Thursdays are often my slowest night of the week. The gate fees are almost as high as they are on Friday and Saturday nights, every cab and limo and ridesharing Prius is out on the road to compete with you and there just isn’t the amount of business to support all the vehicles trying to make a living off of picking up passengers. Everyone starts going home at midnight and the streets are just dead by last call.
But last night was the slowest night I’ve had in months. The last time I made as little money, I was turning in my cab at the halfway point so as to not stab to death the next passenger that got under my skin.
At least that was lack of money by choice – last night was downright painful and not because I called it a night early. I spent the whole night cruising around, often behind three or four other empty cabs, waiting for a hand to go up or for the computer to send me an order. The last half of my shift the computer didn’t go off once and the street hails petered out until I just said fuck it and went home. Not only was it slow, the night dragged by to the point where it felt like I was working a double.
Come Monday I need to go down to Flywheel and get their taxi-dispatching app put back in my cab. At this point, anything will help, even if it’s just an extra ride or two a night. People are enamored with being able to hail transportation on-demand from their smartphones and Instantcab’s app isn’t providing me with much in the way of rides, so I might as well go put a third phone in my taxi in the hopes of more rides.
And it’s not even winter yet. I have a feeling come January it’s going to be the slowest winter I’ve seen since I started, what with Uber, UberX, Lyft and Sidecar on the road in addition to all of the extra cabs the city has added to the streets in the last year. Which is why I’m meeting Monday with an old friend with some bullet points about the pros and cons of getting into the ridesharing business.
It’d take a lot of doing to make it work, but we’re two veteran cab drivers who know the business of transportation in San Francisco. More than anything, it’s going to depend on the business the ridesharing apps can or can’t provide and there’s no way to know exactly what to expect from them until we actually go ahead and pull the trigger. In the meantime, we can do the work surrounding the cost of doing business and figure out exactly what those numbers would be. Thankfully, all the work I did last year surrounding forming and cancelling an LLC and the business costs associated with a limousine are all still applicable, so I don’t have to reach too far for the math.
Which means I have homework to do before Monday, and I’m staring my last shift of the week in the face as we speak.
Time to go get to it – hopefully tonight will be better than last night.
