Rhythmanalysis in Taxicabs and Soft Cabs: a report from three North American cities

Here is the abstract of my latest publication, a chapter in Rhythmanalysis: Place, Mobility, Disruption and Performance, edited by Dawn Lyon, and just now out in print:

Rhythmanalysis in Taxicabs and Soft Cabs: a report from three North American cities

Just who is the “analyst” who practices rhythmanalysis? The extension of the name “rhythmanalyst” to other than scholarly practitioners makes possible an investigation of the relationship of rhythmanalysis to other rhythm-analytic forms of knowing and representing urban space, and the ways in which these differing but related practices may challenge, undermine, or inform each other. In this paper, drawing on years of ethnographic and autoethnographic research in three North American cities, I discuss the rhythmanalytical practice involved in cabdriving, as this is shaped by the technologies drivers use to sense the city, and by the transformation of the taxicab into the “ridesharing” or soft cab. First, I discuss the occupational knowledge and wayfinding practice of cabdrivers, and the extent to which their work requires the development, by means of a variety of tools and practices, of a sense of the city as composed of multiple interacting rhythmic movements, or polyrhythmia, with which they must strategically converge and facilitate. Second, I discuss the redelegation of the role of rhythmanalyst to predictive algorithms and mobile interfaces, as part of the reinvention of the taxicab, and its associated micropolitics and power/knowledge relations, by smartphone enabled hailing and dispatching services. Struggles over, and transformations of, these non-academic forms of rhythmanalysis may provide insight, in turn, into the contemporary politics of the production of social space.

Digital Mediation, Soft Cabs, and Spatial Labour

The new special issue of Digital Culture & Society on "Mobile Digital Practices" has been released, featuring my article on "Digital Mediation, Soft Cabs, and Spatial Labour:"

https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/dcs.2017.3.issue-2/issue-files/dcs.2017.3.issue-2.xml

Click here for the free repository version of the article.

Abstract

Critics of digitally mediated labour platforms (often called the “sharing” or “gig economy”) have focused on the character and extent of the control exerted by these platforms over both workers and customers, and in particular on the precarizing impact on the workers on whose labor the services depend. Less attention has been paid to the specifically spatial character of the forms of work targeted by mobile digital platforms. The production and maintenance of urban social space has always been dependent, to a large degree, on work that involves the crossing of spatial boundaries - particularly between public and private spaces, but also crossing spaces segregated by class, race, and gender. Delivery workers, cabdrivers, day labourers, home care providers, and similar boundary-crossers all perform spatial work: the work of moving between and connecting spaces physically, experientially, and through representation. Spatial work contributes to the production and reproduction of social space; it is also productive of three specific, though interrelated, products: physical movement from one place to another; the experience of this movement; and the articulation of these places, experiences, and movements with visions of society and of the social. Significantly, it is precisely such spatial work, and its products, which mobile digital platforms seek most urgently to transform. Drawing on several recent studies of “ridesharing” (or soft cab) labour platforms, I interrogate the impact of digital mediation on the actual practices involved in spatial work. I argue that the roll-out of digital labour platforms needs to be understood in terms of a struggle over the production of social space.

We need better reporting from NPR about Uber

Here is the rant I just sent to NPR, regarding their recent Marketplace segment, "Why ride sharing companies are absent from SXSW":

As a transportation scholar who has conducted research on e-hailing services, including Uber and Lyft, I was surprised and disappointed to hear Molly Woods’ one-sided reporting from the SXSW conference. Your segment, “Why ride sharing companies are absent from SXSW” is 1) misleading (there are plenty of e-hailing companies in Austin, including both taxicabs and “ridesharing” services), and 2) your segment did not actually address the question of why Uber and Lyft are absent!

Uber and Lyft voluntarily left the city to avoid regulations which the voting public approved of. Regulatory limitations on Uber and Lyft, as well as AirBnB, are based on serious considerations of economic and social welfare—but these were dismissed as “quirky” on NPR, the one network from which we expect a more critical and even-handed perspective, now more than ever.

Just as infuriating were the implications that, for daring to challenge these corporations, Austin is somehow backwards, or non-tech-friendly. While other cities are still stuck with Uber and Lyft, Austin is incubating the next generation of e-hailing services—more responsible, and more accountable than the corporate giants. 

What the world wants to know—and what NPR can more responsibly report on—is how well these new, non-Uber-and-Lyft e-hailing companies are servicing Austin. We all know that companies like Uber are unsustainable. Austin is the place where we see what will happen next—please give us some reporting on that. 

I normally try to stay away from comments or emails like this, but this time I couldn't help it. I think I showed great restraint by not even asking them why they are still calling it "ridesharing" (though they must know better by now)...

I haven't looked closely at what has been happening in Austin since my early post about "ridesharing" apps swarming into Austin, right after Uber and Lyft left. It would be great to see some real reporting on how the new, local apps are working out. For a good start at this, see this recent article on Shareable.

Disrupt the Disruptors! An Interview with Kelly Dessaint

Cabdriver, zine publisher, and Examiner columnist Kelly Dessaint’s Behind the Wheel series is a must-read for anyone interested in an on-the ground view of how tech gentrification and the “sharing” economy have transformed the experience of life and work in San Francisco.

Kelly Dessaint's Behind the Wheel series chronicles his path from Uber/Lyft driver to licensed San Francisco taxi driver. They are available in print or pdf from his website, as well as from Amazon. He also writes the I Drive SF column for the Examiner.

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I’m inbound on Post street. While I wait for the light to change at Jones, I practice my double bass drumming on the steering wheel along to the Slayer CD blasting from the stereo in my taxicab. (Behind the Wheel 3, page 1)

The third installment of Behind the Wheel begins and ends just like most of the stories it contains—in motion through the streets of San Francisco. Dessaint was the first driver/writer to publish about the experience of driving for Uber and Lyft, and he has since joined the ranks of the city's licensed taxi drivers. Like most writing about cabdriving, the stories in Behind the Wheel take the form of fragmentary, slice-of-life episodes, but Dessaint’s stories are unified by a sense of movement, recurring characters, and a compelling theme of analog resistance to the digital colonization of everyday life.

