On the ride from Jackson Heights to LaGuardia Airport yesterday evening, I explained to my taxi driver why I was headed to the airport’s taxi lot. Mayor Zohran Mamdani was announcing his nominee to lead the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC): Midori Valdivia, a forty-two-year-old former TLC deputy commissioner of finance and Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) board member. Known as a transportation wonk, Valdivia spent six years as an analyst and adviser at the Port Authority and, during her tenure at the TLC, led a push to expand wheelchair-accessible vehicles.
“There’s no way,” the driver said when I raised the possibility that the mayor’s pick could be good for drivers. “Nobody ever looks out for taxi drivers. The TLC office is very rude. They treat us like slaves.”
It was a familiar assessment. For decades, drivers’ encounters with the TLC have largely meant fines, hearings, suspensions, and rules that many say feel designed less to regulate the industry than to discipline those doing the work of driving. When I mentioned that Mamdani had taken part in a hunger strike outside city hall in 2021 alongside taxi drivers that had won $475 million in relief for heavily indebted taxi-medallion owners, he shrugged. “We’ll see.”
At the LaGuardia lot itself, the mood was more hopeful. Drivers still carried a long list of grievances, but they were standing beside the mayor, Valdivia, and Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice Julie Su during the press conference. New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) members appeared intent on pressing an administration that had already shown itself responsive to their needs.
Among them was Richard Chow, a hunger striker whose brother was one of nine indebted drivers who committed suicide in 2018. Mamdani name-checked Chow in his election night speech and arrived at his January 1 inauguration in Chow’s cab.
“I’m very proud of him, from the bottom of my heart,” Chow told me of the new mayor. “Because…
Auteur: Alex N. Press
