem odd that my "luck" was so good, that when bad a thing happened to me (and it was never that bad) something pretty good would soon follow, that at the least evened things out. I had half in jest decided that there is a God of Taxi drivers, or an angel or saint working with God that looked after at least me and probably other taxi drivers who worked the night time streets of New York.
My wife tells me that God was watching over me because although I was not a believer I was doing honest work, not robbing anyone or insulting anyone and in the process I was feeding, housing and even at times doing more for a wife and two children, these two children who were working hard at becoming adults and who needed me and the small but sufficient money I could wring out of the night time streets. I still have a problem believing in such a personally involved God. I once had a conversation (in a taxi I was driving, naturally) with a Reform rabbi who admitted to me that God must either not be omniscient or else God is not omnipotent, because a just God (and God is Love and God is Justice and God is That Which is right) would not permit the worst injustices that befall His (for want of a better word) children, who the rabbi did say he believed are all human beings and not just this rabbi's tribe of them.
It seems to me that the universe, or the multiverse of universes that exists, that life, that growing and beautiful trees , life forms that fit together on this planet, could not just have happened, that some force had to be involved in making sure that it happened. The big bang theory to me does not explain much, as far as I know it does not explain how apparent nothingness, or one atom or whatever it was, could explode outward and here we have galaxies, stars, planets and life forms that feed each other, give each other what is needed to breathe, and are so perfectly symetrical. Coincidence? As we New Yorkers would say "you're kidding me."
So these things seem to happen. That on the worse night I earn what is at least minimally acceptable to justify the labor, even with a car that breaks down, even with being dispatched at six instead of five. Then one night last week I got further evidence that some force or power is on my side, for whatever reason I cannot explain. It was a night that had started badly, I got dragged out to Brooklyn during the rush hour and as the trip progressed my passenger got to complaining that the meter was running to fast, that she did not beleive the forty cent increments were the correct fare, that the last time she took this trip it had cost about half what it was costing now. (This has to be either a lie or a reference to a taxi trip she took when she was a little girl on her mother's lap.) I girded myself to be stiffed or to have to negotiate a partial payment. In the end she did pay what was on the meter, part of it in nickles and dimes, but pay she did.
I got back into the city and got a fare outside the criminal court/ overnight lockup at 100 Centre Street. I think the passenger was a cop of some kind, a jail guard or court officer. Anyhow he pretended not to understand the one dollar rush hour surcharge and left me forty cents short of what was on the meter. It would not have paid in any sense to have argued with him. I was not looking forward to a decent night. I struggled on, brought someone who wanted to go to Greenwich Avenue to Greenwich Street, corrected that for free. It was not looking too good.
Near the end of my shift, which is five in the morning, at three o'clock, I was tooling up Amsterdam Avenue and there was not another car within two lights behind me. I was on the left and I spotted a block ahead a man standing outside a bar waving at me. I put on my right turn signal and carefully, with no other vehicles around (I thought) made it to the right hand lane, stopped, waited for my green light and got to the passenger. As he leaned towards the window to ask me something a cop car pulled up out of nowhere, or so it seemed, and the officer at the passenger side indicated that I should roll down my window, and he asked I give him my trip sheet, which was happily all filled out with no blank spaces. "I want you to tell me why you went through that red light" he said. I told him that quite frankly, in my mind's eye and to my memory I had not done that. His partner, in the driver's seat looked at my trip card. He said to the other officer "this poor bastard's been working all night. Leave him alone." The first officer handed back my trip card and told me to be more carefull in the future. The passenger requested a long out of town upstate New York trip. I had enought time to make it back to the garage by five, and got paid really almost the margin of what was my profit for the night, and not too shabby at that.
