The taxi industry is going to lose the battle for the hearts and minds and wallets of the public.
We’re already disliked, what with so many of the drivers refusing fares to the Sunset and Bayview and refusing to take credit cards. The companies can’t afford to make us employees even if they were interested in doing so and none of us want to give up our independent contractor status and the freedoms it affords us. As a result, drivers don’t pick up radio calls with the same frequency that Lyft and Sidecar and Uber do and the public has picked up on this, voting with their money.
The city doesn’t seem to be interested in enforcing the laws on its books about making sure these guys are properly insured. The regulatory body that is the SFMTA has gone so far as to allow advertising on their own buses for these ridesharing services, a nod to their legitimacy by the same agency tasked with enforcing regulation on them. They won’t issue tickets for violators and they won’t go after them in court, paying the taxi industry lip service while doing absolutely nothing.
The companies won’t bite the bullet and work together to create a centralized dispatch, too intent on protecting their ship from pirates instead of fixing the holes that are rapidly sinking them.
The politicians who should be serving their constituents are far too worried about losing favor with the money trough that is Silicon Valley. There is a new breed of businessman cutting the checks to the war chests of local politicians and as they look to the future in hope of positions on the Board of Supervisors and Sacramento and Washington, D.C. they’re going to have to finance their runs for office, so the last thing they want to do is spurn the well-wishers and the checkbooks of an ever-growing chunk of the economy out here. They’re too concerned with staying in office and what office they’re going to hold next and amassing power than they are with making sure a bunch of taxi drivers – most of whom live outside of San Francisco and can’t vote for them – aren’t being regulated out of competing for the public’s money.
And the public, well… where do I start. They’re the real reason we’re going to lose, though I don’t blame them as much as I’d like to. My industry helped create this mess with its crony capitalistic ways, leaving people waiting for a taxi too many times for too long. There’s a million reasons why it’s tough to get a cab in certain neighborhoods at certain times and while we could blame a million different factors, the guy waiting an hour for a cab doesn’t care and goes searching for other options – options they now have. The public wants to get where they’re going and they don’t care who picks them up as long as they don’t have to wait. Smartphones and interconnectivity have created the ability for on-demand services to be dispatched with ease and the average person’s patience for anything other than “immediately” makes a fifteen minute wait for a ride on a busy Friday night a thing of the past. And that in turn creates an expectation that everyone who has the money gets exactly what they want, when they want it, to the point where many people have given up on taxis so completely that they will stand at 16th and Valencia and look at their phones for five minutes at midnight on a Tuesday instead of getting in one of the ten cabs that pass them by while they’re waiting for a pink mustachioed car to take them home.
There are real problems in our industry but at this point the biggest one is the perception bias created by instant gratification and I don’t see what cab drivers are going to be able to do to change the perspective of the public. We could start doing nothing but picking up dispatched calls, say please and thank you, let the people in the back seat control the radio station and give blowjobs and we’d still be a bunch of felonious, uneducated immigrants to enough of the public where it wouldn’t stem the tide raging against us. These are the same people who don’t mind that Chinese workers made their cell phone for a handful of dollars of day as long as they pay less for the smartphone they hail an Uber with. People are lazy, cheap and self-centered and no amount of regulation or coaxing is going to change that. Our society doesn’t think much about others, and the freedom to not give a shit – while not expressly guaranteed by the Bill Of Rights – is real and alive and well in this country of ours.
But all drivers are gonna lose no matter what we do, because in ten years driverless cars will be on the roads and it won’t matter whether you drive for Lyft, Uber, Sidecar or whoever – the whole concept of driving is going to change and the job of professional driver is going to slowly disappear until robots are doing our jobs. Like thousands of other jobs, in the next twenty or so years we’re going to automate so many things that we’re going to leave more and more of society behind as we trend onwards to our slow extinction as a species.
It was a good gig while it lasted, but I’m sure like most of the people I know driving right now, in twenty years I’ll have long been doing something else.