One of the most striking characters is San Francisco itself. At least since Tex Reed’s 1970 book Hey Taxi, San Francisco cabdrivers have been writing complicated love stories to the city. Cabdriving memoirs from other cities often emphasize a sense of the alienation of disconnected service work, or even the despair of being caught in a dead-end job. San Francisco’s cab writers—including Dessaint—don’t overlook the downsides of the work, but they always balance it with a sense of intoxication with the city, and the myriad stories of the people they drive through it. The result is a mix of light and shadow, of spleen and ideal, a performance far more human and interesting than the sugar-coated kitsch of (for example) Lyft Me Up San Francisco. Dessaint calls it “the incurable madness of taxi driving:”

San Francisco is like a drug. When it gets inside you, each moment is a revelation. Until things get ugly. (Behind the Wheel 3, page 10)

Behind the Wheel paints a psychogeographic portrait of San Francisco, joining a tradition that includes Rebecca Solnit’s Infiinite City and Gary Kamiya’s Cool, Gray City of Love. Like the “spatial stories” described by the philosopher De Certeau, Dessaint’s stories are narratives in motion, lighting up the city through the movements of a cabdriver and his passengers:

And if you’re lucky, one ride follows the next, like jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place. One minute you’re working the swanky hotels on Snob Hill, the next you’re dropping off in the oft-forgotten Bayview, where urban detritus collects like dust bunnies under a credenza.

And you’ve seen it all, cause you’re a cabdriver, or at least you’ve seen most of it, although in reality, you don’t know fuck all. (Behind the Wheel 3, pages 58-9)

We meet a myriad of other characters of course—passengers from all walks of life, taxi drivers hanging around the garage or the cabstand—but the most interesting is Dessaint himself. Unlike the wry persona affected by many cab writers (such as the Examiner’s old Night Cabbie columnist), Dessaint reveals his own reactions to what he encounters, showing his defeats along with his triumphs, and his exhaustion, uncertainty, and anguish at the hands of abusive passengers, particularly during his “ridesharing” phase:

It’s nights like these that make me want to curl up into a fetal position and rethink this whole ridesharing deal. (Behind the Wheel 2, page 28)

As a whole, the three Behind the Wheel books tell the story of Dessaint’s growth through cabdriving, and his own arc of progress from Lyft driver, to Uber driver, to licensed San Francisco taxi driver—in a direction diametrically opposed to the official narrative of the “sharing economy.” And this is one unifying theme of the Behind the Wheel series: it is a story of defiance, an act of political activism. The series is a war-cry against the gentrification of the city, and the intrusion of tech interfaces and algorithmic manipulation into everyday life. In one of the most important chapters of Behind the Wheel 3, Dessaint teams up with a disgruntled Uber driver to confront David Plouffe himself at a tech conference. In a later chapter he argues with some passengers who don’t realize the contradiction between supporting Bernie Sanders, and patronizing Uber and Lyft:

This new gig economy is regressive. It pushes the most vulnerable members of our society into wage slavery, where they’re paid for piecework rather than given an opportunity to secure a stable income. And what’s more, instead of seeing their profits increase by working more, due to the constant Uber/Lyft price wars, they actually make less in the process. How can you support a system like that? (Behind the Wheel 3, page 55)

The Behind the Wheel series is a must-read for anyone interested in seeing the real, gritty, human reality of how work and urban space have been transformed by the tech-centric “sharing” economy (And as a bonus, each book comes with a “Disrupt the Disruptors” bumper sticker!)

My Other Car Is A Taxicab

I interviewed Kelly by email about Behind the Wheel, along with his long-running zine Piltdownlad, his Examiner column I Drive SF, and his future plans.

How did you start writing a column for the Examiner?

I'd been blogging about my experiences driving for Uber and Lyft for a while and getting a decent amount of attention. I was extremely critical of both companies and how they were treating drivers. I'd already put out the first two zines and started writing for Disinfo.com and Broke-Ass Stuart. To explore other aspects of driving for hire, I was planning to go to taxi school and get my a-card.

On New Year's Eve 2014/2015, Flywheel ran that special where every ride was $10 and it killed business for Uber and Lyft, who'd been getting bad press about surge pricing. I worked that night and it was dismal. Just horrible. I drove around empty most of the night. The next day I wrote a blog post called "Night of the Living Taxi" that made the rounds. Several news outlets contacted me, including Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez of The Examiner. We talked on the phone for a while and the next month he recommended me to the new editor as a modern version of the Night Cabbie, but as an Uber driver. By this time I'd already started driving a taxi, so I pitched my idea of a column about a former Uber/Lyft driver turned cab driver. The editor was interested. When we met to go over the details, he told me that one of the things he wanted to do when he took over The Examiner was revive the Night Cabbie. Of course, in the beginning, and still to this day, comparisons are made between his column and mine. Except I'm not anonymous.

Incidentally, the editor was relieved that I wanted to use my real name. Though I quickly realized the advantage the Night Cabbie had by not revealing who he was. Writing for a newspaper is restrictive because there are limits to what you can write about. Which is why I find doing the zine more liberating because I can write whatever I want. And I'm not bound by a 700 word limit.

How did you first get into writing and zine publishing?

I've always written. It's something my parents encouraged me to do for as long as I can remember. Whether it was filling notebooks with derivative song lyrics or pecking away at my mother's Royal typewriter trying to compose bawdry poems, writing was a way I was able to truly express myself. And shock the adults around me.

As a teenager, I wrote vociferously. Exploring both verse and prose before eventually settling on prose as my preferred method of communication. After getting rejected by any half-way decent magazine I found on the newsstand, I started my own zine and book publishing empire. (And by "empire" I mean that Gateway computer set up in a burned out garage behind my mother's house in East LA.)

I modeled my publications on lit journals from the 60s that I'd found in used bookstores and collected over the years, as well as contemporary handmade, photocopied punk zines coming out of the underground, listed in the back of Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside.

From there, I just kept pushing the boundaries... writing and publishing and designing... collaborating with different artists and writers until we inevitably went our own ways... usually acrimoniously. But not always...

In 2010, I started my latest project: Piltdownlad: A Personal Narrative Zine. 