Last night I brought two moms and two kids from close to Penn Station to Harlem, they paid me and thanked me and went on their ways. I was heading west looking for my left turn to downtown when I saw another mom with some kids standing on the corner with lots of bags and valises and a shopping cart. She waived at me. Almost any other cabbie would have passed her up it was so obvioulsy going to be a losing propostion. I guess it was the social worker in me, I stopped and did not put the meter on till the van taxi I was driving was loaded (maybe ten minutes waiting for free). I took her where she needed to go, she had just been booted out of homeless shelter because, she said, the staff had gone into her room and robbed her of sixty dollars and she had called the police who came to the shelter, run by Hale House and took her complaint. (My wife fully believes this story, and she is a shelter veteran, and I, an old CPS worker find it rings true also.) I turned off the meter before I went back and started to help her unload all the stuff, and there was plenty, and her eight year old daughter refused for a few minutes to leave the taxi saying only that she was too tired and that she wanted to sleep. Well, maybe a whole hour was gone for the ten bucks which the lady insisted on paying, not even enough to cover an hour's lease and gas, let alone pay me, but once in a while one is called on to do little things that matter. Somehow, I came out of the night with my barely acceptable minimum profit in spite of this.
Maybe tonight will be better.
(Apparently) The Taxi God Rides Again.
I have spoken here about my former life as a taxi driver and how I am now once again working in that noble occupation. I spoke about how even when I was a convinced atheist it did seem odd that my "luck" was so good, that when bad a thing happened to me (and it was never that bad) something pretty good would soon follow, that at the least evened things out. I had half in jest decided that there is a God of Taxi drivers, or an angel or saint working with God that looked after at least me and probably other taxi drivers who worked the night time streets of New York.
My wife tells me that God was watching over me because although I was not a believer I was doing honest work, not robbing anyone or insulting anyone and in the process I was feeding, housing and even at times doing more for a wife and two children, these two children who were working hard at becoming adults and who needed me and the small but sufficient money I could wring out of the night time streets. I still have a problem believing in such a personally involved God. I once had a conversation (in a taxi I was driving, naturally) with a Reform rabbi who admitted to me that God must either not be omniscient or else God is not omnipotent, because a just God (and God is Love and God is Justice and God is That Which is right) would not permit the worst injustices that befall His (for want of a better word) children, who the rabbi did say he believed are all human beings and not just this rabbi's tribe of them.
It seems to me that the universe, or the multiverse of universes that exists, that life, that growing and beautiful trees , life forms that fit together on this planet, could not just have happened, that some force had to be involved in making sure that it happened. The big bang theory to me does not explain much, as far as I know it does not explain how apparent nothingness, or one atom or whatever it was, could explode outward and here we have galaxies, stars, planets and life forms that feed each other, give each other what is needed to breathe, and are so perfectly symetrical. Coincidence? As we New Yorkers would say "you're kidding me."
So these things seem to happen. That on the worse night I earn what is at least minimally acceptable to justify the labor, even with a car that breaks down, even with being dispatched at six instead of five. Then one night last week I got further evidence that some force or power is on my side, for whatever reason I cannot explain. It was a night that had started badly, I got dragged out to Brooklyn during the rush hour and as the trip progressed my passenger got to complaining that the meter was running to fast, that she did not beleive the forty cent increments were the correct fare, that the last time she took this trip it had cost about half what it was costing now. (This has to be either a lie or a reference to a taxi trip she took when she was a little girl on her mother's lap.) I girded myself to be stiffed or to have to negotiate a partial payment. In the end she did pay what was on the meter, part of it in nickles and dimes, but pay she did.
I got back into the city and got a fare outside the criminal court/ overnight lockup at 100 Centre Street. I think the passenger was a cop of some kind, a jail guard or court officer. Anyhow he pretended not to understand the one dollar rush hour surcharge and left me forty cents short of what was on the meter. It would not have paid in any sense to have argued with him. I was not looking forward to a decent night. I struggled on, brought someone who wanted to go to Greenwich Avenue to Greenwich Street, corrected that for free. It was not looking too good.
