Thread by @CheyCab

“Minneapolis today has 48 licensed taxi drivers in the entire city compared to 1,359 10 years ago.”

Thread:
I was one of them and here’s some interesting info for you. Back then I worked mostly off my phone and the internet. While most cabbies took runs of the cab computer and

https://twitter.com/h_pan3/status/1484575848896339976

walk ups, people prearranged with me directly via text. Called me from Yelp. And hailed me off of Siri. I’d fill in the extra time doing cab company fares and medical account runs. Around the time Uber entered the market in 2014 I was nearly 100% off my phone so I didn’t need to

be under a taxi company umbrella and paint a nice car into ugly taxi colors. So I switched over to the limo side. At that time, my phone rang around the clock from customers and calls off the internet. I was very unusual in that I was one of the few individual taxi drivers with a

presence and reviews that you could locate online. As Uber and Lyft pulled limo and taxi clients over those calls for taxi service went down from many a day to a few a month. Starting around 2019 people started coming back to taxis and limos as they grew weary of Uber. And

during the pandemic that trend accelerated(about 1yr into the pandemic) in ways neither the taxi/limo biz could have imagined. But half of limos went out biz in the pandemic, and nearly all of cabs had gone extinct. So all these people were calling only find cabs were no more.

Remember how I told you that from 2014-2019 I only got a few taxi calls a month? Well now I get 15-20 calls a DAY at all hours. I spend a great deal of time helping people order a cab in a city where few remain. The author of this article asked me why nobody wants to drive a taxi

It’s hard and dangerous, and for many years there were no passengers(besides medical account runs) because everyone switched to rideshare. If you followed my Twitter back then you remember me sharing how hard and dangerous it was. For limos it’s been a great opportunity to secure

a new generation of clients. But we also have challenges with rising expenses(like insurance) and a shortage of cars and drivers at peak times. But not nearly as much as the taxi business which is less than 10% of what it was just 10 years ago. From a historical perspective I

consider myself lucky to have experienced being a female cabbie in all it’s real and raw ways before Uber came and changed the taxi world forever. It was an awful yet rich experience. It also allowed me to study and observe my community from an incredibly unique perspective.