Stuck in reverse

It’s been quite the ride, if you will, trying to figure out all the different motivations and interests involved in this taxi dispute. Even after a month or so of digging, the spin I’ve been getting from every direction has got me going in circles.

When I chose this as an investigative topic, I didn’t realize that I was literally going to end up becoming a sleuth for a month or two. The information I’ve found is somehow so elusive, the interviews are extremely contradictory, and much of the existing media coverage is useless at best.

It seems that there are holes in everyone’s stories – from the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), to the drivers, to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, to the brokers and fleet owners. While the exact motivations for a) the TLC’s decision to mandate GPS and b) the Alliance’s outrage with the requirement are not entirely clear, it is likely true that the inherent reason for the action and the retaliation is money.

For the drivers, a “Big Brother” conspiracy is much more marketable than a line that goes something like “cabbies are getting the short end of the financial stick. ” And as for the TLC, a “we want to make things more efficient and give something back to the passengers in return for the 2004 fare increase” sounds better than “we want to make sure all fares are done on the meter and we’re also a little interested in the whereabouts of the drivers.”

With two days left until the magazine feature is due, I have a lot of notes and audio, a ton of questions and very few answers.

Stop, look, and listen

I feel as though I’ve reached the point of saturation – information overload, if you will. Apparently, there comes a point when you’re so far inside a story that you can no longer see it for what it is or what it could be.

I have done so much reporting, so much information gathering, that my head is literally filled with miscellaneous taxi-related matter. So much matter, in fact, that the information has been crippling my ability to envision the direction of my magazine feature.

Today’s class discussion taught me a number of things: primarily, it’s definitely 100 percent better to be saturated with information than to have holes in your reporting. It looks as though I’m not as far off track as I was feeling and what I really need to do is take a step back and try to see everything I’ve learned from a bird’s eye view. By looking down from above and approaching my notes and transcribed audio from a more distanced perspective, I think I’ll be in a much better position to take this story and hit the ground writing.

Ah, another lesson learned.

Taxi Strike? Didn’t Notice.

If there hadn’t been so much hype leading up to Monday’s taxi “strike”, most people in New York never would have noticed that it was even taking place. It is estimated that about 95 percent of all cabs were on the streets that day, down from the usual 96 percent on any given day.

A successful taxi strike isn’t one in which wait times at Penn Station are no longer than 15 minutes. An effective taxi strike isn’t one in which the streets are lined with yellow cabs, appearing to be business as usual. A unified taxi strike isn’t one that pits drivers against one another where the few strikers namecall those who choose to hit the streets.

Perhaps this is why Monday’s “protest” will likely have zero effect on the technology requirement issue. Taxi drivers knew about this technology since back in March 2004 – meaning they had more than three years to launch an effort to put a wrench in the city’s plans.

One step forward, two steps back

 

While the ride-along with Bill was productive in many ways, it was also a sort of sensory overload coupled with an overwhelming inundation of information. I feel like I took in so much that I lost sight of the focus of the narrative for my magazine feature.

After a class discussion today, i realize that my piece needs to be more timely, relevant, and narrow. It appears that one of the most interesting aspects of the business is the amount of fares and transactions that are done in cash and which go unclaimed as far as taxes are concerned.

This brought up the obvious question as to whether the recent uproar against the GPS and credit/debit card technology has more to do with potential lossed income than it does with any sort of privacy concerns.

How the drivers react to the new technology (will some of them find loopholes or ways to beat the system?) and how it will affect their bottom line will the main focus of the story.

Behind the streets

So now I know what it feels like to spend eight hours in a cab in New York city. Well, perhaps I should amend that. Technically we weren’t in the cab the whole time, but I picked up fares with a driver (Bill) from 8:30am until 5:30pm earlier this week.

It was a Monday, so the “streets” weren’t necessarily the place to make the money. Instead, we picked up a fare to JFK and hung out at the taxi lot until we were dispatched to one of the airport terminals. Killing time in the lot itself was one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had in a very long time. The ride-along gave me insight into an industry that appears to exist almost as another world, one to which I had never been privy nor really thought about for that matter. It would take a few posts to describe the entire shift with the driver, so here’s just few interesting facts about the taxi lot alone:

-There are about 55 lanes. Drivers pull up, park their cab, and keep an eye on the lanes to know when to get in their car and get their terminal ticket from the dispatcher.
-According to the supervisor, about 1,000 cabs are dispatched every hour from 1pm until midnight or so.
-Drivers pass the time doing a number of things: some bring pillows in their trunks and snooze, some gather to gamble out of the trunk of a taxi, some play dominos or backgamon, some eat at the restaurant which has no sitting area and rather has rows of metal counters
-There are Muslim prayer rugs behind the restaurant/washroom facilities
-There is a “shorty” line which allows you to skip the regular queue if you return within an hour and a half of taking someone from JFK to Brooklyn or Queens

I could literally go on and on and on and on. Instead, I’m using the material from the ride along as a narrative to drive my magazine feature. The feature will intertwine information about the intricate taxi industry. First draft is due tomorrow.