Near the end of my shift, which is five in the morning, at three o'clock, I was tooling up Amsterdam Avenue and there was not another car within two lights behind me. I was on the left and I spotted a block ahead a man standing outside a bar waving at me. I put on my right turn signal and carefully, with no other vehicles around (I thought) made it to the right hand lane, stopped, waited for my green light and got to the passenger. As he leaned towards the window to ask me something a cop car pulled up out of nowhere, or so it seemed, and the officer at the passenger side indicated that I should roll down my window, and he asked I give him my trip sheet, which was happily all filled out with no blank spaces. "I want you to tell me why you went through that red light" he said. I told him that quite frankly, in my mind's eye and to my memory I had not done that. His partner, in the driver's seat looked at my trip card. He said to the other officer "this poor bastard's been working all night. Leave him alone." The first officer handed back my trip card and told me to be more carefull in the future. The passenger requested a long out of town upstate New York trip. I had enought time to make it back to the garage by five, and got paid really almost the margin of what was my profit for the night, and not too shabby at that.
Last night I brought two moms and two kids from close to Penn Station to Harlem, they paid me and thanked me and went on their ways. I was heading west looking for my left turn to downtown when I saw another mom with some kids standing on the corner with lots of bags and valises and a shopping cart. She waived at me. Almost any other cabbie would have passed her up it was so obvioulsy going to be a losing propostion. I guess it was the social worker in me, I stopped and did not put the meter on till the van taxi I was driving was loaded (maybe ten minutes waiting for free). I took her where she needed to go, she had just been booted out of homeless shelter because, she said, the staff had gone into her room and robbed her of sixty dollars and she had called the police who came to the shelter, run by Hale House and took her complaint. (My wife fully believes this story, and she is a shelter veteran, and I, an old CPS worker find it rings true also.) I turned off the meter before I went back and started to help her unload all the stuff, and there was plenty, and her eight year old daughter refused for a few minutes to leave the taxi saying only that she was too tired and that she wanted to sleep. Well, maybe a whole hour was gone for the ten bucks which the lady insisted on paying, not even enough to cover an hour's lease and gas, let alone pay me, but once in a while one is called on to do little things that matter. Somehow, I came out of the night with my barely acceptable minimum profit in spite of this.
Maybe tonight will be better.
White Night In the Ghetto
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
White Night In The Ghetto From the Front Seat of A Taxicab.
I've been working almost every night these past two weeks and have become re acclimated to driving and all it entails.
Sunday night for some reason I got five different fares who were young adult whites going to their residences deep in formerly Black neighborhoods (well, Crown Heights is a neighborhood that is mainly Black but has a large number of Lubavitcher Jewish cultists also, and I won't count Williamsburg in Brooklyn an area long shared by the Satmar hasidics and Puerto Ricans because it's been getting filled up with these generic whites from the interior of North America for a long long time now.) I got to talk a bit with two of these passengers. Let me digress here for a moment though. In the old days I had more conversations with passengers than I do now. Back then cell phones were not for everyone as they are today and these days I ignore it when I hear a passenger speak because nine times out of ten they are calling ahead to their destinations or calling their spouses to explain their whereabouts, and so forth.
Anyhow one of these kids (I call them kids, they must be in their twenties or thirties) was a bit concerned that I would not know how to get to where he was going (real "Do The Right Thing" territory - Bed Stuy, do or die as they say) and I told this kid that the corner where he was going to is where my parents had a small apartment on the day they brought me from Brooklyn Jewish Hospital sixty years ago.) Anyhow these two kids are very aware that they are the forward wedge of white power in the ghetto, that their presence alone makes it more difficult for the people already there to stay there. Each said he was "guilty." In my mind these kids are good kids but they should not feel "guilty" that they also need a place to lay their heads at night and they cannot afford to live in Manhattan or in any white enclave anywhere near New York City. It's a gift to have a conscience. I told them what matters is what they do with their understanding of how things are in order to change the world and make it a place where everyone has a place to be in.
Since I am a Jew who lives in General Grant Houses I am also I guess part of this forward wedge. General Grant Houses is on the Western border of Harlem, rubbing right up against Columbia University's neighborhood which clearly begins one block south of my apartment. Columbia University has bought up the land right across Broadway and they plan to destroy the low density buildings over there, gasoline stations (there are very few remaining in Manhattan) warehouses and so forth. St. Mary's Church is one center of resistance to this spread.
