Good-bye, old friend
It all happened rather suddenly. One day I was a happy taxi driver in Pensacola, Florida; next day I'm driving for Uber.
My taxi, a 2006 Ford
Freestar was becoming...how you say...troublesome. The van has
206,000 miles. It was on its third transmission (a well-known
problem with this make/model) and even this one was starting to act
up. The $3,000 repair was not something to which I was looking
forward. Plus, I'd been having air conditioner problems.
My rear a/c had
stopped working altogether, and up front I couldn't keep a compressor working for
more than a couple of weeks. (The shop I use kept generously replacing them
under warranty but even they were getting frustrated that they could
not find the source of the problem which clearly was in my car and not their compressors.) There were also other
electrical glitches that I knew had expensive fixes. Clearly, the
van was reaching the end of its useful life as a profitable taxi.
We all know this. We know
that eventually vehicles wear out and need replacement. Smart taxi
drivers put away money for that. You can keep
putting money into the vehicle in repairs, but sooner or later it
ceases to be economically viable. Parts for my Ford are
super-expensive.
So I started looking for
another van. I considered buying a sedan, but minivans are just so
much more practical. Over the years I've been asked to carry so much
weird stuff that would never fit in a sedan. I wanted a
Chrysler/Dodge van. They're not particularly durable, but Chrysler
made a gazillion of them. Parts are plentiful and they're cheap to
repair. In 2008, Chrysler redesigned its iconic minivan. The design
has been the same ever since, and the 2008's are nearly
indistinguishable from a brand-new one.
I found a very nice,
one-owner 2010 Dodge Grand Caravan at a local dealer. The thing had
a little more miles on it than I would have preferred, but it was
immaculate – cleanest one I'd looked at. It just so happened that
my friend Terry and I visited them on the very last day of the month.
And boy were they in a mood to sell! We made a deal. I won't say that I "stole" it, but they did immediately
come off their asking price, and they agreed to take my van in trade, sight-unseen, and give me a “fair” price
for it as well.
About that: These old
vans from the mid-2000's are not worth much, especially if they have
high miles on them as my Ford did. The fact that the dealer would
take it in trade (even if we all knew that it was going immediately
to a wholesaler) was the deal-maker. It meant I wouldn't have to
sell it myself, which would have required paying someone to take all
the taxi decals off. They get baked on and are not easy to remove.
Plus I would have felt like a shitbag for selling someone a van with
a faulty airconditioner and transmission.
The biggest decision was
not to put the new van back on as a taxi. Nope, I'm switching to
Uber! Yeah, I know...consorting with the enemy and all...
There are a lot of reasons
for this. In the end it was kind of a coin-toss. What tipped the
scales for me is that as a taxi, working the Navy base and the
airport has become a huge pain in the ass. It seems that nobody
likes taxis anymore - not the base commander nor the airport manager. In the end I just said, “Screw it!” Working the base is just not worth the hassle anymore. Working the airport is nearly as bad.
So it's good-bye, taxi and
hello, Uber. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
2 comments:
You’ll be great as a Uber driver. Look forward to even more stories.
Yeah Bob, I'm sure there will still be stories...
But it's funny. Uber likes to think that they invented something new: Driving people around for money! But that's what I've been doing since 2010, in a car that I've owned. And for me driving for Uber is EXACTLY the same experience, just minus the taxi meter...sort of (more on this later). People get in, we drive, people get out.
Uber wants riders/passengers to think that this is "special"...that they're just getting a casual ride with a friend - "sharing" the trip if you will - but there's no sharing going on; they're still paying for it. Just in a different way. The downside is that part-time, "side-hustle" Uber drivers *might* not be as professional as cab drivers for whom it is a full-time job. And there is a difference. Most cab drivers I know take the job of transporting people around for money very seriously. It's not a lark, or something they do for fun.
But yesterday I had to laugh. I was in my car, in the driveway, and I was setting up the new mount for my cellphone, which you really have to have up in view (umm, like a taximeter?). I had the Uber app on, trying to set up a companion app called UZURV which...well, I'm not exactly sure what it does or how it does it. Anyway, as I was sitting there, the phone "pinged" with a trip! I was, like, "Goddammit..." So I hit "Accept." Turned out the person lived really close - a young woman who needed to get to work. So I zipped up, got her and took her to Target.
It wasn't a huge trip but it pointed out the importance of a service like Uber. There are *NO* taxicabs anywhere near my subdivision. Even with 300,000 people in the surrounding area, Pensacola is not a big taxi-town. The few cabs that work during the week are at the airport. In fact, if you call Yellow Cab they don't even give you an ETA anymore! They simply say they'll get there when they get there - and that wait can be extensive. Such service, right? No wonder Uber has flourished.
But it's really a chicken/egg kind of thing. When more semi-retired guys like me can just log-on to the app when they're at home (like I am right now), and the general public gets to realizing that there are "taxis" available right in their own neighborhood, I believe that Uber/Lyft will see explosive growth. It's already happening.
In the meantime, I see that there are only six Uber cars in the queue at the airport, so I may go down there and see if I can get a trip. Or I may not. As I've often mentioned, Pensacola is a little Podunk town where the tiny airliners irregularly arrive at our dirt strip airport, spitting and sputtering and backfiring like those you see in a cartoon.
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