If lately you had to wait 15, 20 or even more than 40 minutes for a cab in some corner of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires know that you did not have a bad day, but that in the district the number of cars was reduced by half what are they circulating.
After the pandemic and according to what different leaders of the union and the consulted taxi drivers told Télam, there is a 60% fewer vehicles than could be in operation. Today, some 15,000 taxis circulate through the streets of Buenos Aires, when a few years ago — they calculate that at the end of 2015 — there were 38,000.
The human being tends to reason using a cognitive bias known as the Principle of Least Causality, which implies attributing a single explanation to a problem.
But the reality is that the taxi driver activity is in emergency and according warn the most pessimistic, with risk of extinction earlier than later, for various reasons.
It happened that illegal applications entered the country, but also that in pandemic many drivers and owners migrated to other activities because it became very expensive to maintain the car without collecting what was necessary due to the health crisis.
Keep in mind that the taxi is the the only public transport service that does not receive any subsidy from the State.
All those consulted feel abandoned by the head of the Buenos Aires Government, Horacio Rodriguez Larreta and they make it heard in their demonstrations although until now they have not received a response.
The MP Mara Brawer presented a project so that licensees can access a car 0 kilometer of national industry with tax exemptions that has a chance of leaving and would be agreed with Together for Change, but meanwhile the sector is in intensive care and those who suffer the most are the so-called taxi workers.
the typical case
Fabian Gustavo Buzurro He is already well over 50 years old and has been a taxi driver for decades. But rent the car. He would love to live only as a tachero, but he can’t.
Every day, he has to give 6,300 pesos to the owner of the car to give it to work. “I do the rental cost in 13, 14 hours. If I’m lucky, in 12. But I have a thousand pesos for gas and a thousand for food. That It takes me to spend about 8,000 pesos a day, even if I work 15 hours, because what I have left from my earnings pays for the trip to and from my house,” he said. His Second job it is like manager in a garage in Flores. The one that allows you to pay fixed expenses.
fabian sleep two hours a day. He knows that he survives, that his cannot be called a life. Say what many of his fellow laborers went on to work on apps, which in his opinion – which is shared by all those consulted – are the ones that are going to extinguish the activity of the taxi in CABA if the State does nothing about it.
Although the unions recognize that a taxi worker is charged an average of between 4,500 and 5,000 pesos for car rental per day, according to the collective labor agreement, it should work differently: the driver would have to give the owner 35% of what he collects at the end of the day. But there is a lot of informality and the need has the face of a heretic.
The app pandemic
Marcelo Mezzotero, a member of the Capital Taxi Drivers Association, puts the crisis in numbers. “The CABA Automotive Park has 38 thousand licenses and 25,000 renewed. They are approximate numbers. We think about 10,000 cars stopped working, that’s about 60% less,” he explained.
The issue of illegal applications like Uber obsesses him and this week there was another mobilization to ask the CABA government to fight them.
“The system of applications leaks hundreds of millions of dollars that could go, for example, to vaccines. Is awesome. You make a trip of a thousand pesos and 30% goes to the application. And Larreta has an ambiguous speech, he says that they are illegal, but he does not fight them”.
Mezzotero emphasizes that the taxi is the only means of public transport that does not receive subsidies from the State. In that sense, they are excited that the bill that Daniel Filmus started and Mara Brawer continued to prosper the modernization of the taxi fleet.
The fleet was cut in half
One night, when Lula came to Buenos Aires, the national deputy of the Frente de Todos for CABA Mara Brawer had dinner with the former president of Brazil and his wife and they offered to take her back. She politely declined the offer, convinced that she would get a cell phone right away on Las Heras Avenue. After all, in Buenos Aires, there are plenty of cafes and taxis. Or left over. I do not pass.
“I walked and walked through Las Heras and I couldn’t. The taxi fleet from the economic crisis in the pandemic was reduced by half”, Brawer told Télam.
But it was not just the complaint: submitted a project that was discussed in committee the day Together for Change decided not to give a quorum for the Frontal Labeling law and now the committee has to meet again because the approval lost its validity, but the legislator says that it is agreed with the opposition .