I had reason yesterday to look over the legal definition of genocide and the historical 1951 petition to the United Nations that charged the United States with genocide against "The Negro People of the United States" which was at that time the accepted usage.Looking at it onc e could say that Administration for Children´s Services here in New York is a mechanism of genocide. Check it out:
ARTICLE II, CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE:
Adopted December 9, 1948" In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
ARTICLE III:
"The following acts shall be punishable:
A. Genocide;
B. Conspiracy to commit genocide;
C. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
D. Attempt to commit genocide;
E. Complicity in genocide."
-xii-
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9685712
Article II of the Genocide Convention
A- ACS knowingly has a policy now of overloading its caseworkers and making them take parents to court in cases that really don´t merit this level of intervention which wastes caseworkers´s valuable time and energy. They know well that this policy actually results in the neglect of cases, some of which actually are legitimate abuse situations that cry out for intervention. This is why the number of children who die while on ACS caselods increases during removal panics which are dictated by the media barons Sulzberger (New York Times), Zuckerman (New York Daily News), and Murdoch (New York Post) . Almost entirely these children are Black and Latino. ACS illegally turned over approximately 465 Black and Latino foster children for drug experimentation and it was reported that the experiments killed two of these children.
B and C- ACS harasses Black and Latino families needlessly. Black and Latino families are rousted in predawn raids and ACS awakens entire apartment buildings in which members of these two groups reside. ACS harasses and interferes with family functioning even when allegations against them are clearly known to be false. ACS frightens and traumatizes Black children and Latino children on a daily and nightly basis. Black and Latino children often witness their parents being placed in handcuffs and taken away at these hours, for so the called crimes of disciplining their children by customary and religiously sanctioned means. These tactics, often initiated by anonymous accusations, smack of what we once were taught took place in Hitler´s Germany and Stalin´s USSR.
White Night In The Ghetto From the Front Seat of A Taxicab.
I've been working almost every night these past two weeks and have become re acclimated to driving and all it entails.
Sunday night for some reason I got five different fares who were young adult whites going to their residences deep in formerly Black neighborhoods (well, Crown Heights is a neighborhood that is mainly Black but has a large number of Lubavitcher Jewish cultists also, and I won't count Williamsburg in Brooklyn an area long shared by the Satmar hasidics and Puerto Ricans because it's been getting filled up with these generic whites from the interior of North America for a long long time now.) I got to talk a bit with two of these passengers. Let me digress here for a moment though. In the old days I had more conversations with passengers than I do now. Back then cell phones were not for everyone as they are today and these days I ignore it when I hear a passenger speak because nine times out of ten they are calling ahead to their destinations or calling their spouses to explain their whereabouts, and so forth.
Anyhow one of these kids (I call them kids, they must be in their twenties or thirties) was a bit concerned that I would not know how to get to where he was going (real "Do The Right Thing" territory - Bed Stuy, do or die as they say) and I told this kid that the corner where he was going to is where my parents had a small apartment on the day they brought me from Brooklyn Jewish Hospital sixty years ago.) Anyhow these two kids are very aware that they are the forward wedge of white power in the ghetto, that their presence alone makes it more difficult for the people already there to stay there. Each said he was "guilty." In my mind these kids are good kids but they should not feel "guilty" that they also need a place to lay their heads at night and they cannot afford to live in Manhattan or in any white enclave anywhere near New York City. It's a gift to have a conscience. I told them what matters is what they do with their understanding of how things are in order to change the world and make it a place where everyone has a place to be in.
Since I am a Jew who lives in General Grant Houses I am also I guess part of this forward wedge. General Grant Houses is on the Western border of Harlem, rubbing right up against Columbia University's neighborhood which clearly begins one block south of my apartment. Columbia University has bought up the land right across Broadway and they plan to destroy the low density buildings over there, gasoline stations (there are very few remaining in Manhattan) warehouses and so forth. St. Mary's Church is one center of resistance to this spread.
