Up Against Uber And Lyft, Green Cabs Wither To Lowest-ever Level In New York

While seated behind the wheel of his green cab at East 125th Street and Park Avenue, Bakary Kane recalled how optimistic he felt more than seven years ago when he became the owner of a so-called Boro Taxi.

But with the number of green cab drivers sinking to its lowest level ever, Kane said he regularly must work seven days a week just to pay his bills.

“I had a lot of hope,” the 50-year-old driver told THE CITY outside the Harlem-125th Street Metro-North station on Monday. “But now I will say that turning green was maybe the worst decision I ever made.”

The latest New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission numbers paint an increasingly bleak picture for the green cabs that arrived in Northern Manhattan and the boroughs in 2013 as an alternative for neighborhoods not typically served by yellow taxis. 

That was around the time that Uber and tens of thousands of for-hire vehicles began upending the entire industry with on-demand rides passengers booked via their mobile devices.

TLC data shows there were just 539 working green cab drivers in February — a nearly 93% collapse from May 2015, when 7,521 operators were picking up street hails in the boroughs and Upper Manhattan.

Those numbers jumped out at Nancy Reynoso, who became the city’s first green cab operator in the summer of 2013 before she threw in the towel in March 2022.

“I was shocked to find out that there are even that many — 539, oh wow!” said Reynoso, who went on to work at the LEGOLAND New York Resort in Orange County and as a mail carrier after turning in her TLC license plates. 

Green cabs averaged 1,304 daily trips in February, according to TLC data, down almost 98% from the peak of 57,637 trips per day in May 2015. The number of those on the road fell to 522 in February, lower even than the 671 that remained in service during the early days of the pandemic in April 2020.

At their June 2015 peak, more than 6,500 green cabs were working in Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and north of East 96th Street and West 110th Street in Manhattan.

The collapse of the green cab industry has hit those behind the wheel hard, even as drivers can accept pre-arranged trips from for-hire vehicle bases and over the ride-hailing apps.

At its peak in May 2015, green cab drivers averaged $114 a day from trips, totaling $862,099 in revenue across all drivers, which doesn’t include additional earnings from credit card tips. In February, those earnings dropped to roughly $52 a day, according to an analysis of TLC data. 

“The starting time was good, but now it’s very bad,” said Syed Kabir, a 52-year-old father of three from Bangladesh who has been a green cab driver since 2014. “No, no, no — no good business.” 

That’s in contrast to competitors in the taxi and for-hire vehicle industry, which have regained significantly larger portions of their shares of pre-pandemic ridership.

TLC data shows that high-volume for-hire vehicles, such as Uber and Lyft, had 19.8 million trips in February, almost 99% of pre-2020 levels. Yellow taxis are at 47% of pre-pandemic trip levels. The green cabs, meanwhile, are at just 6.5%.

“Economically, it doesn’t give you results like the yellows, because the greens can’t go into the central business district of Manhattan,” said Jose Altamirano, president of Livery Base Owners, an association representing more than 250 bases citywide.

Altamirano added that those restrictions leave green cab owners and drivers to scrap for leftovers, while the more than 82,000 vehicles from app-based services battle for passengers alongside close to 11,000 yellow taxis.

“Instead of getting the juiciest part of the meat, you’re chewing on the bones,” he said. “And now you’re competing against filet mignon.”

On Monday afternoon, more than a dozen green cabs were parked outside the Metro-North station on 125th Street, with drivers waiting for would-be passengers to emerge.

Several drivers stationed alongside the elevated Park Avenue railroad tracks said the waits can be long.

“One hour, half an hour,” said Tamzid Khan, 45. “We’ve all been waiting more than 40 minutes.”

TLC has pushed a pilot program aimed at boosting business for the struggling green cab sector.

The commission approved changes in May 2023 that allow up to 2,500 out-of-use green cab licenses to be reactivated — but minus required upfront and operating costs that include green paint jobs, partitions, metered trips, rooftop lights and vehicle markings.

Licensed vehicles in the street-hail livery pilot program are mandated to have trips booked through livery bases and cannot be hailed on the street, unlike the green cabs. 

A September 2025 report on the initiative found that only 563 permits from the test were actively in use as of last June after 3,509 were initially issued. A TLC spokesperson said that as of February, there are 441 licenses in good standing.

The report last year noted that the drop in driver demand suggests that the business model envisioned by TLC “is of limited viability.” In addition, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance filed suit against TLC in state court, charging that the pilot program runs counter to state law by not allowing street hail livery vehicles to be hailed on the street.

Citing pending litigation, TLC declined to comment on the lawsuit, though a spokesperson said the trial run has been extended through June. 

Altamirano, of the Livery Base Owners group, expressed optimism that the remaining green cabs and their owners can be saved from further damage.

“The greens could be revamped, the state should look at making this less complicated,” he said. “There are a lot of requirements that the greens have to do.”

Reynoso, the original green cab driver, was less upbeat.

She said she worries about the future of the remaining green cab drivers — a far cry from the day in November 2013 when she drove then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg back to his Upper East Side home from Brooklyn after he marked the arrival of 1,000 such vehicles on city streets.

“I was always hoping, keeping fingers crossed, that it would get better for the people who [stayed],” Reynoso said. “But I don’t see that it’s happening.”

She added that she is hopeful that the bleeding can be stopped for green cab owners and drivers under Midori Valdivia, the incoming TLC Commissioner.

“Everybody made an investment to get in there, you know?” Reynoso said. “They didn’t do this to not make enough money or to feel like you’re being left out of the big pie.”

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