Seyum Asrat doesn’t kid himself. He admits that the taxi industry is dying.
Since the burgeoning of ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, taxi drivers across the nation have struggled to maintain the workload and lifestyle they had grown accustomed to. In San Jose specifically, the number of arriving airport passengers seeking a taxi ride has declined by three-fold over the past five years — spurring the number of taxi drivers like Asrat to drop by more than half.
Asrat, who immigrated from Ethiopia to San Jose in 1996, has spent the past 24 years working long hours, driving miles upon miles in his taxi, speaking out against unfair conditions — and now he and about 140 others are hanging on by a string.
“Most of our people drive until we die — until our eyes fail or something like that,” Asrat said in a recent interview.
San Jose taxi drivers like Asrat — living and working in one of the most expensive areas in the nation — have been weighed down for more than a decade by an extra burden that no other ride-hailing or taxi drivers in the region face.
At most regional airports, both ride-hailing and taxi drivers are required to pay “trip fees” — a charge of a few dollars for each ride they start from the airport — that go toward funding various maintenance and operations on the airport grounds.
At the San Francisco International Airport, a portion of those fees are used to operate a team of dispatchers that identify passengers in need of a taxi and connect them with a taxi cab waiting in a staging area. At Oakland International Airport, the city helps to subsidize a similar operation.
But at the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport, taxi drivers pay hundreds of dollars out of their paycheck every month to fund the airport’s non-reservation taxicab dispatch operation.
As the number of trips from the airport have declined and taxi drivers have fled, the monthly operating fees per driver have risen exponentially — pushing the city’s taxi drivers even closer to the edge of distinction and forcing many to work longer hours just to recoup the losses. Asrat, for instance, went from working about 50 hours to working 85 hours a week so he could maintain his income level.
Taxi San Jose, a nonprofit started by independent taxi drivers and small company operators over what they considered unfair working conditions forced on drivers at other companies, has provided the on-demand dispatch services at the airport since 2005.
While some taxi companies are commissioned by nonprofits and the county to provide certain transportation services to individuals in need, picking up arriving passengers from the airport — particularly international travelers and elderly travelers — is still the largest revenue stream for San Jose taxi drivers.
In the words of Asrat, taxi drivers “never miss our airport day.”
When the city and Taxi San Jose entered its first agreement for the on-demand operations in 2005, the airport limited the maximum number of annual taxi permits to 300 drivers and required that each driver only come to the airport every other day.
But since the ride-hail companies popped up, the number of taxi drivers permitted by the airport has dropped from 300 to 140 and the number of taxi trips from the airport has dropped from 30,000 a month to 10,000.
To keep the nonprofit and on-demand dispatch operations afloat, the nonprofit slightly reduced its hours of operation and looked for ways to trim its budget, such as switching over to cheaper dispatching technology. Bu eventually, drivers were required to help pick up the extra slack — now contributing $330 a month instead of $240 from their paychecks.
And that’s not the only part of their salary that goes toward airport operations. For each passenger they pick up from the airport, about $3.88 goes back to the airport.
Taxi drivers like Asrat have spent the past few months lobbying the city to use those fees like San Francisco and Oakland to help run the dispatch center.
“San Jose is not a poor city as far as I’m concerned,” Asrat said. “It should be able to do like San Francisco and Oakland and just return those fees.
“We’re not asking for a subsidy, we’re just asking to let those fees come back to us, whatever is left, we can use to run the dispatch center.”
As the number of permitted taxi drivers declined by half, Taxi San Jose went from gathering more than $99,000 per month in revenue to just below $46,000 per month. And according to the nonprofit, its expenses are about $55,000 a month.
Offering the nonprofit and its taxi drivers a lifeline for the first time in nearly 15 years, the city council earlier this month agreed to provide $10,000 a month so that the nonprofit can remain in operation until their agreement ends in January 2021.
“The on-the-ground transportation providers each contribute to the success of the airport, and even while transportation companies like Uber and Lyft are proliferating, the on the ground transportation option of a taxi, I think, needs to be in place to provide full service to folks,” Councilmember Maya Esparza said during the council meeting.
But the remedy is only temporary and the state of the 140 drivers currently serving the airport remains to be seen.
The agreement gives the city the ability to break the deal before Jan. 2021 if it decides to use a new ground transportation dispatching model, which airport and city staff are currently exploring.
The airport plans to publish a request for proposals within six months but officials declined to say what a new ground transportation model might entail. In spite of the ambiguity, airport officials are adamant that taxi services will still play an integral role at the airport — at least for now.
“Taxi services in an efficient and effective manner is important to the passengers arriving to the Airport without prearranged transportation,” John Aiken, San Jose’s director of aviation, said in a statement. “Some travelers prefer to take a taxi or may not have the digital capability to book a rideshare company. Many of our international travelers look for a walk-up taxi style service when arriving to (San Jose International Airport).”