I had reason yesterday to look over the legal definition of genocide and the historical 1951 petition to the United Nations that charged the United States with genocide against "The Negro People of the United States" which was at that time the accepted usage.Looking at it onc e could say that Administration for Children´s Services here in New York is a mechanism of genocide. Check it out:
ARTICLE II, CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE:
Adopted December 9, 1948" In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
ARTICLE III:
"The following acts shall be punishable:
A. Genocide;
B. Conspiracy to commit genocide;
C. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
D. Attempt to commit genocide;
E. Complicity in genocide."
-xii-
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9685712
Article II of the Genocide Convention
A- ACS knowingly has a policy now of overloading its caseworkers and making them take parents to court in cases that really don´t merit this level of intervention which wastes caseworkers´s valuable time and energy. They know well that this policy actually results in the neglect of cases, some of which actually are legitimate abuse situations that cry out for intervention. This is why the number of children who die while on ACS caselods increases during removal panics which are dictated by the media barons Sulzberger (New York Times), Zuckerman (New York Daily News), and Murdoch (New York Post) . Almost entirely these children are Black and Latino. ACS illegally turned over approximately 465 Black and Latino foster children for drug experimentation and it was reported that the experiments killed two of these children.
B and C- ACS harasses Black and Latino families needlessly. Black and Latino families are rousted in predawn raids and ACS awakens entire apartment buildings in which members of these two groups reside. ACS harasses and interferes with family functioning even when allegations against them are clearly known to be false. ACS frightens and traumatizes Black children and Latino children on a daily and nightly basis. Black and Latino children often witness their parents being placed in handcuffs and taken away at these hours, for so the called crimes of disciplining their children by customary and religiously sanctioned means. These tactics, often initiated by anonymous accusations, smack of what we once were taught took place in Hitler´s Germany and Stalin´s USSR.
Taxi Drivers Have Ears ( I )
Monday, October 30, 2006
Taxi Drivers Have Ears
A few days ago I picked up a man and a woman on the Upper East Side. They were clearly Democratic Party operatives, speaking of Nancy Pelosi as though they knew her and mixing "the party" and "us" in their dialogue. They were arguing whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing for "us" to take back the House of Representatives. The young lady was all for it. The gentleman had deep reservations. He felt that Ms. Pelosi has an unpleasant personality and that this would harm "the Party" were she to become Speaker of the House. He was also very concerned with what Representative John Conyers might do to embarass "the Party." "Conyers having hearings could really hurt us."
The gentleman also thought that it would be preferable for the Democrats to be able to go to the public on 2008 saying that they had been powerless and not responsible for anything that had happened over Bush's (p)residency at the White House.
The young lady got out at Grand Central Station and the gentleman went on, to the meatpacking district if I remember correctly. He got onto his cell phone and scolded someone for indulging in cocaine at a party in the home of someone who could be hurt were it to become known.
He got out, paid me and tipped me and went on his way.
Taxi Drivers Have Ears
A few days ago I picked up a man and a woman on the Upper East Side. They were clearly Democratic Party operatives, speaking of Nancy Pelosi as though they knew her and mixing "the party" and "us" in their dialogue. They were arguing whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing for "us" to take back the House of Representatives. The young lady was all for it. The gentleman had deep reservations. He felt that Ms. Pelosi has an unpleasant personality and that this would harm "the Party" were she to become Speaker of the House. He was also very concerned with what Representative John Conyers might do to embarass "the Party." "Conyers having hearings could really hurt us."
The gentleman also thought that it would be preferable for the Democrats to be able to go to the public on 2008 saying that they had been powerless and not responsible for anything that had happened over Bush's (p)residency at the White House.
The young lady got out at Grand Central Station and the gentleman went on, to the meatpacking district if I remember correctly. He got onto his cell phone and scolded someone for indulging in cocaine at a party in the home of someone who could be hurt were it to become known.
He got out, paid me and tipped me and went on his way.
