Around 10 a.m. on a biting Saturday earlier this month, Abraham Derbo pulls up to the South Nashville offices of NashVegas Cab in one of the company's green and yellow vans. He hops out, strides across the parking lot and offers a hand and a greeting.
"So, you want a ride?" he says, grinning. The ride has already been arranged, of course — but it's a force of habit.
Derbo is an Ethiopian immigrant and father to a 6-month-old daughter who occupies a major portion of his phone's photo album. He's also president of NashVegas, a driver-owned cab company. He moved to America several years ago, through a U.S. government program offering limited immigration that he compares to hitting the lottery.
A month later, he says, he called home asking his family to help him get back. His English was more broken then, he was unemployed, and he hadn't yet discovered the community of Ethiopian immigrants he works with now. His father made a deal with him. Stay in America two more weeks, he said — and if you can't find work, I'll buy you a ticket home.
A few days later, Derbo had a job at the Dell warehouse. He would move through several jobs — at Borders Books, at a gas station, then at a home health care company, where he worked for two years before deciding to enroll at Nashville State Community College to pursue a career in medical technology. He started driving cabs because he could arrange the hours around his classes.
To understand what happened next, you have to know a bit about how taxis operate in Nashville. Governing the whole industry is the Metro Transportation Licensing Commission, a seven-member body appointed for two-year terms. Its current makeup largely consists of lawyers and professionals from the downtown tourism and entertainment sector.
Among other things, the commission determines how many cabs can operate in the city. Unlike, say, the restaurant industry, in which new operators are essentially free to enter the market and fail or succeed, the number of cab drivers who can work in Nashville is capped each year when the commission grants permits to various cab companies.
The system is ostensibly meant to make sure supply aligns with demand — for the sake of drivers and riders — and to keep the industry from outgrowing the commission's ability to inspect and oversee it, in the name of public safety. In practice, however, it has also allowed a few cab bosses over the years to control a major share of the industry in Nashville.
Nashville cab drivers, a group largely made up of immigrants, operate within the industry's famously tangled web of regulations — and under notoriously exploitative arrangements with the cab companies and their often faraway bosses. Cab companies pay Metro an annual fee of $255 for each permit they hold. They turn around and charge drivers weekly franchise fees, known as "licks," that can range from $200 to $300 for the right to use the permit and drive a car bearing the company's name and logo.
Drivers buy their own vehicles and pay for insurance, maintenance and gas. Because they work as independent contractors, they have been unable to unionize. They start each week in the hole, and drive long hours with the goal of racking up enough in fares — which are also regulated — to cover their expenses and make some money if they can.
Marvin Sutton, an assistant manager at Yellow Cab, understands why drivers like Derbo would think the system is stacked against them. He's been in the business 35 years, 18 of those as a driver. But there's a lot they don't take into account, he says.
"See, they don't understand that they go to these new companies that are charging lower fees, but what are they getting for that lower fee?" Sutton asks. "They don't get advertising. Do they have established business, do they have charge accounts with big corporations? We've got over 100 charge accounts with companies all over the city."
In 2013, Derbo — who initially drove for Allied Cab — and 133 other drivers, many of them also Ethiopian immigrants, sought to break out of what their lobbyist Theo Morrison calls "the sharecropping system" set up by traditional cab companies. They all chipped in to start NashVegas Cab. Instead of working under an arrangement designed to maximize someone else's profit, they are now the drivers and the bosses. Derbo calls it the American Dream, with the sincerity of someone who heard the term long before he ever set foot in the country.
They're not the first Nashville cab drivers to try it. In 2011, a group of Ethiopian drivers banded together to start Volunteer Taxi, and for more than a year they fought to break into the market. They faced resistance from established companies who dubiously claimed there were already too many cabs on the streets. After attending a meeting to discuss starting the new company, some drivers were fired by their current employers. Volunteer Taxi had 80 cabs on the road last year.
