According to the article, at the end of a 12-hour shift, a driver goes home with $160 after paying $120-$130 to rent the cab & medallion and $8 for credit card processing. There's also gasoline costs, which the article doesn't give a number for, but as a guess, a driver might go through half a tank on a shift for $40, and that's in an inefficient large car with a V8.
So over half of the cost of an NYC taxi is the driver's labor, and a nontrivial portion of the taxi rental goes to pay for the taxi medallion, which has gone up in cost to a million dollars in recent years:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/06/taxi...
The economics of taxi service in the US are largely driven by labor costs as well as regulations that have been perverted to funnel money to a rent-seeking set of license/medallion owners, not the running cost of the motor vehicle.
According to the article, at the end of a 12-hour shift, a driver goes home with $160 after paying $120-$130 to rent the cab & medallion and $8 for credit card processing. There's also gasoline costs, which the article doesn't give a number for, but as a guess, a driver might go through half a tank on a shift for $40, and that's in an inefficient large car with a V8.
So over half of the cost of an NYC taxi is the driver's labor, and a nontrivial portion of the taxi rental goes to pay for the taxi medallion, which has gone up in cost to a million dollars in recent years: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/06/taxi...
Many other cities have the same problem, like my hometown Milwaukee: http://wisconsinreporter.com/milwaukee-taxicab-battle-test-o...
The economics of taxi service in the US are largely driven by labor costs as well as regulations that have been perverted to funnel money to a rent-seeking set of license/medallion owners, not the running cost of the motor vehicle.