How did you pick the name for the zine? Some relation to Piltdown Man?

Pitldownlad comes from an album by the D.C. band Fidelity Jones entitled "Piltdown Lad." I combined the two words for aesthetic reasons. Fidelity Jones was the first punk band I saw live, during a visit to D.C. when I was 17. "Piltdown Lad" is their only full length LP. There is very little commentary associated with the album or a title song, but I assume it's an expansion on the idea of the Piltdown Man (a fake early man) to incorporate feeling "fake" as a young (new) person. Perhaps. Or a reference to arrested development. Or, the Peter Pan complex. I don't know really... 

I used Piltdownlad as a vehicle to explore the darkness of my childhood in relation to my current existence as a writer trying to make sense of the past and the future, as well as an outlet to review equally, over-personal zines. 

Where does the Behind the Wheel series fit into this?

After ten issues, around 2014, I discovered Lyft, the ride-hail company. I thought to myself, here is something that is culturally relevant - albeit entirely absurd - that I'd love to document. Something I was convinced surely wouldn't last for long. From Lyft, I delved into Uber, which I also assumed was a fly by night operation at best. 

As I documented the stupidity, the madness, the desperation of using one's personal car as a taxicab, I stumbled onto many fascinating discoveries... Namely, that I loved driving around San Francisco, witnessing the last gasps of a city that I'd always associated with free expression and limitless artistic possibilities as tech start ups took over and molded the cultural reality into something darker and sinister... And the realization that Uber and Lyft weren't going anywhere soon. 

That's where the Behind the Wheel series was born, and from which it has evolved: detailing the nightmare of what was, and what may never be again. And holding a torch for the last bastion of analogue technology: taxi driving. 

It's safe to say I may have bit off more than I can "eschew." And now I'm in a vicious circle. But I still believe that salvation comes from hard work. And driving a taxi in San Francisco is a challenge I have yet to master. And may never master. But I am keeping notes... 

What do you mean when you say you're in a "vicious circle"?

The vicious circle I referred to is driving a taxi to write about driving a taxi... The writing comes easy. The driving, not so much. I suppose I could just work a few days each month, collect some stories, talk to other cab drivers, get their stories and do the column without subjecting myself to the physical stress, the poor financial returns and the constant sense of futility. But that's not the type of writer - or person - I am. Unfortunately, the story I want to tell requires active participation. And that comes with a plethora of consequences, both personal and financial. 

When writing the three Behind the Wheel issues, do you have a particular audience or reader(s) in mind?

I do. And it changes with each issue. When I wrote the first one I thought of readers of my previous zines. The second, people who read my blog. And the third, readers of my column. I've been fortunate to receive a decent amount of messages and comments from people who read my stuff. I don't always reply but I try to incorporate responses in future writings, either through inside jokes or references that only a few will catch.

I know from talking to taxi drivers that geography is a major issue to them when they read about locations. So I always make sure not to fuck up my cross streets or routes. Cause when I do, I immediately hear about it.

A few months back, some guy left a comment on an old column of mine in which he questioned my claim that taxis serve poor people, or the working poor, rather. His argument being that Uber is way more affordable. True, but that's irrelevant. Obviously. The complete lack of insight into how poverty works makes my mind swell each time I think about his comment. I still haven't figured out a single rebuttal because there are so many to make. When I try my mind just goes pfffffftttttttt. And yet, I find myself incorporating the subject of poverty into what I'm writing, not in a direct way, but just adding small scenes along the way. It's a subtle reply, I guess.

What are the most important things you want your readers to learn or understand from your writing?

I think writing should be exciting to read. It should be honest. It should capture the feel of a time and place. It should break rules and constantly push boundaries. I don't see much of that today. I'm often amused by things I read, but rarely am I excited. Like first discovering Henry Miller. Or Thomas Pynchon. Or Hunter Thompson. Not that I actually believe I'll ever reach that caliber, you know, but at least try, right?

Will there be a 4th Behind the Wheel? Do you have other future writing planned?

I've started working on the new BTW. Which will be mostly unpublished stuff about the daily process of driving and going into the city every day from Oakland. "The Thin Checkered Line."

Before I started documenting my experiences driving for hire I was working on other personal narratives under Piltdownlad. I'm actually hoping the new zine will lead to a return to those past stories to wrap up a manuscript I should have returned to the publisher over a year ago. I released a book about my abusive childhood several years ago and that's what led to Microcosm, the publisher, approaching me about another book that dealt specifically with punk rock as a method of recovery from abuse, called No Fun: How Punk Rock Saved My Life.  

The Behind the Wheel series is available from Dessaint's website, or from Amazon.

Related Posts:
"It Ain't Just a Job, Folks!" The New Deep City Press, 1975-1978
Taxi Inferno, Anthropologist Wallace Zane's harrowing cab ride through Los Angeles
Big Tom's Antique Hack Yarns

Posner's Taxi Ruling Is Based on Falsehoods and Bad Logic

Conservative jurist Richard Posner, writing for the US 7^th Circuit of Appeals, has issued what is likely to be an influential ruling on the regulation of soft cabs (such as Uber, Lyft, etc.; in his ruling Posner refers to these as “TNPs”) and other taxicabs in the city of Chicago. This is unfortunate, because Posner’s ruling is riddled with errors, inaccuracies, and false logic—in fact he all but admits cribbing part of his argument off the internet! Here I’m going to go through Posner’s most ridiculous statements point by point; you can read his full text here.

The first is that allowing the TNPs into the taxi and livery markets has taken away the plaintiffs’ property for a public use without compensating them. A variant of such a claim would have merit had the City confiscated taxi medallions, which are the licenses that authorize the use of an automobile as a taxi. Confiscation of the medallions would amount to confiscation of the taxis: ... Anyway the City is not confiscating any taxi medallions; it is merely exposing the taxicab companies to new competition—competition from Uber and the other TNPs.

Does Posner understand anything about how the taxi industry works? Of course medallion owners can’t complain about competition, because they are already in competition with each other. Even drivers for the same company are in competition with each other. It’s like Posner is borrowing an image of a monopoly from a completely different industry and trying to impose it on the cab industry. Do your homework, sir.

