Every time Omar Khalil drives across the Queensboro Bridge, the veteran cabby makes a point of counting the number of occupied yellow taxis heading from Queens into Manhattan. Just a few years ago, he said he would see dozens of yellow cabs ferrying passengers into Midtown Manhattan on a weekday afternoon.
But as Khalil began a shift on a recent Thursday afternoon, only two yellow cabs carried passengers across the bridge. Instead, the traffic heading out of Queens that afternoon was dominated by black sedans, each with an Uber sign in the window – and at least one passenger in the back seat.
“Uber is everywhere you look now,” said Khalil. The 59-year-old Egyptian immigrant has been a yellow cab driver since 1985. In recent years, he has seen his business plummet as the ride sharing app’s popularity surged in New York City. “The people that used to come over the bridge in yellow cabs take Uber now,” he said.
For Khalil, the problem of Uber’s growing clout in New York’s taxi market is playing out right on his doorstep. Astoria, the neighborhood where he lives, saw Uber pickups increase by over 1,000 percent in all four of its zip codes during 2014, according to a report published in September by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
Adoption of Uber within Astoria ranks among the highest in the city outside of Manhattan. This enthusiastic embrace of the ride-sharing service is taking place in a neighborhood that has also been a longtime residential hub for some of Uber’s most vocal opponents: yellow taxi drivers like Khalil. The effects of Uber’s rise are now rippling through a community that has counted these drivers as an integral part of its local economy for decades.
Of the city’s 50,000 cab drivers, 46 percent live in Queens, based on 2014 figures from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Astoria in particular has long been a popular place for cab drivers to live because of its proximity to Manhattan and to LaGuardia and Kennedy Airports, said Javaid Tariq, the co-founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, an advocacy organization for drivers. The neighborhood is also convenient for cab drivers because of the many garages, auto repair shops and cab brokers located in or near the area, he said.
However, things are rapidly changing. The rise of Uber is hitting cab drivers’ incomes just as rent and other costs have begun to skyrocket in Astoria, said Tariq, who has lived in the neighborhood for 19 years. “It’s not affordable for them to live here anymore,” he said.
Indeed, apartment rental prices in the northwestern area of Queens where Astoria is located have been on a sharp incline, with the median rental price spiking 30 percent from last year, according to a 2015 report by the real estate firm Douglas Elliman. Meanwhile, the annual mean wage for taxi drivers in New York in 2014 was $31,660, down from $32,160 in 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The financial squeeze has gotten so tight that even longtime residents like Khalil are considering leaving the neighborhood. “Astoria is like Manhattan now,” he said. “Everything is getting expensive….I’m thinking of moving anywhere else, maybe even leaving the city completely.”
It’s not just individual cab drivers who are feeling pinched by Uber’s success. The brokers who lease cabs to drivers, many located just outside of Astoria in neighboring Long Island City, have seen their fortunes fall. Yellow Cab SLSJet, one of the larger brokers, has seen a marked downturn in its business, said Andrew Georges, a dispatcher at the company. “It’s a dramatic change from two years ago,” he said. “If drivers are not able to make enough money, then they’re not interested in taking cars from us. That affects our business.”
Part of the problem in Astoria is that Uber users in the area don’t seem to realize the impact on their neighbors, said Georges, who lives in Astoria. Georges said even his ex-girlfriend began using Uber, blind to the possibility of his disapproval. “People who are not affected by the taxi industry don’t have a second thought,” he said. “It’s a matter of convenience.” Georges said that his girlfriend’s use of Uber was not the cause of their breakup.
Other small businesses in the neighborhood have also taken a financial hit. The El Khayam Cafe on Steinway Street now sits quiet on nights that would have been bustling just a few years ago. “We used to have groups of 25 to 30 cab drivers a night, said the cafe’s owner Gamal Dewidar. “Now we’re lucky to get two or three.”
Beyond the impact on his business, Dewidar said the challenges facing cab drivers are bad for the community at large. “Cab drivers are a very important part of this community,” he said. “They’ve been here for a long time, but it’s just getting too hard for them to live here anymore. If they leave, that changes the kind of neighborhood we have.”
Some Astoria Uber users like Chris Konstantinidis have sympathy for the challenges faced by their neighbors. However, Konstantinidis, 26, said that Uber was fulfilling a need that the yellow cab industry was failing to address for riders: convenience. “I hate to use the phrase ‘get with the times,’ but this is all a reflection of the times,” he said. “They have to understand that people want the ability to order whatever they want, when they want it, as soon as they want it.”
— Lora Moftah