Consists in which the taxi licenseesboth natural and legal persons, can access a 0km car from national industry with tax exemptions. It is a benefit that taxi drivers can use once a year and the law will be valid for 6 years.
“It has three ends; First of all, support taxi drivers in this hard time that the sector is going through; secondly, to stimulate the provision of a safe service for citizens and lastly to benefit the national automotive industry”, he stated.
the other pandemics
Mezzotero believes if the first pandemic was the introduction of illegal applications during the macrismo, but two others followed: the economic crisis in times of Cambiemos and the coronavirus pandemic. There was a break there and it began to be noticed much more strongly that there was a lack of taxis in the City.
Even if taxi drivers were considered essential workers from the beginning, many owners stopped renting the car because for a long time the demand dropped and it did not yield them. It also happened that among the more than 100,000 deaths that Argentina has from covid, many were taxi drivers. Finally, many others decided to migrate to applications and there was a significant number of drivers who directly dedicated themselves to something else.
The parts cost tragedy
A change of wheel can cost 18,000 pesos. Not to mention your car breaking down. For the owner and for the “pawn” these are situations that in the current situation emotionally unbalance because they do not know where to get the money.
The solution to spend more hours working to amortize the expense It is a false start for several reasons: being more on the street also means spending more and a taxi driver who sleeps less than he has to sleep is a threat to his own life and that of others. As well as someone who is wrong all the time.
unfair competition
Since they landed in Argentina, taxi drivers have demonstrated against passenger transport applications such as Uber or Cabify. They consider that they do not pay the same taxes as them, that they practice unfair competition with dumping practices, that they do not offer passenger security and that they flee the money they earn outside the country. They prosecuted their demands, but so far the applications continue to work.
The truth is that after the applications initially seduced with their prices, today it is usually cheaper to travel with the traditional black and yellow car.
the battle plan
Luis Fernandez, president of the Association, recalled: “We have fought and we have achieved the extension of the license for 14 years for the models until 2011. And 11 years for those from 2009-2010 11”. But he is very concerned about the crisis in the sector.
He also said that they encourage “comrades” to work as a percentage, without having to give the owner a fixed sum each day, but when there is so much need it is very difficult for the weakest link in the chain to set conditions.
Michael Soto He is Secretary of Organization of the Taxi Labor Union and he is fed up. He has already lost count of the number of times the taxis put the 9 de Julio to make the claim visible with a null result. “It seems that we have an enemy in Larreta. We are organizing a fight plan and next time we are going to take the cars, but we are going to leave them there, to see if they listen to us “, he warns.
pocket paradoxes
Although for most of the population taking a taxi is a luxury (today the cost of flag lowering from 111 pesos from 6 to 22 and 20% more expensive after that time) taxi drivers want it to increase because the money is not enough for them. “Today We are more than 50% late. The flag drop for it to be truly profitable should be equivalent to the value of a dollar,” says Mezzotero.
women and taxis
Valerie Herrera She has been working in the taxi since 2001 and is a member of the board of directors of the Association of Taxi Drivers of the Capital “so that we fellow taxi drivers are better represented.”
Asked why there are so few women behind the wheel says that the journalist Luciana Peker investigated based on the same question and discovered that there are many that appear in the vehicle documentation, but very few that drive.
Patriarchy leaves no activity untouched.
However, he affirms that every day there are more although “it is very difficult since most of us are breadwinners, the pandemic did not allow us to wait and many colleagues migrated to domestic work or went to care for older adults”. The fact of why many women choose the taxi is sad: it is an activity in which they do not have to be young to be able to get down to work.
Valeria denounces the abandonment of the CABA government during the pandemic. “Larreta did not take us into account as essential workers and they were complicit in the applications, there were no reductions, but there were increases”.
And the desperation to get the daily sustenance of many colleagues was such that at the worst moment of the pandemic he does not know any of those who continued to work who could have stopped for more than five days.
For all these reasons, it would be impossible to film a remake of the successful “Rolando Rivas, taxi driver” in today’s Argentina. But these professionals at the wheel are not going to sit idly by because they know that no defeat is final and that fighting is the only way to get change. Although it costs.