A year ago, the MTLC granted NashVegas 35 permits and just one permit to serve the airport, obviously a key part of any cab company's business. It was enough for the new company to get up and running, but it meant 98 NashVegas shareholders were stuck driving for their current companies. The new company they'd helped start wasn't permitted to put them on the road.
The night before meeting his Saturday morning ride-along guest, Derbo drove from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. It was a slow night, he says: He made just $45. But because of NashVegas' model, the company is able to minimize its costs. The company collects just $115 per week from its drivers — a fee it waived for one week over the holidays, Derbo says, "because we know what the market looks like, we've been there."
Under this setup, Derbo says, a slow Friday night isn't nearly the disaster it used to be. He will be able to cover his costs, and make enough money to pay for school and bills.
"For me," he says, "better than the money is the freedom."
But many of the drivers he knows lose money on a weekly basis. He tells stories of drivers staying on the road for 24 hours or more at a time in an attempt to make it up. Some of those drivers are NashVegas shareholders, stuck in a system they thought they had escaped.
Their frustration has been exacerbated by the entrance of Uber and Lyft, app-based ride-sharing services that were allowed to operate in Nashville for nearly a year without any regulation. After Metro Council action last month, regulations for those services should be in place soon. MTLC director Billy Fields said at the time that the commission would revisit the city's taxi ordinances in an attempt to better align them with the rules created for Uber and Lyft, which could mean adjusting requirements regarding the maximum age for automobiles or insurance coverage.
As Derbo steers around Lower Broadway, pointing out his cab's features, you can sense his frustration that his company's attempt to stay on the cutting edge has been halted rather than hailed. NashVegas cabs are equipped with credit-card machines — surprisingly, not a standard feature in all of Nashville's cabs — and cameras, which on at least one occasion were used to help law enforcement track down a criminal. They also have a free app.
At a meeting next week, the MTLC will hear cab companies' requests for permits for the next year. As of this writing, eight companies — six existing and two new — are requesting a total of 650 new permits on top of those they held last year. In addition to the 35 they're operating with now, NashVegas is requesting 200 new permits.
Fields, a noted municipal troubleshooter who is described by Volunteer Taxi veterans as a "night and day difference" from the commission's old leadership, tells the Scene that although the commission granted permits for 1,125 cabs — plus 117 vehicles equipped to accommodate wheelchairs — he estimates there are approximately 900 cabs on the road.
That represents a significant increase over 2012, when the city had just 585 cabs. But if the commission is hesitant to continually grant new permits, Fields says, that's because it often initially results in a shuffling of drivers between companies, rather than an increase in the number of cabs serving the city.
"My job isn't to decide what companies grow and don't," he says.
There, however, is the rub. From where drivers like Derbo sit, the commission is deciding which companies grow and which don't, no matter what they do.
"I understand what they're saying and I certainly get it," Fields says. "By the same token, the role of the commission is to determine how many cabs are really needed. But I think the commission is going to listen to that. I've met with NashVegas and I've met with several of the other companies, and they make compelling arguments about why they want to grow their company and why they want the opportunity to move it forward."
But Yellow Cab's Sutton suggests the city has more than sufficient numbers of cabs on the road. After a meeting last year, the commission added 370 new permits and three new companies.
"They said then, at that meeting there, that that would be the last time they would increase the cabs in the city," Sutton says. "So I'm hoping that someone is gonna speak up at the next meeting coming up and hold them to their word.
"Evidently they've got the idea that Nashville is growing. Yeah, I've lived here all my life; yeah, it is growing — but it's not New York City. You gotta draw a line somewhere. Right now the supply and demand is not meeting the number of cabs on the road. That's why these people aren't making any money."
Pulling back into the parking lot outside of the NashVegas office, Derbo offers an analogy for the situation his company and its driver-shareholders are stuck in. It's like you're renting a house, he says, and you decide you're sick of throwing money away every month. So you buy one. And then you're told you can't move in.
"Is this America or what?" he says. "Why are these things happening?"