Homage To My Day Driver (Why I Hate Gay Bashers)
Sunday, December 18, 2005
HOMAGE TO MY DAY DRIVER (WHY I HATE GAY BASHERS)
Ralph and I were taxi drivers. We worked out of that once famous taxi garage in the West Village, Dover. Dover by the way was used for the exterior shots for the TV show Taxi, and some of the drivers there had uncanny resemblances to the characters on the show. (But I digress.) Dover closed long ago, changed its name to Glenties and relocated to the South Bronx, and when they did that my day driver Ralph and I went with of them. (Many"Village type" drivers scrambled to stay based in Manhattan-that was the eighties-and there are no more "Village type" cabbies around).
The deal was this: Ralph took the car for the day shift and I took it for the night shift. I'd meet Ralph on the Northeast corner of 74th and Amsterdam at 4:00 AM and drive up to the garage and gas up. Ralph would pay his lease, get his trip card, I'd turn in my trip card and Ralph would drop me at my furnished room on East 7th Street and then go to work. I'd get the car around 4:00 PM, (I would pay my lease once a week, on Friday, thereby buying 6 consecutive days of "seniority",) take him to the area of 74th and Amsterdam and head out to work.
Now cabbies don't often trust each other. Yellow cab drivers live after all by cutting each other's throats. Ralph must have felt that if I had his phone number I'd abuse it by calling him to announce that I'm bringing the car to him late, as I would then (he probably figured) be out there hustling that (extra) last ten dollars (that would be his ten dollars). So when I got broadsided by a drunk from Massachusetts who didn't have a license one night I couldn't call Ralph to tell him I wasn't coming. The car was undrivable. (I was okay thank goodness.)
Ralph of course went to the assigned corner at the assigned time. As he waited for me he went into the Korean deli there on the corner, got a cup of coffee and stood there, waiting for me. A few doors up the block there is a famous gay bar. It lets out at 4:00 AM, New York's statutory "last call for alcohol." As Ralph was standing on the corner sipping his coffee the patrons of that establishment were streaming out, many headed south to the corner and to the deli.
As Ralph told the story a car pulled up and stopped at the corner. A big white guy who Ralph says he didn't know from Adam (and Ralph's white) got out, ran up to Ralph and punched him square in his left eye, ran back into the car and took off into the night. Now this creep was wearing either a bunch of big rings or brass knuckles. Ralph was a bloody mess. He took a taxi down to Saint Vincent Hospital (he didn't trust any other) and they stitched him up, but the vision in his left eye was mainly gone.
Now back then one re applied for his/her hack license every year. There is a question on the form that asks if the driver saw a doctor since the last reapplication. If you check off "no" they don't bother you. There were cabbies who according to this record had not seen a doctor in 25 years. Ralph, for reasons I couldn't understand, checked off "yes.". Now they wanted a letter from a doctor saying that he was fit to work. An old prescription that had never been filled was the key here. The Rx got whited out, the form was brought to a copy place and blown up to letter size and the "doctor" wrote his medical release.
Ralph could tell, though, that his driving days were truly over. Now why Ralph had this thing for Reno, I can't say. I never knew him to even buy a lotto ticket. He never talked about cards, or dice, or roulette, or professional sports. Ralph, who had years and years with no accidents and no tickets, was having both. Ralph told me that if he was going to be poor he would be poor where it was warm year round, and he took off for Reno, he said, to become a security guard or a non union construction laborer.
I got a letter from him a couple weeks later telling me how great everything was out there. He had this furnished apartment in this condo type place, he said, it was filled with model types who lounged at the pool all day and he was loving it. He urged me to quit my job, leave my furnished attic apartment on University Avenue (I had finally moved to the Bronx just before he headed out west) and come join him. He was living he said in the lap of luxury for $400 a month. He said that he had a job as a security guard and was working on his gun permit and then he'd be rolling in dough.
I wrote him back telling him that I'd take it all under advisement.
One day a few months later Ramon the dispatcher asked me to come into the office. The coroner from Reno was on the phone. He told me that Ralph was dead. He had been found hanging from a light fixture. He was broke. The room was littered with beer cans. They found my name, stuff with the garage phone number too, and they were trying to figure out his story. Some names have been changed to protect privacy but this is fundamentally a true story. The bar mentioned is Candle Bar which was seen in the movie Six Degrees of Separation.
