Taxi Strike Ends After Minor Disruption
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A two-day taxi strike that thinned the city’s vast yellow fleet, but caused limited disruptions, ended before dawn today with no tangible gains won for the hacks who idled their cabs.
At least hundreds and probably thousands of drivers stopped working Wednesday morning to protest new city rules requiring all taxis to be fitted with new technology, including credit card machines and global positioning systems that will track where the cabbies drive.
Those rules – decried by some drivers as both costly and an invasion of privacy – remained in place as the strike ended, and city officials dismissed any notion that they might be reversed.
A spokesman for the City Office of Emergency Management, Andrew Troisi, said late yesterday that the walkout had caused “no major impacts.”
A majority of the city’s cabbies appear to have ignored the strike and kept driving, although there were headaches over fewer cabs in midtown Manhattan and at the city’s two major airports.
Still, the advocacy group that organized the walkout, the Taxi Workers Alliance, declared victory. Its executive director, Bhairavi Desai, said the work stoppage had made its point: Many drivers are angry, and they are organized.
“The numbers can be spun as much as the opposition wants, but the reality is, the waiting lines speak for themselves,” she said.
She said the alliance would consider calling for another strike if the city doesn’t alter its new technology rules, which require the new equipment to be in place in any cab inspected after October 1.
The city has 13,000 yellow cabs and 44,000 licensed drivers. The alliance claims to represent about one-fifth of those cabbies, most of whom lease their taxis daily from fleet companies.
The combination of the group-fare rules and a thinner taxi fleet added up to banner days for drivers who kept working, with some saying they did double or more of their usual business.
Temporary rules that had allowed passengers to share cabs and drivers to charge flat fares instead of the usual metered rates expired at 5 a.m. today.
In Philadelphia, the city’s cab drivers launched a 48-hour strike on Wednesday over similar rules but ended it a day early, after causing sporadic delays.
