An estimated 200 members of a livery-cab driver union, La Coalición de Taxistas de New York, gathered outside of the Taxi and Limousine Commission's office in the financial district on Tuesday afternoon to protest the city's plan to expand green-cab service. Waving signs and chanting, "Somos taxistas, no somos terroristas" ("We're taxi drivers, not terrorists") the drivers called for the Five Borough Taxi plan to be either abandoned or modified, citing the high cost of renting permits for the new green cars and properly equipping them.
Livery cabs are call-service only in New York, meaning they aren't permitted to pick up passengers who hail them in the street. The practice is common anyway, but those behind the wheel of the black sedans face fines of $500 and up for doing so. They tend to work the outer boroughs and neighborhoods where yellow cabs won't go. And the majority of cabs in New York are liveries - there's currently more than 24,800 of them on the city's registry, as compared to 12,237 yellow cabs. The city has effectively created a new class of cab: the plan will allow it to sell 6,000 annual permits for livery cabs which can also do street hails north of E. 96th and W. 110th Streets in Manhattan as well as all of the other boroughs except for the airports. Livery drivers who choose not to convert to the green cabs can still use the old black sedans, but will have to keep looking over their shoulder if they do.
The Coalición says the plan hurts even the drivers who decide to make the switch. Permits for livery cabs, which have to be renewed yearly, cost $1,500, but drivers say that additional costs necessary in preparing the green cabs for the road - painting it the distinctive lime green and buying a meter and credit-card reader, among other things - will drive that number up into the range of $5,000-$6,000, too much for drivers who service less trafficked neighborhoods where people are less likely to be big tippers.
"We're in a desperate situation right now," Norman Salcé, 58, a livery-cab driver in uptown Manhattan, told the Latin Times. "The pressure that taxi drivers have against them is intolerable." He added that he saw the Boro Taxis as a way of making livery drivers disappear. "I definitely think that they want to get us out of uptown Manhattan so that the yellow taxis can get in there. As white Americans have changed the area, they're coming up to uptown Manhattan to live, they're calling for the Taxi and Limousine Office to send yellow taxis, because they don't want to use the black cabs."
"To me, this demonstrates that they want to make us disappear with the pressure that they're putting on us now so that we spontaneously, not being able to put up with this imposition of the Boro Taxi, have to abandon our work."
RELATED: Immigration Reform 2013: 10 Activists Arrested For Blocking New York City Street
© 2024 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