The real complaint from the taxi industry was not “we are being competed against” but “we are being charged licensing fees, etc., but other people operating the same business are not being charged the same fees.” In other words, the argument is not against competition but against unequal competition as an effect of unequal regulation.

An apt comparison would be if someone paid a license fee to run a liquor store, then complained because the city allowed someone to sell liquor next door without a license. Or, if the electric company was only allowed to charge certain rates, but then another electric company was allowed to operate in the same city, charging whatever they wanted. Would Posner really argue that such companies had no legal recourse against the regulator for allowing such unequal competition?

Posner then rambles off into another argument borrowed from the internet—that the difference between Uber and taxis is the simple fact of historical technological change:

Indeed when new technologies, or new business methods, appear, a common result is the decline or even disappearance of the old. Were the old deemed to have a constitutional right to preclude the entry of the new into the markets of the old, economic progress might grind to a halt. Instead of taxis we might have horse and buggies; instead of the telephone, the telegraph; instead of computers, slide rules.

What makes these examples particularly funny, to me, is that I actually research the history of two of these transitions—from the telegraph to telephone, and from horse-drawn cabs to taxis. I’m sorry Mr. Posner, but those transitions had almost nothing in common with this current case. For one thing, those were actual, significant technological shifts, but there is no actual difference in technology between an Uber and a taxi. Both are just automobiles, and both can be hailed from a smartphone. I realize that Posner, like many people, may not be aware that smartphone apps for taxis have been around longer than Uber (in Chicago, Curb (formerly Taxi Magic) has been available since 2009). But you would think that a legal scholar making an important ruling on a case like this would bother to do some actual research on the history of this technology, instead of taking Uber’s crypto-history at face value.

The plaintiffs argue that the City has discriminated against them by failing to subject Uber and the other TNPs to the same rules about licensing and fares (remember that taxi fares are set by the City) that the taxi ordinance subjects the plaintiffs to. That is an anticompetitive argument. Its premise is that every new entrant into a market should be forced to comply with every regulation applicable to incumbents in the market with whom the new entrant will be competing.

Here Posner briefly comes back to reality before taking another swerve off into his own imaginary land. At least he states the taxi industry’s complaints correctly: yes, they are upset that someone competing against them, offering the same service they do, is not subjected to the same rules and regulations. In other words, they are asking for a level playing field. How is this remotely an “anticompetitive argument?”

Then Posner launches into his already infamous “taxi drivers are like dogs” argument. Let’s just quote this, slightly amended for clarity to show what he is strongly implying:

[Taxi drivers] on average are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than [Uber drivers], are feared by more people, can give people serious bites, and make a lot of noise outdoors, barking and howling. Feral [Uber drivers] generally are innocuous, and many pet [Uber drivers] are confined indoors.

Thank you, Mr. Posner, for so clearly and cluelessly articulating part of the deeply racist and classist imagery at the heart of Uber’s popularity. This ugly little quote is too packed with significance to be fully dealt with here. Suffice it to say for now that the contrast Posner is articulating is known, in US history, as “the house slave and the field slave.”

Let’s move on to Posner’s next insanity, where he takes issue with the lower court judge who had granted some merit to one of the cabdrivers’ claims:

She ruled that the City, by failing to place as many regulatory burdens on the TNPs as on the taxicab companies, might have denied the latter the equal protection of the law. But this was taking equal protection literally, and it should not be taken so. Otherwise prospective entrants to a market who had lower costs than incumbent firms would not be allowed to enter the market unless some regulatory entity burdened the new entrants with regulations, whether or not necessary or even appropriate, that eliminated any cost advantage the new entrants would otherwise have in competing with the incumbent firms.

“Equal protection of the law” should not be taken literally? Wow, Mr. Posner. Just, wow. I suppose we ought to leave that one wide open to interpretation, huh? Otherwise we all might have to be treated... equally... well, we can’t have that!

The next sentence is where his argument gets really ridiculous. According to Posner, if we had to offer all competitors equal protection (or, an equal playing field, basically), we would have to handicap any new entrants who had a special advantage. Like saying: runner A is faster than runner B, so if they compete, runner A has to carry weights to make them run the same speed.

Well, this is a fascinating diversion into philosophical speculation, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the real-life case that Posner is supposedly writing about. The taxi operators are not asking for additional burdens, above and beyond what taxis bear, to be placed on Uber and Lyft to make them competitive; they are just asking for equal regulations. Equal treatment. Literally.

Mind you, there is a very important truth buried here, which Posner has completely failed to recognize. Uber and Lyft really aren’t in a truly competitive market situation against taxis, because while taxis have to compete in a real market, Uber and Lyft (for the time being) are being subsidized by a constant influx of new investment capital. How “competitive” is it to have to keep a small business legitimately afloat while competing against someone who can lose money hand over fist, while constantly attracting more funding? There is no real “market” here as long as Uber (and its backers) have a heavy hand on the scales.

Posner finally turns to his most important argument, that taxis and soft cabs like Uber are too different to be regulated in the same way. First of all, he repeats the very tired argument that taxis can be hailed off the streets, but that Ubers can only (legally) be hailed with a phone app. What Posner completely fails to understand is that this difference is the wholly arbitrary effect of regulation, not a pre-existing difference that regulation is “responding” to.

Not that regulation never responds to the nature of the industry regulated: in fact, much existing taxi regulation is just such a response. In many cities, for instance, it was long illegal for cabs to take street hails—regulators wanted cabs only to pick up at set locations like cabstands, or to respond to orders via phone. Over time, those restrictions were worn away by demand. In some cities, such as Mexico City, there are still different categories of taxi, some of which respond to street hails, while some can only be picked up at stands, and others can only be ordered by phone. This is, incidentally, a very inefficient system, brought about by regulation that arbitrarily creates a distinction between dispatch modes. There is an inherent pull, I would argue, for taxis to ultimately be made available by all dispatch modes. Uber (and other soft cabs) is in fact already starting to experience this.