THIS WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED TO DEMOCRATS IN AIRPLANES UNDER THE PSEUDONYM BERNARD MARX. IT IS THE WORK OF AND PROPERTY OF ME, EUGENE WEIXEL.
Poets Are Ridiculous
Check out
www.acsmustbestopped.com
www.acsmustbestopped.com
Through the rear view mirror I could see the two guys I had picked up at Savalas on Bedford Avenue. They were talking "film." I zoned out of their conversation until I heard one of them say rather loudly, "Metaphor!" That's poets and we all know poets are ridiculous."
Thank You For Picking Me Up
Friday, June 30, 2006
In the 1960s, the black comedian Godfrey Cambridge used to tell his audience that there was only one way a Negro man (that was the correct wordage of the time) could get a taxi in New York.You take all your clothes off. You wrap yourself in a bedsheet. You go downtown and stand in front of the United Nations. And you go "Oooga booga booga." Back then we thought that was pretty funny.
It's been known that in New York City taxi drivers pass by black people and particularly black men who hail them. It happened to David Dinkins, our former mayor. It's happened to other celebrities, and incidents have gotten into the media from time to time. The Taxi and Limousine Commission and the NYPD run sting operations to catch taxi drivers who do this. The penalties are pretty severe, and they ought to be so, and yet it still happens.
Rumor has it, I read it ages ago but cannot find reference on the internet, and it might have been a malicious lie, that Godfrey Cambridge himself got a few tickets for doing just this, back when he was a struggling taxi driving comedian/ actor and a driver could get caught doing this a few times and keep his license (not true now) . Sometimes black taxi drivers, usually immigrants, do get caught doing this.
Now I never made it my practice to not pick someone up because of his race. I think lots of taxi drivers can honestly say that. I never made it my practice to refuse to pick someone up for the various real and honest reasons that are not legal excuses and that can sure look like racism - the passenger wanted to go to a dangerous area, and my car is bright yellow, an advertisement that I have money and no weapon; the passenger wanted to go to an area where people don't take yellow cabs and I'd be stuck for half an hour empty burning gas and paying rent on an empty moving taxi. Hasidic Jews are routinely passed up by cabbies who love to ferry other Jews between the Upper West Side and the theater district or Wall Street or Greenwich Village twelve hours a day. The Hasid has "Brooklyn" written all over him, and during busy heavy traffic times the above excuses or reasons apply to him. People trying to stop a yellow cab in Manhattan while in religious Muslim garb will have the same experiences as the Hasid and for the same reasons.
At any rate, because I am one of the many taxi drivers who do respect the law and decency I have black passengers in my cab every shift. So, a few times a week people thank me for stopping for them. I wish they wouldn't. I go where they want me to go. Usually, once I drop them off I seek the fastest route back to Manhattan if I find myself in one of the "outer boroughs", or back to downtown, where my customers are waiting, if I find myself in Harlem. Wouldn't you?
Also I try to know when hockey games, rap concerts and heavy metal concerts are letting out of Madison Square Garden. I don't want to be caught within a quarter mile of there when they do. This has nothing to do with anyone's race. it's based upon hard learned lessons, the kind of lessons one does not want to learn more than once.
I've been back driving taxi this week, for the first time in a decade and the business has changed. I do fewer rides in an hour and they tend to be for longer distances, so I remain busy (with a passenger) about the same proportion of my time. The fares are much higher. The fare structure seems to be designed in part now to do what taxi drivers risked tickets to do in the past, that is to keep inconvenient passengers on the sidewalk, heading for the subway station, or the bus stop.
I've learned a few things these few days I've been back driving. I should check "Gridlock Sam" on the internet before I go to the job and take a printout with me.
I've read that in Tokyo there are no street and building addresses as we know them here. New York is becoming a bit like Tokyo. Many of my passengers are generic whites who were born in the interior of the continent who perhaps went about their lives going from landmark to landmark instead of from address to address. This wasn't so often the case even ten years ago. All the hundreds of restaurants and nightclubs and even hotels have changed names probably twice since 1996. So even I get that "I can't find the place you want to go to" feeling. This too shall pass.
