NEW YORK — Babacar Dem, a yellow cab driver originally from Senegal, died during a break in his work shift in the bathroom of a Bronx chicken shop in late August. He was the fourth cab driver to die while on the job in the city over the summer.
Dem had been going for dialysis treatment three times a week, but was behind on his medallion payments and pushed himself to keep driving as much as possible. A cab driver since 2001, he signed a contract with Queens Medallion to pay at least $800 weekly for three years — almost a quarter million dollars — to get his own title to the cab. He still owed money when he died.
“It’s a debtors’ prison,” Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the Taxi Workers Alliance, the union that represents cab drivers, told Gothamist news. “Drivers feel that they’re handcuffed to the wheel. You begin each day at a negative and you have to keep working, whether you’re sick or have an emergency.”
Khalifa Siwa, a diabetic, was found dead in his cab Sept. 2 with an insulin pen in his hand. That was a week after his cab’s GPS tracker showed he had stopped along the West Side Highway.
Originally from Tanzania, Siwa was hospitalized in July for a stroke that left him with visible facial paralysis. But his doctor said he was cleared to work. Like Dem, Siwa was on a lease-to-own contract requiring weekly payments.
Richard Coulibaly, a 73-year-old cab driver from Ivory Coast, also on the hook to Queens Medallion, died in his cab during an intense heat wave here July 2.
Jagjit Singh was found dead from a suspected heart attack in his cab in the West Village Sept. 11.
Conditions for yellow taxi drivers have declined sharply since the introduction of strong competition from Lyft and Uber, companies that have more than 84,000 cars licensed to operate in the city. There are just over 10,000 active yellow cabs today, whose drivers have to work ever-increasing hours to bring in an average of about $387 in fares a day.
Desai said a recent union survey of over 400 cab drivers found that 10% of them knew drivers who had become homeless and 30% of those surveyed were behind on rent or mortgage payments last year.
For many cab drivers the four deaths brought back memories of at least eight cab drivers who found their situation so difficult they committed suicide in 2018. Drivers who had purchased taxi medallions — that at one point cost over $1 million each and were marketed to cabbies as a lifetime investment — found themselves drowning in debt after Uber and Lyft gutted what had been a government-enforced monopoly for the taxi industry, driving down the value of the medallions.
Growing hardships for Uber drivers
Uber and Lyft drivers are facing harder times too. While the costs of these rides rose nearly 10% last year, that extra money isn’t going into the pockets of the drivers. In June, Business Insider reported on a study covering ride-sharing data from three drivers in Dallas; Miami; and Tampa, Florida. Over a decade Uber bosses’ cut rose above 50% in some cities, well above the 15% to 20% the company used to take out of drivers’ fares.
That shift, benefiting the bosses’ profits by squeezing drivers’ income, along with fewer customers as working people hit with inflation cut back on using cabs of all kinds, has left app drivers scrambling. “I used to make a minimum of $300 a day,” Anja Holthoff, an Uber and Lyft driver for 10 years in Atlanta, said. “Now, sometimes, it takes me two days to make that.”
All cab drivers in New York have a tough time finding a place to take a meal break or use a restroom. They compete for just 151 parking spots south of 60th Street in Manhattan that the city has set aside for yellow cab drivers, and another 137 spots they share with app drivers. They face fines of $115 to $150 if they leave their cars, even briefly, in restricted or no-standing zones.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani took a yellow taxi to his inauguration on Jan. 1 driven by Richard Chow, the brother of one of the cab drivers who committed suicide in 2018. But this was just show, no concrete help for drivers has come from the mayor’s office.
The Department of Transportation is discussing a one-year pilot plan that could expand the number of rest stops cab drivers can use. But “drivers have been hearing that ad nauseam for decades,” Desai said last September.
Of more consequence, the Taxi Workers Alliance is stepping up its long-standing fight for disability insurance, expanded sick leave and healthcare for drivers. “If you get sick, you’re pretty much on your own,” Wain Chin, a yellow cab driver for 30 years, told the New York Times. And with times getting tougher, he said, “forget about retirement. We don’t have nothing.”