Past the curled receipts at the base of the windshield, a trail of yellow cabs sits waiting at the curb outside Penn Station. Above Eighth Avenue, a sky of uniform gray mirrors the empty road below. “It’s a long line,” Richard Brown, a forty-six-year-old cabdriver, says. “Ain’t nobody moving. Nobody in those trains.”
Since the coronavirus swept into New York, less than four weeks ago, the city has become the outbreak’s American epicenter. On Thursday night, the number of confirmed cases in New York City breached twenty-three thousand, and the death toll rose to three hundred and sixty-five. In the face of this increasing devastation, shops and businesses have shuttered and offices have emptied out, leaving the normally bustling public spaces of the country’s largest and densest urban area all but free of people, including potential taxi riders.
Earlier this week, the Times reported that many yellow-cab owners and drivers estimate that their fares have dropped by more than two-thirds this month. (Exact figures for March aren’t yet available.) It’s a stunning blow to the industry and its workers, who have already contended in recent years with the disruptive influx of ride-share companies and the astronomical prices of yellow-cab medallions. “They crippled the business,” Brown says, of Uber and Lyft, adding that he’s lost more than half his income as a result of the proliferation of ride-share drivers. “And now the virus here—I don’t know what the next step is.” For now, he is still trying to look for fares. “My bills stay the same,” Brown, who has two young children, says. He has twelve years to go on a thirty-year loan for his medallion, and, “sooner or later,” he says, “I may have to walk away from it, because it’s dragging me and my wife and our finances down. And all the hard work, and all the investment, and everything that you think that you are accomplishing”—Brown snaps his finger—“go right out the door.”
The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the state legislature are reportedly at work on supportive measures for the taxi industry. In the meantime, some cabs are going several hours between fares and cruising the city’s mostly deserted streets, as shown in the video above. “A lot of drivers out here, they’re going crazy, because they don’t know what to do,” Brown says. But there’s little other option: “There’s so much cars out here that’s still looking, you know? Still searching.”
