In the seventies, corporations lowered costs by hiring contract labor and leasing medallioned cabs to drivers.
“Forty years ago, drivers went from laborers to independent contractors,” Desai explained. It has experienced similar upheaval before. This is how Uber and others are destabilizing the industry. (Medallions come on the market infrequently earlier this year, one was auctioned off for nearly a million dollars.) Ride-share services allow drivers to avoid acquiring expensive New York City taxicab medallions, which grant drivers the right to operate yellow cabs.
The upstarts can provide a range of ride options at different price points, improve driver efficiency by matching drivers with rides more quickly, and weed out bad drivers. “Tech tools have changed the whole environment,” Josh Mohrer, the general manager of Uber’s New York office, told me. Real-time passenger feedback means that drivers who consistently receive low ratings can be dropped from the service. With G.P.S., anyone can navigate efficiently. Startups like Uber argue that technology can transform the casual driver into a professional. Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, told me, “Customer complaints and accidents are at an all-time low.” It’s nothing like the Knowledge, but “there is an interest in a higher professional standard in New York,” Fromberg said. rules, and guidance on dealing with passengers. It encompasses geography, an overview of the T.L.C. recently partnered with the City University of New York to provide a uniform curriculum for all yellow-taxi and for-hire drivers seeking licensing from the city. Since the seventies, New York City has enacted numerous fare increases and focussed more attention on driver training.
In 1969, the Times reported that one driver, a nineteen-year-old pre-med student who drove a yellow cab in the summer, had to pull up beside another cab to ask how to get to Times Square. Allan Fromberg, a spokesman for the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission (T.L.C.), told me, “One would be hard-pressed to find a cabdriver who wasn’t part-timing in the sixties.” The temporary nature of cab driving meant that some drivers knew very little about the city. In New York, driving a yellow taxi has historically been a short-term gig. Of course, not all cab drivers are as knowledgeable as those in London. The researchers concluded that the process of obtaining a license and maintaining the mental acuity to navigate the city helped London’s cab drivers develop their brains beyond normal capacities.
Neuroscientists from University College London found that people who undergo this training and work as licensed cab drivers have larger than usual posterior hippocampi, the area of the brain responsible for spatial memory. On average, the licensing process takes about five years to complete and includes a written test and one-on-one interviews in which prospective drivers are asked to navigate between two points in the city. British cabbies must commit the Knowledge to memory before they’re allowed to accept fares. In London, for example, licensed black-cab drivers distinguish themselves by mastering what’s known as the Knowledge-a compendium of city street routes that dates back to 1865. The driving trade has always attracted both experienced professionals and part-timers who fill in the cheaper end of the market.