In the 1960s, the black comedian Godfrey Cambridge used to tell his audience that there was only one way a Negro man (that was the correct wordage of the time) could get a taxi in New York.You take all your clothes off. You wrap yourself in a bedsheet. You go downtown and stand in front of the United Nations. And you go "Oooga booga booga." Back then we thought that was pretty funny.
It's been known that in New York City taxi drivers pass by black people and particularly black men who hail them. It happened to David Dinkins, our former mayor. It's happened to other celebrities, and incidents have gotten into the media from time to time. The Taxi and Limousine Commission and the NYPD run sting operations to catch taxi drivers who do this. The penalties are pretty severe, and they ought to be so, and yet it still happens.
Rumor has it, I read it ages ago but cannot find reference on the internet, and it might have been a malicious lie, that Godfrey Cambridge himself got a few tickets for doing just this, back when he was a struggling taxi driving comedian/ actor and a driver could get caught doing this a few times and keep his license (not true now) . Sometimes black taxi drivers, usually immigrants, do get caught doing this.
Now I never made it my practice to not pick someone up because of his race. I think lots of taxi drivers can honestly say that. I never made it my practice to refuse to pick someone up for the various real and honest reasons that are not legal excuses and that can sure look like racism - the passenger wanted to go to a dangerous area, and my car is bright yellow, an advertisement that I have money and no weapon; the passenger wanted to go to an area where people don't take yellow cabs and I'd be stuck for half an hour empty burning gas and paying rent on an empty moving taxi. Hasidic Jews are routinely passed up by cabbies who love to ferry other Jews between the Upper West Side and the theater district or Wall Street or Greenwich Village twelve hours a day. The Hasid has "Brooklyn" written all over him, and during busy heavy traffic times the above excuses or reasons apply to him. People trying to stop a yellow cab in Manhattan while in religious Muslim garb will have the same experiences as the Hasid and for the same reasons.
At any rate, because I am one of the many taxi drivers who do respect the law and decency I have black passengers in my cab every shift. So, a few times a week people thank me for stopping for them. I wish they wouldn't. I go where they want me to go. Usually, once I drop them off I seek the fastest route back to Manhattan if I find myself in one of the "outer boroughs", or back to downtown, where my customers are waiting, if I find myself in Harlem. Wouldn't you?
Also I try to know when hockey games, rap concerts and heavy metal concerts are letting out of Madison Square Garden. I don't want to be caught within a quarter mile of there when they do. This has nothing to do with anyone's race. it's based upon hard learned lessons, the kind of lessons one does not want to learn more than once.
I've been back driving taxi this week, for the first time in a decade and the business has changed. I do fewer rides in an hour and they tend to be for longer distances, so I remain busy (with a passenger) about the same proportion of my time. The fares are much higher. The fare structure seems to be designed in part now to do what taxi drivers risked tickets to do in the past, that is to keep inconvenient passengers on the sidewalk, heading for the subway station, or the bus stop.
I've learned a few things these few days I've been back driving. I should check "Gridlock Sam" on the internet before I go to the job and take a printout with me.
I've read that in Tokyo there are no street and building addresses as we know them here. New York is becoming a bit like Tokyo. Many of my passengers are generic whites who were born in the interior of the continent who perhaps went about their lives going from landmark to landmark instead of from address to address. This wasn't so often the case even ten years ago. All the hundreds of restaurants and nightclubs and even hotels have changed names probably twice since 1996. So even I get that "I can't find the place you want to go to" feeling. This too shall pass.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Venezuela Matters
visit
www.acsmustbestopped.com
I have friends and family in Venezuela - in the not too distant future I'd like to retire there with my wife. The Venezuelan people have a right to decide what sort of government they want. I ask of my country- leave Venezuela alone!
Venezuela matters.
www.acsmustbestopped.com
I have friends and family in Venezuela - in the not too distant future I'd like to retire there with my wife. The Venezuelan people have a right to decide what sort of government they want. I ask of my country- leave Venezuela alone!
Venezuela matters.
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