Right now soft cabs are only (legally) hailable by phone; but this is just the arbitrary effect of the exemption that regulators have created. But anyone coming out of a busy concert and trying to hail an Uber knows that dozens or hundreds of vehicles converging at once, each looking for a specific person, is a complete mess. Now, imagine that the Ubers were instead allowed to line up at the concert exit, and everyone coming out could just take the first one in line. Wouldn’t that be more convenient? Rest assured that, at some point in the near future, regulators will be asked to make this change.

Or say that, as Posner believes, licensed taxis are completely driven out of business. Who then will serve the demand for street hails? Uber, of course, will be given the right to accept flags off the street. And it is perfectly rational, in fact almost inevitable, that this will happen. The only irrational aspect to it would be the inconvenient fact that Ubers had first been created as a separate category on the temporary, and arbitrary basis that they were excluded from these forms of dispatch. But there is no inherent reason for this exclusion, or for the legal distinction between taxis and soft cabs.

Posner then makes a series of false or illogical statements in rapid succession:

A major difference is that customers, rather than being able to hail an Uber car, must sign up with Uber before being able to summon it...

Remember, you can e-hail taxis just like soft cabs, requiring all the same pre-arrangement. This is an absolute red herring.

Unlike taxicab service Uber assumes primary responsibility for screening potential drivers and hiring only those found to be qualified, and the passengers receive more information in advance about their prospective rides—information that includes not only the driver’s name but also pictures of him (or her) and of the car.

This is an odd way to put it, because for taxicabs the “primary responsibility” for these falls to regulators. Uber is only exempt from this (and thus allowed to take “primary responsibility”) because they were granted an exemption by lawmakers. Furthermore, if you’ve followed Uber in the news and the courts at all you are likely to have a dim view of their sense of “responsibility.” Posner is really arguing here that you should simply trust this corporation when it comes to safety. But if Uber was really committed to safety, and background checks, etc., why are they so against being required to follow the same level of safety regulations as taxis already face?

Furthermore, the TNPs use part‐time drivers extensively, and it is believed that these part‐timers drive their cars fewer miles on average than taxicab drivers, who are constantly patrolling the streets in hope of being hailed; and the fewer miles driven the less likely a vehicle is to experience wear and tear that may impair the comfort of a ride in it and even increase the risk of an accident or a breakdown.

If Posner was posting this on Wikipedia, an editor would flag “it is believed” as weasel words. Not only is Posner’s statement weaselly, it is precisely the opposite of “what is believed.” Having studied and written about this very aspect of the industry, I find these falsehoods particularly insulting. The truth is that the core of Uber and other soft cab services are provided by drivers who rely on it as a job; incidental or “part-time” drivers as Posner imagines them only provide a fraction of overall rides. Second, part-time and incidental drivers are not more efficient in their mileage than full-time drivers; in fact, the opposite is likely to be the case, as I pointed out in my 2014 publication on this very question. Mayber Posner should have read some of the literature before jumping to these assumptions?

Posner ends by showing his true colors, with a paean to the disastrous experiments in taxi deregulation back in the 1970s. He lauds the fact that “the deregulation movement has surged with the advent of the TNPs.” Which leads to the most important lesson to be learned from this entire saga:

There is really no such thing as “deregulation;” there is only different regulation.

Posner completely fails to understand (or to admit) that all the differences between soft cabs and taxicabs which he feels justify separate regulatory regimes for the two forms of on-demand car service, were in fact created by those very regulations. Thus, even though he celebrates this as “deregulation” it is really just an arbitrary shift—from one game, involving a certain set of rules and certain players, to another game, with different players and different rules. Even the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek recognized that markets are artifacts in this way. The surprising thing is that Posner does not apparently realize this—that regulators are not “recognizing” a real distinction between two markets, but creating that distinction; and Posner in issuing his decision, is actively assisting in that creation.

Lewis Hine's New York Taxi Drivers

A New York taxi driver poses for the camera while car 433 of the Third Avenue Railway System passes in the background. Photo by Lewis Hine; George Eastman Museum.

Lewis Hine was an early 20^th Century advocate of what he called social photography—photography that helped bring about social change. He is most famous for his photos of child laborers, of immigrants passing through Ellis Island, and of construction workers building the Empire State Building. He also took a series of photos of New York City cabdrivers.

(All photos courtesy of the George Eastman Museum).

The double-breasted coat worn by this taxi driver would have looked right at home on a 19th Century hack driver. Photo by Lewis Hine; George Eastman Museum.

The date given for these photos is “circa 1935,” but judging from the cabs it is more likely the 1920s. The cab in this photo still has carriage-style lamps on either side, behind the driver.

In all of Hine's photos, the cabdrivers look straight ahead, with their hands on the wheel. This reflects Hine’s intention, in his work portraits, to show the relationship between workers and their machines, and to capture how “the character of the men is being put into the motors.” Presumably Hine means to convey how the speed of the taxi forces the driver’s attention on the road ahead—very reminiscent of Marx’s observation that industrial workers become mere “conscious organs” attached to the machine. You might say that, just like for the office workers T.S. Eliot had written about only a few years before this photo, for these taxi drivers

...the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting...

 This makes a sharp contrast with the images I posted about last month, of Honoré Daumier’s hack drivers, who are always shown interacting with passengers or hailers (when they are not falling asleep while driving!)

In his book of photographs, Men At Work, Hine wrote:

Cities do not build themselves, machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men. We call this the Machine Age. But the more machines we use the more do we need real men to make and direct them.

Hine’s goal was to show the importance of labor even in this “Machine Age,” and to depict the dignity of workers.

Then, the more you see of modern machines, the more may you, too, respect the men who make them and manipulate them.

Photo by Lewis Hine; George Eastman Museum.

There’s not much background variation in these photos, indicating that they were probably all taken in quick succession at the same location, perhaps at a cab stand. Here we see the first driver again, having moved forward slightly, perhaps a spot or two up the line. In this photo you can get a sense of how early windshields were designed. Before windshield wipers, a heavy rain could completely obscure the view through the front. To counteract this, the top part of the windshield could be swung outward, to create a gap through which the driver could peer into the rain.

You can also see that this cab, like all the rest in these photos, had no passenger-side front door. The space next to the driver was for storing the passengers’ luggage; if the space was needed for a passenger, there was often a fold-down seat that could be called into service.

