By Mehmet Zorluoglu
Reporter
A typical day for Nevzat Basboga starts at 5 a.m., long before the sun rises on a winter day such as this. As an Uber driver, he spends the first several hours of his day ensuring that all the early birds make it to work on time, despite the crush of rush hour traffic in the Boston metropolitan area. Today, as usual, he will fulfill his own schedule, making sure not to miss the early rush hour.
Nevzat is an immigrant in his mid-forties who has finally found a full-time job that he plans on keeping. He immigrated to the United States in 1996 after winning his green card in a lottery. He worked many different jobs as he was acclimating to a new country, and couldn’t find a job that paid well enough to justify staying for a long period of time.
After seven years of bouncing around and working pretty much exclusively on a minimum wage, he decided to try and open his own restaurant. His jobs had not met his needs, and opening his own place allowed him to be his own boss, which gave him freedom he did not have in his previous jobs. However, this business was largely unsuccessful; he worked long hours for an income that could not support his living expenses.
Although his original attempt failed, that same entrepreneurial streak was one of the primary motivators in his decision to become a driver for Uber. The company is aware of this, claiming in an email sent out to all of its drivers, that “nearly 90% of drivers choose Uber to be their own boss.”
In the information age, it seems fitting that people would be able to manage their own personal taxi service from essentially anywhere at any given moment on a small handheld device that weighs no more than two-hundred grams. That is precisely what Uber set out to do, and what it has accomplished for drivers like Nevzat.
It was a small leap for Nevzat, from small-business ownership to driving for Uber. He sets his own schedule. He vacations when he wants to. A regular week at work can be anywhere from 25 to 40 hours. Some days he works four hours, some days more.
As we had planned, he picked me up from the Woodland Train Stop around 8 a.m. Despite having been at work since the early dawn, he greeted me with a kind mood and a smile. As his own boss, he understands the importance of making his services available early, when more people are traveling and opportunities for fares are greater.
Normally, he will capitalize on this early rush and then return home to catch up on the early morning sleep he sacrificed for work. Some days, however, he remains out on the road as long as he continues to be matched with customers nearby.
As the morning rush hour came to a close, the demographic of Nevzat’s customers changed a bit. On this day, as on many days, the plethora of colleges in the Boston area provided him with an abundance of potential fares. “We are headed to a Boston College dorm room. Students are usually one of my best sources of business,” Nevzat said, excited to have different kinds of customers to converse with. He seemed a conscientious chauffeur, making sure to explain to his customers why there was a strange passenger along for their ride.
The first person he picked up was a college student headed to the airport to visit her family. Finals had wrapped up and students were on break. “I am headed to the Southwest airlines terminal,” she said.
When asked about the perks of working for Uber, Nevzat was excited not only about the ability to control his schedule but also about the convenience of Uber’s customer to driver pairing system. “With this app on my phone, I am paired with a person who needs a ride, and then it directs me to them with a navigation system,” Basboga said. “After they get in the car, it shows me how to reach their destination, because they have the address typed into the app before I even pick them up.”
Although his accent isn’t overwhelming, it seemed to provide a level of comfort for him, that a potential language barrier could be overcome by the simplicity of the Uber system.
Basboga also likes the system of accountability and customer safety which Uber has put in place. “Many people say they feel safer in a taxi, which doesn’t make too much sense to me,” he said. “Here, if a person complains to Uber, they have all of the driver’s personal information including cell phone number and license plate number. It would be quite easy to track someone down if something were to happen.”
Accountability, however, isn’t the only upside to this fully integrated system. He also enjoys being assured that his customers have had a good experience with him. “Uber has a ratings system. After each ride, it asks the driver to rate the passenger out of five stars, and it asks the passenger the same of the driver,” Basboga said, proudly with the student still in the car. “I am one of the highest rated drivers at 4.87.” Uber has instituted such a system which is self-governing, and checks the responsibility of the drivers while allowing freedom for its employees.
However, as Uber’s future is uncertain, so is Nevzat’s. Uber’s tremendous growth since it was started in 2009 has interfered with the profitability of traditional taxi services, which continues to put political pressure on the company. Haydar Kurban, an associate professor of economics at Howard University, points out that the future of these two competitors seems unclear.
“The government has a monopoly on taxi services. People who pay for taxi licenses pay the government, but expect a certain amount of revenue to be made,” Kurban said. “Because of Uber disturbing the entire industry of taxi services, the profitability of taxis will go down, which could spark all kinds of conflicts. Only time will tell what the result of all of this will be.”
And the profitability of taxis has indeed been falling as of late. The price of medallions in New York (which drivers need in order to drive a taxicab) has fallen due to the increasing presence of Uber in the area. As reported in The Street, “. . . valuations [continue to] fall for medallions, the license needed to operate a cab in New York. Corporate medallions (those sold in pairs for use as part of a taxi fleet) were last auctioned in April 2014 and sold for $2.6 million per pair, or $1.3 million each. In March 2015, there were transfers of medallions for as little as $1.8 million for a pair, or $900,000 each.”
Nevzat, however, does not seem too worried about Uber continuing to thrive: “I doubt anything will happen to Uber. For one, Uber is unlike taxis because all payments are made through the Uber application. You must provide a payment method, such as your credit card,” he said. “After your ride is over, the fare is charged to you from there, so everything is properly taxed.” He feels as though this is better for the government, as payment first goes through Uber, and is therefore always done properly.
“However, sometimes this is not the case with taxis,” Nevzat said. “Some cabbies will tell you their credit card machine is broken so that you pay them cash. When they receive cash, that is a kind of under the table payment that goes untaxed, which means more money in their pocket.”
In any case, efforts to slow or halt Uber’s rise in becoming a major player in the car service business have failed thus far. But at the moment, none of that matters to Nevzat. He is content continuing on with his job as an Uber driver as far as it takes him, but does think about the future. “You can think of this job like a cake. If you hire more drivers, you can only get a smaller piece of the cake,” Nevzat said. “That is because the number of customers will stay more or less the same, but the driver count will have increased.” With Uber only continuing to grow, it is feasible that there will be so many drivers that it too will lose some of its profitability.
For Nevzat, though, the growth of Uber has been a perfect chance to work on terms with which he is comfortable. Not only can he choose his own hours, he can make money from something he’s always liked to do anyways. Plus, there is an attractive social aspect to his line of work — meeting hundreds of new people every month. This has not always been an option for him, making him particularly sensitive to its benefits. Due to Uber’s recent founding and rise to success, Nevzat and his fellow Uber drivers are able to tap into the wealth of economic and social opportunity it provides.
