On an early July evening, Uber invited legislators, journalists, and business types into the cavernous confines of its midwest headquarters in the West Loop. Besides showing off the impressive new space, the ride-share juggernaut was unveiling some ambitious plans for the future. Following a video presentation fraught with attractive young people, inclusive refrains—We’re all just people trying to get from one place to another, maaan—and a dose of tech worship, midwest general manager Andrew Macdonald took the mike to inform the crowd that Chicago is the lucky locale of serious ride-share growth. By 2016, he expects the Carpenter Street HQ to quadruple in size, employing 500 people, up from just 75 today. Then there are the thousands of drivers with whom the San Francisco-based company will continue to “partner”—because it’s just an app, Uber doesn’t actually employ drivers.
The discussion about legislative regulation was typically presented as addressing consumer safety concerns. Behind closed doors, however, it was a rancorous turf war between the taxi establishment and the ride-share insurgency, with both sides accusing each other of utilizing money and clout to monopolize the public’s transportation dollars and protect its profits. And right now, the cab industry seems to be fighting a losing battle. The institution that once seemed a permanent part of urban life is being threatened by ride-share’s convenience and next-gen innovation. As more amateur, commercially unlicensed ride-share drivers enter the market, the taxi industry has found itself “in shambles,” as veteran city cabdriver Fayez Khozindar puts it. Professional drivers are “fed up,” Khozindar says, both with an industry that failed to innovate and with the encroachment of an industry that did. “The industry is now fucked-up,” second-generation taxi driver Ehsan Ghoreishi says.
Granted, driving is a part-time job for Ghoreishi, a filmmaker and accordionist in the punky eastern European folk band Black Bear Combo and his own group, Bad Mashadi. The Iranian immigrant has been driving a cab in Chicago since 2005, but his father has been full-time since 1989. Ghoreishi drives exclusively on weekends. For about $70 a day, the 34-year-old leases a car from Flash Cab, which means he starts each shift making up a deficit. He uses the Uber Taxi app, but he does so because he’s obliged to. “It’s become a necessity—as of now, I make tangibly less money working weekends [than in the past],” Ghoreishi says. “When I’m waiting in front of bars, like California Clipper or Scofflaw, people are just standing there waiting for private cars. I’m right there, and they’re staring at their phones.”
Cabdriver Peter Enger has been on the front lines of fellow drivers’ struggles against the city, taxi garages, and medallion owners since 2008. As a cofounder of the United Taxidrivers Community Council, he fields complaints and advocates on behalf of drivers who’ve received traffic or parking tickets they think are unfair or claim they’ve been overcharged for a medallion lease or fined for bogus consumer complaints to 311. (Enger says he’s seen cases where customers didn’t even correctly identify the race of the driver they’d reported for one offense or another, from discourtesy to reckless driving.) More recently, the UTCC’s Bucktown office has been hearing from drivers who’ve left the traditional taxi industry to switch over to the UberX platform. “This rideshare option comes into town, and ever since we’ve been getting complaints from drivers,” Enger says. “They heard reports of how much money you could make driving your private car, but there’s no limit on how many drivers can be in the field—it’s Economics 101.”
I didn’t speak to a single driver who wasn’t intimately familiar with 400 W. Superior, where administrative hearings are held. Because Uber cars aren’t marked—although you can’t say the same for Lyft—taxi drivers who have converted to Uber feel like they’ll no longer be taken advantage of as an “ATM for the city,” as one driver put it.
Among Chicago’s taxi drivers, there are differing opinions about what should be done to save the profession. The industry encompasses people from an array of cultural backgrounds who are always on the move. And for almost a century, this loose community has found it difficult to successfully unionize. In 2012, when the ride-share menace had yet to fully rear its head, cabdriver Melissa Callahan filed a lawsuit against the city that questions whether cabdrivers shouldn’t be considered city employees who are guaranteed a minimum wage. “[Ride share] was like the icing on the cake,” she says with a laugh. “This just made a really bad situation even worse. Everything that I’m fighting for, Uber is saying they’ll serve up on a platter.” Callahan says the goal of the lawsuit isn’t necessarily to become municipal employees—it’s not exactly like the city could suddenly afford 12,000 new workers—but rather to get City Hall to reach some sort of arrangement with drivers that would make driving a taxi a reasonable full-time job again.