And you can see that, although the passenger compartment is enclosed, there isn’t much protecting the drivers from the elements. No wonder that other driver was wearing such a heavy coat.

Yellow Taxi with phone number Lenox 2300. Photo by Lewis Hine; George Eastman Museum.

Here is another reason for the drivers to stare forward: to give their passengers privacy. This photo gives a good view of the glass partition which separated drivers and passengers in early taxicabs. In horse-drawn days, closed carriages created a natural boundary between the interior space for the passengers (inside the carriage), and the exterior space for the driver (outside, “on the box”). This social distinction was eroded by the automobile. The glass partitions in these early taxicabs were meant to recreate the separation of social space between driver and passengers—but this also required the affective work of the driver in knowing when to separate himself from the private space of the passengers.

Such in-cab micropolitics is the focus of a painting by Eugenie McEvoy, roughly contemporaneous with Hine’s photos, and fittingly titled “Lenox 2300.” In that painting (which you can see here) the driver stares straight ahead—just like in Hine’s photos—pointedly excluding himself from the intimate space of the couple in the backseat, whose reflection appears, nevertheless, in the glass of the partition just behind the driver’s hunched, stressed back.

Yellow Taxi with phone number Penn 3723. Photo by Lewis Hine; George Eastman Museum.

Although this cab, just like the last one, is labelled “Yellow Taxi,” it has a different phone number on the side: Pennsylvania 3723, linking through an exchange near Pennsylvania Station (as remembered in the song, “Pennsylvania 6-5000”). In other words, these appear to be the cabs of two rival cab companies, both named “Yellow Taxi” (the Lenox 2300 guys were first, and unsuccessfully sued their competitors for copying their name and color). In fact, all of the cabs in Hine’s photos call themselves “Yellow Taxis,” even though they are evidently from different companies (judging from slight variations in the logo and paint scheme).

In Hacking New York, one of the earliest cabdriving memoirs ever written, old-time taxi driver Robert Hazard describes the color-coded taxi wars of 1920s New York, as taxi owners kept switching to whatever make and color of cab were most fashionable: first Brown and White, then Yellow, then Checker, and finally Brown and White again. The city would eventually put a stop to this by requiring all cabs to have the same yellow and checkered color scheme.

Our serious-looking friend has pulled further ahead in line, and is now in front of the West Shore railroad depot. Photo by Lewis Hine; George Eastman Museum.

In the end, Hine's cabdriver photos come across as a bit wooden and uninspired. Perhaps cab work is a bit more complicated than the "man and machine" image that Hine wanted to portray. Maybe Hine's problem was his limited focus on the driver with the vehicle, with no passengers in sight. In contrast, McEvoy's painting is far more on target as to the actual character of the work.  After all, it's when cabdrivers have passengers that they're really working...

Ride-hailing Apps Swarm Into Austin

Uber alternatives are fine with being regulated, and do not use surge pricing.


In the wake of Uber and Lyft huffily leaving Austin, a swarm of lesser-known "ride-hailing" or "soft cab" services are rushing in to fill the void. Unlike the giants Uber and Lyft, these companies seem to be fine with following local regulations. And the big news is: not a single one of these Uber alternatives uses "surge pricing", the dynamic pricing system which Uber and Lyft use to manipulate the market.

Dallas-based GetMe shows an absolutely insane number of cars available on their app. Uber always tried to make their over-saturation less noticeable by limiting the number of visible cars to 8 or so. GetMe shows so many cars available it actually interferes with the screen refreshing rate. It might also be daunting to would-be GetMe drivers -- how easy can it be to make money with this much competition?

Playing the Lyft to GetMe's Uber is Fare, founded in Phoenix. Part of Fare's selling point is that they claim to be friendlier to drivers. They appear to be far, far behind GetMe in terms of drivers available, but that might be a good thing as far as sustainability of the network is concerned.

Back in 2012, when Uber was just a limousine dispatching service, Tickengo was one of the first companies to go the "ridesharing" route. Since rebranding as Wingz, they have focused exclusively on airport rides--until now. Their new "WingzAround" service, available only in Austin, gets back to their roots. It's interesting that, while both Fare and GetMe's apps follow the map-based style which has become the e-hailing standard, Wingz is sticking with a text-based alternative format, as you can see from this screenshot.

Finally, there is Austin's licensed taxi app, Hail A Cab. Unfortunately this app uses a very old-fashioned (circa 2010) style of map-based format in which you can't see the available cabs until after you have ordered one. Nobody likes that, guys. The licensed cab industry in Austin might want to try attracting a more up-to-date taxi app such as Flywheel.

Certainly the time to roll out a competitive alternative is now, while the elephants are out of the room. If any of these smaller, more driver and passenger friendly alternatives can take hold before Uber and Lyft come crawling back, Austin could invent the future of e-hailing: locally regulated, and free of surge-pricing.

Golden Gate Avenue in 1911

Golden Gate Avenue in 1911. Detail of SFMTA photo U02934 . SFMTA Photo | sfmta.com/photo

The past and future of transportation history mingle in this great photo of Golden Gate avenue in 1911, from the SFMTA photo archive. I don't just mean the mix of horse-drawn and motorized vehicles in the street: what's most interesting about this photo is the presence of a livery stable, a full-service garage, and a taxicab company, all in the same shot.

At the center, the Santa Clara Stables, one of the great old livery stables of the city. In the 1800s, if you needed to rent a horse or a carriage, or a place to keep a horse and carriage, this was where you came. Like many livery stables, the Santa Clara also ran a small fleet of hacks. Rebuilt after the fire, in 1911 the Santa Clara only had one more year of existence left before it would be shut down and its inventory sold at auction.

In the foreground can be seen the Mission-style facade of the Golden Gate Garage. This beautiful old garage has been described as "surprisingly lyrical" by Mark Kessler, author of an amazing book on The Early Public Garages of San Francisco. Kessler notes that, by adopting an architectural style associated with Southern Pacific railroad stations, the Golden Gate “relies upon a continuity of imagery to assert that the garage is the successor to the train station, and the car is successor to the train.” More obviously, it was the successor to the livery stable up the street. Boasting a lounge for chauffeurs (waiting around the garage while their employers shopped, dined, etc.), the Golden Gate was also involved in the auto livery business, and at one point housed a taxi service. Now a mere parking garage, the building still stands at 64 Golden Gate, somewhat neglected and under-appreciated, like most old garages.