Back to the drawing board

Now that the video portion of the multimedia project is coming to a close, I’m turning my focus to the magazine feature.

While writing comes to me much more naturally than shooting and editing video, the task of producing a well-written and investigative feature over the next two weeks will surely be taxing.

I’m planning on doing a 12-hour ride-along with a taxi driver in order to get a first-hand look at what a day-in-the-life of a cabbie might look like. I hope to spend an entire shift with the driver, picking up fares, chatting with other cabbies at popular wait spots, eating where he eats, etc. I also want to learn the economics of the business and find out what kind of money the drivers pull in and how much of it goes towards leasing the medallion, the car, gas, and so on.

Now to find the lucky driver…

*FYI: please stay tuned for another edit of my video – the one currently on YouTube will be altered slightly in the near future.*

iWonder

Someone recently asked me whether I would rather be given ten dollars or a discman. I actually stopped to think, pondering what I would possibly do with a bulky portable CD player, and then decided I would take the cold hard cash. Five years ago, I would’ve laughed at that question and wouldn’t have parted with my trusty discman for any less than fifty big ones.

The point is that new technology is always around the corner and the consumer is often the one who is behind the times. We don’t even know what we want until some corporation makes something nifty and puts it into our hands. Then pretty soon we can’t remember what life was like without it.

The next big question might very well be not whether the Internet will obviate the need for newspapers, but rather how soon it will be before the “death of print” as we know it becomes a reality. Arguably, there will always be those people who can’t fathom curling up in bed with their laptops. This is true, but we have no idea what devices the world’s techies will cook up next.

Like I said earlier, I’m a print girl. But what happens when print no longer exists? Alas, my desire to translate my skills into ones that are timely, relevant, and lasting.

Not all for naught: Lessons learned

I re-learned two important lessons this week: a) never underestimate the importance of doing your own preliminary research b) don’t believe everything you read.

I’m a print girl. That’s what I’m used to. Writing. This whole multimedia thing threw me for a loop and I temporarily forgot certain basic reporting skills. I walked into this story with a basic grasp of the issue at hand and a very elementary understanding of how the New York taxi industry works. That amount of knowledge wouldn’t have been enough to start writing a magazine feature, so how did I possibly think I could start shooting and editing a web video?

I realized that I had to start digging – and digging pretty deep. I read the court documents that denied the plaintiffs a reverse on the technology requirement and I delved into the Schaller NYC taxi factbook. For anyone curious about the 1.8-billion dollar industry which sees about 240 million passengers each year, I recommend perusing the factbook for some jaw-dropping statistics and information on the intricacies of the sector.

My research helped clear up some of the misinformation I was reading in the mainstream media. For example:

1. There is a lease cap on the price of leasing a medallion (dispelling the myth that leases will immediately and inevitably increase).
2. The vendors of the technology system offer different payment options and most drivers have opted for the plan whereby the vendors pay for the installation of the system (dispelling the myth that owners will have to front thousands of dollars for the equipment).

So I went back to the drawing board and started over. Though this learning experience was indeed time-consuming, the lessons re-learned were definitely priceless.

Full speed ahead

 

It has been quite the week for anyone who claims to have anything to lose or gain from the taxi technology requirement.

Surely coming as a relief to the GPS vendors who have invested millions in this project, the lawsuit was struck down last Friday and the October 1 deadline rolled around. As of yesterday, any taxis scheduled for their annual inspection must be equipped with the GPS and the credit/debit card machine. This means that by next Spring, all of the more than 13,000 yellow cabs in the city are projected to be donning these devices.

But tomorrow is another day and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance says that it is considering forging another strike at the end of the month. According to the Taxi & Limousine Commission and the judge who upheld the decision to have the technology installed, it’s too little too late considering the requirement was announced at the time of the 2004 fare increase.

For a driver’s view of the strike and the issues at hand, check out cabbie Melissa Plaut’s blog called New York Hack. On her site, she posted an op-ed she recently wrote for the New York Times and talks about the issue from a driver’s perspective. The site also has some interesting reads including posts that describe some of her shifts in New York.