There are so few travelers left at Kennedy International Airport, one of the world’s busiest airfields, that taxis wait six hours or more for a single passenger.
Taxi companies can no longer find enough drivers for their fleets because there is so little business.
And some cabdrivers are so fearful of being exposed to the coronavirus they are staying home with no way to pay mounting bills.
All this at a time when many of New York City’s taxi owners are already in financial ruin after taking out reckless loans to buy medallions — city-issued permits required to own a yellow cab — at artificially inflated prices, with the reassurance of the city’s taxi commission of their high value.
Their industry has increasingly lost riders to the boom in Uber, Lyft and ride-app services, and been shaken by a spate of suicides by desperate taxi owners and for-hire drivers.
Now taxi owners and drivers who were barely holding on said their livelihood had evaporated as the city all but shut down to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
“When you have to wait six or seven hours to get one passenger, it’s really bad,” said Mario Darius, 66, a taxi owner who was camped out at Kennedy Airport after picking up just three fares in three days.
Though citywide taxi ridership numbers for March are not yet available, some taxi companies, cab owners and drivers said their rides had plunged by two-thirds or more.
The city’s largest taxi group, the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents the owners of 5,500 yellow cabs, said rides had dropped nearly 91 percent to a total of 20,596 trips over this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday. That is compared with 217,540 total trips for the same three days three weeks ago.
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