Alco Taxicab Company, 360 Golden Gate. Detail of SFMTA photo U02934. SFMTA Photo | sfmta.com/photo

And in the distance, the sign for the Alco Taxicab Company peeks over a building. This is the kind of cab company that would last out the Twentieth Century, long after livery stables and full-service garages had been forgotten. In this year of 1911, one of Alco's drivers was a young Malcolm Loughead, who would later found the Lockheed corporation with his brother Allen.

(See here for more on livery stables and cab history in San Francisco.)

Alco Taxicab ad, San Francisco Call, 1910. (California Digital Newspaper Collection)

“It Ain’t Just A Job, Folks!” The New Deep City Press, 1975-1978

San Francisco's New Deep City Press, with cover art by Jamie Maddox. Courtesy of Ralph Hoffschildt.

The New Deep City Press was a uniquely San Franciscan creation. Published from 1975 to 1978, it was a magazine of short stories, poetry, art, and journalism produced mostly by San Francisco cabdrivers, and largely—though not at all exclusively—about the experience of driving a cab in San Francisco. The DCP was one of the flagships of what journalist Tamim Ansary called the “literature of work,” a literary movement that brought out the creative expressions, not just of cabdrivers, but of longshoremen, factory workers, and other working class writers. It was a product of San Francisco’s longstanding and artistic underground publishing tradition. And it remains, today, a compelling window into the bohemian culture of San Francisco during the 1970s.

Most of the regular contributers were cabdrivers, such as Jesus Portillo, Andy Araneo, Catherine Baker, Marty Breslow, and “social worker behind the wheel” David Frankel. Jamie Maddox drew the “Maxie the Taxi” comic strip, and Jimmy “The Glove” Vetter provided a regular column on how to play craps. Besides cabdrivers, there were writings by journalist Sandra Katzman, and poet-longshoreman George Benet, along with cameos by folks like Gary Snyder, Spain Rodriguez, and Warren Hinckle.

For years, only scattered issues of the DCP were available, typically for $40 an issue on eBay or Amazon. Now, with the permission of DCP publisher Ralph Hoffschildt, six of the original eleven issues will be available as pdfs on the Taxi Library site, hosted by Luxor Cab’s Charles Rathbone.

Via email, I talked to DCP publisher Ralph Hoffschildt (Duke of the Mission, and a medallion holder at Yellow Cab), and editors David Bolton (now teaching writing at the University of Maryland) and Mark Joseph (now a novelist living in the East Bay) about the origins of the New Deep City Press.


Origins of the DCP

The New Deep City Press was the brainchild of cabdriver Don Fassett:

Dave Bolton: The first meeting of the DCP took place in the Doggie Diner on Lombard. There were about a half dozen of us. Don Fassett, a cabdriver who hailed from PA, had called us together. Don was a great salesman and would go on to launch a number of businesses. He was always coming up with ideas. ... 

The fat man sported a foot-long beard, had a twinkle in his eye, a wonderful belly laugh, and sold lids of dope out of his City cab. On this particular evening, he wanted to start a magazine and he wanted us to do it.

City Cab itself was a crucial part of the story. In the 1970s, according to Examiner writer Andy Meisler, “every third cab on the street [was] being piloted by a frustrated Faulkner, Sondheim, Heifitz or Hoffman.” City Cab was where these taxicab virtuosos collected. As Hoffschildt describes it:

Ralph Hoffschildt: City Cab was at 2015 McKinnon, behind the water department, around the corner from the produce market. We had a couple of gas pumps and a tin roof and driver’s room with a pool table. That’s where Jimmy the Glove would fade the main...shoot craps among each other, no house. He’d cut the pot a bit for running the game. Cool Breeze was always playin’ the pin ball machine. The old tin roof building is still there.... If those walls could only talk.... 

Dave Bolton: Anyway, Don was the glue in the beginning. He approached his friend Ralph [Hoffschildt] with his idea, and Ralph, being a man of great energy, imagination, and a degree in physics, ran with the idea, teaching himself the intricacies of publishing along the way. I do believe Ralph came up with the name of the magazine.

Yeah, what about that name? Was there ever an old Deep City Press? Hoffschildt reveals:

Ralph Hoffschildt: Originally, as I recall, I thought I’d just call it “Deep Press,” id est “Depress.” But Don Fassett was too optimistic. “City” and “New” just made for more syllables.

So there you have it.

A Labor of Love

Mark Joseph described his introduction to the Deep City crowd:

Mark Joseph: In 1975 I was working in a warehouse at 1st and Folsom in San Francisco when I met Dave Bolton at a party in North Beach. He told me he drove for City Cab where a bunch of drivers created a little mimeograph magazine called the Deep City Press. I gave him a short story which he passed on to the publisher, the head dispatcher at City Cab, Ralph Hoffschildt... after Ralph read it we talked on the phone and he said the DCP could publish my story... And by the way, would you like to drive for City Cab?

Today, accustomed as we are to laser printers and computer desktop publishing, it may be hard to imagine just how much work went into small press publishing as recently as the 1970s—especially for a beautifully printed four-color publication like the DCP. Hoffschildt was the man at the helm for the hours of labor involved:

Ralph Hoffschildt: The equipment I used was German. It was a Gestetner printing machine and a Gestefax to spark vinal stencils. The machines worked in tandem and were designed for each other. The equipment cost five or six thousand bucks. A considerable sum in 1975....

I had four ink guns: one each for yellow, red, blue, and black (not yellow, magenta, and cyan as in offset and computer printers today.) The Gestafax could separate colors. I would make a stencil for yellow, another for red, and another for blue. I could and did overlay black when needed with still another stencil. I would print all yellow sheets first (usually about 2200, losing around 200 to misalignment), spread them out on the garage floor to dry. Then I would clean the printer drums and change ink guns (the ink was in large tubes attached to the ink gun), then run the dry yellow sheets and overlay them with red, let dry, clean, change guns, and overlay blue and again same process if I overlaid black. 

