Bakary Kane was sitting in his green cab outside the Harlem-125th Street Metro-North station on a Monday when he said the quiet part out loud. “I had a lot of hope,” the 50-year-old driver told THE CITY. “But now I will say that turning green was maybe the worst decision I ever made.”
Seven years ago, that hope made sense. The Boro Taxi program launched in 2013 to push cab service into neighborhoods that yellow taxis historically skipped. Northern Manhattan. The Bronx. Outer Brooklyn. It felt like a fix for a real problem. But Uber was already moving, and the math has been brutal ever since.
New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission data now shows just 539 working green cab drivers as of February. That’s a collapse of nearly 93% from May 2015, when 7,521 operators were picking up street hails across the boroughs and Upper Manhattan. Daily trips tell an even grimmer story. Green cabs averaged 1,304 trips a day in February, down almost 98% from the peak of 57,637 trips per day in May 2015. The fleet actually fell below pandemic-era levels. Only 522 green cabs were on the road in February, fewer than the 671 that stayed in service during April 2020.
Not great.
Nancy Reynoso knows the arc of this story better than most. She became the city’s first green cab operator in the summer of 2013, and she stuck with it until March 2022 before finally walking away. She now works at the LEGOLAND New York Resort in Orange County and as a mail carrier. When she heard the February numbers, she was genuinely stunned. “I was shocked to find out that there are even that many,” Reynoso said. “539, oh wow!”
The money has cratered alongside the driver count. At the May 2015 peak, green cab drivers averaged $114 a day in trip revenue, which added up to $862,099 across all drivers on a given day, not counting credit card tips. By February, that had dropped to roughly $52 a day per driver. Kane works seven days a week just to cover his bills. Syed Kabir, a 52-year-old father of three from Bangladesh who has driven a green cab since 2014, put it plainly. “The starting time was good, but now it’s very bad,” Kabir said. “No, no, no, no good business.”
The Boro Taxi program was always a bit of a stopgap. It landed just as Uber and the broader app-based ride-hailing industry began rewriting how New Yorkers move around the city. For-hire vehicles flooded streets in the outer boroughs, the exact neighborhoods green cabs were supposed to serve. Green cab drivers can now accept pre-arranged trips through for-hire vehicle bases and ride-hailing apps, but that hasn’t slowed the bleeding. High-volume for-hire vehicles have clawed back much larger portions of their pre-pandemic ridership than green cabs have. Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island once supported a fleet of more than 6,500 green cabs at their June 2015 peak. That fleet is now a rounding error.
For neighborhoods like Harlem and East New York, the question isn’t just what happens to the remaining drivers. It’s whether street-hail service in underserved parts of the city disappears entirely. Yellow cabs still concentrate in Manhattan south of 96th Street. App-based rides work when you have a smartphone, a credit card, and a few extra minutes. Not everyone does.
Reporting by The City first surfaced these TLC figures and tracked down drivers still working the streets, giving this story much of its texture.
Kane is still out there, working East 125th Street and Park Avenue. He’s 50 years old and putting in seven days a week. The program that was supposed to bring equitable taxi service to the outer boroughs has essentially hollow itself out, one driver at a time, while the TLC numbers quietly record the decline. The city has no announced plan to address the collapse. So the green cabs that remain just keep circling, looking for a fare.