Each color run I did standing at the printer adjusting manually with knobs the alignment of each color. They had to align or register sideways, lengthwise, and stay straight front to rear (no “fishtailing.”) If I saw any misalignment I would work the knobs to correct it. The last cover (front, back, and inside) went through the machine 9 times. ...Doing all this for just that sheet probably took around 12 hours of constant printing spread out, of course, over days.... 

After it was printed, it was collated, folded, stapled, and trimmed—all manually. The last issues were 64 pages or 16 sheets printed front and back. I used a large chart board to map it. Pages 1 & 64 (front page and back page), pages 2 & 63 (inside covers), pages 3 & 62, pages 4 & 61, etc. went together so that it folded into a standard looking little homemade magazine. 

Occasionally, even I had to write something just for filler. But, as you can see, mine is the tactile side. I have to make it, touch it, and look at it.

Hoffschildt’s editorials, of course, served as far more than mere filler; they anchor each issue, keeping the wide ranging content on mission, from anointing the DCP “the permanent record... of our adventures, or misadventures” in one of the earliest issues, to reminding readers of the final issue that “this is our soul. This is another true life cab story from deep in the City.”


The Deep City’s Legacy

Mark Joseph: Ralph produced the magazine in his basement, printing it in four colors on a fancy Gestetner mimeograph, and we—the drivers and writers—sold it on the street to drivers and anybody else with a buck. I distributed it to several SF bookstores, and at one point in 1977-8, around there somewhere, Shig, the manager at City Lights, told me the DCP was the best selling little magazine in the history of City Lights Books. I don't know if that was true, but it was one of the proudest and finest moments of my writing career.

By turns witty, serious, silly (Portillo’s “Cab Array” musical), tragic, and poignant (Joseph’s “Death on Watchman Way,” about the murder of a cabdriver)—the DCP gives us a glimpse into the cultural politics of San Francisco during an era that, to borrow Chris Carlsson’s phrase, “shook the city.” Most notably for cab history, the DCP chronicled the collapse of Yellow cab and its rebirth as a cooperative; as time would show, this would also result in the collapse of the cabdriver as employee and the switch to the “independent contractor” model over which Uber is facing lawsuits today. More generally, the DCP is a record of an important period in San Francisco’s history, when the city was still capital of the Left Coast, rather than just the nearest convenient urban laboratory for Silicon Valley’s imagineers to conduct experiments in. It is a chapter in the city’s longstanding individualistic, vibrant culture, which many fear is threatened today by gentrification and homogenization. If Uber gets its way:

Ralph Hoffschildt: The taxicab industry in all of its former fascinating color and history may well die and become as bland and boring as the drab Google bus techies swarming these beautiful hills on Baghdad by the Bay.

It is ironic that San Francisco—birthplace of the Uber and Lyft anti-cab apps—is also home to a rich and varied tradition of literature by and about cabdrivers, perhaps more than any other city. The DCP was neither the first, nor the last word in this tradition. It was preceeded by the cabdriving-inspired works of beat poet Lew Welch and minimalist composer Steve Reich; and followed by Mike Weiss’s novels about cabdriving sleuth Ben Henry, and Emil Lawrence’s long-running “Night Cabbie” column. The tradition is continued today by writer/drivers like MC Mars, Alex Sack, and Kelly Dessaint.

(To read some much, much older San Francisco cabdriver stories, check out “Big Tom’s Antique Hack Yarns.”)

Wouldn’t it be great someday, to see the New Deep City Press once again gracing the window of City Lights, this time as a collected volume? For now, at least, the pdfs are available for download from Taxi Library.

The Deep City crew outside of City Cab. Courtesy of Ralph Hoffschildt.

November 28, 1910: San Francisco's Taxicab Drivers Go On Strike

Though the large cab companies fought the union, some small companies such as the Blue Moon Taxicab Service supported the cause. Advertisement from the San Francisco Call, December 2, 1910 (California Digital Newspaper Collection)

For most of the Twentieth Century, taxicab drivers in San Francisco were represented by the Chauffeurs' Union, Local 265 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, founded in October, 1909.

The Chauffeurs' Union faced many troubles in its first year of existence. There was a turf conflict with the old Hackmen's union, which was faced down with the aid of the Labor Council; there was competition from the "Professional Chauffeurs' Association," a fake "union" invented by garage owners and the auto industry in order to keep drivers from joining the real union. By the end of 1910 local 265 was nevertheless ready to take on the five biggest taxicab companies in the city, starting on November 28, 1910.

Drivers at that time were earning a commission of 20% of the meter, which rarely came to more than $3 (about $70 in today's money) for a 13 hour shift; out of this they had to pay for their own gasoline. The strikers demanded a daily wage of $3.50, free gasoline, and a closed shop.

San Francisco was at that time in the bidding to host the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and the city fathers didn't want news of labor unrest tarnishing the city's image. So many of the details of the strike come from newspapers in other cities. For example:

Small Strike Bitter Affair

Although Only 100 Men Are Involved In San Francisco Taxicab Strike, a Half Dozen Arrests Have Been Made and Score Shots Fired.

San Francisco, Cal., Nov. 30.--Although not more than 100 men are involved, the strike of the taxicab drivers, which was inaugurated here Monday night, already half a dozen arrests have been made and a score of shots fired. 

President Carl Dreger of the Chauffeurs’ union and five other union men today were admitted to bail, following their arrest for alleged stoning of a nonunion cab. The police are investigating a shooting affray at the same corner early today, in which Richard Kemp, a non-union driver, emptied his revolver into a crowd of union sympathizers who had stoned his cab, breaking his windshield and the glass door of the body. Two women were in the vehicle at the time, it is said. 

The drivers are standing pat on their demand for 20 per cent of the cash fares and free gasoline. Three of the five companies against which the strike was instituted have given in.

Medford Mail Tribune, Wednesday, November 30, 1910

The strike lasted for two weeks and ended with a compromise. Drivers got their free gasoline but remained with 20% of the meter; while some small companies unionized, the two largest companies (Taxicab Company of California, and Pacific Taximeter) kept the open shop.