Taxis and Other Artifacts

On a rainy day in Tokyo, stranded commuters wait under shop awnings and building overhangs. They fix their eyes on the streets, watching for the elusive vacant taxi.

Competition is fierce. In sour weather, you’re lucky to find one vacant taxi for every dozen or 20 that pass. The hunters eagerly wait to see their prey, marked by a flashing LED sign in the windshield that reads kuusha — vacant.

After a few years of living in Japan, this sight remains quaint to me. The act of hailing a cab — stepping into the street and stretching your hand toward the sky, perhaps punctuating it with a subtle wave — feels antiquated today. The spread of smartphones and the availability of ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft is steadily chipping away at this very human interaction and displacing it from the modern urban experience.

Riding a taxi in Tokyo is unique in other ways for non-natives. An automatic door swings open to allow passengers on and off. How quickly this has become programmed into my muscle memory, such that I find myself waiting for a few embarrassing seconds for doors to open when traveling outside Japan. Whereas ride-hailing services allow the user to program a destination and the driver to get there without a word to the passenger, negotiating a destination in a taxi on the labyrinthine Tokyo streets can present challenges  to drivers and passengers alike. In the predominantly cash-based Japanese socio-economy, bills actually change hands to close the transaction. Gone is the automatic debit to your stored payment information.

Follow that car!

Ride-hailing services offer myriad advantages over their grandfather, the taxi. Collectively, arguments for the availability of these services stress the convenience.

At the same time, the advantages of preserving taxi culture should at least give us pause the next time we navigate to the app and drop a pin.

One significant argument against the technology is the impact it’s having on labor. Much has been written about this. The list is long, but one compelling  argument is that services like Uber depend upon employment agreements with the most economically vulnerable segments of our population, thereby hiding deep structural issues with the capital-labor relationship and perpetuating, or even worsening, socio-economic issues associated with it, such as poverty. By design, workers who make these services possible are fragmented and unorganized, putting traditional methods for leveling the playing field with the capital class, such as unionization, entirely out of reach. This is to say nothing of the tragic exploitation of labor behind the various extracting and manufacturing processes that make the end-user’s smartphone available to begin with. Most of us can drop pins and call rides without giving this deeply exploitative backstory much consideration.

Another argument that resonates with me is that we are losing our sense of community. Take, for example, taxi banter. This is such a part of urban culture that it’s been lampooned in movies and, adopted as a trope by journalists with seemingly no self-awareness (looking at you, Thomas Friedman). With ride hailing, the user can get in, get there, and get out without exchanging so much as a greeting with the driver. Convenient? Perhaps. And who among us hasn’t had one of those hey-just-leave-me-alone-buddy kind of days? But I worry about the long-term impact of this new mode on our ability to communicate with one another. Humans need community, and city humans like myself can’t escape it. Yet recent research has found that social media services have successfully trapped us in communities contained in our smartphones and it’s making us very depressed indeed.

Then there’s the issue of data. Your smartphone is like a data sponge, sucking up more aspects of your daily goings-on than it knows what to do with. App developers sell and use this for things like tailored advertising and app optimization. But how safe is it to entrust a wildly unregulated industry with data about where we went on our lunch breaks, how long we spent at a doctor’s office, and other personal details? How much can we trust that our decisions are truly our own if developers use our data to build their apps with the objective of encouraging certain consumer activities? The answers are troubling, which is why the largest tech companies — including Uber — have fought regulations meant to improve transparency about the kinds and uses of data they collect.

One needn’t be a luddite to argue against the spread of ride-hailing, or any other hailing for that matter — food delivery services like UberEats and Grubhub, errand services like TaskRabbit, to name a few. But wouldn’t we prefer to shape our technology environment around our social and moral beliefs, rather than allowing technologies to define those for us?

Two Hypothetical Futures

To supplement this discussion, I fleshed out two hypothetical futures. As a disclaimer, this storytelling has an inherent bias in that it accepts at face value the three arguments above. Bias notwithstanding, I find projection exercises like this help me draw conclusions about the impact I’m having on the planet, and whether my day-to-day habits are consistent with my values.

The scene is Tokyo, June 2028. Rainy season has been shorter every year since 2018, the shortest on record at the time. But it’s violent. Wind whips rain in every direction, merciless and fierce.

Uber Universe

Hashimoto stares blankly into his smartphone, watching an animated car trace a line on a map. Other cars flash like little black dots on the screen, each autonomous and idling through the streets, each waiting to be called into duty. He sips warm coffee while he waits — a rare luxury for Hashimoto, whose principal source of income was delivering food before the drones took that away. The drones were still nascent and had trouble in the rain, so the rainy season brought him a bit of fortune. A few hours carting burritos, sandwiches, or whatever for the yuppie couples could bring enough in for him to enjoy a caffeine fix and call a ride without feeling too frivolous.

A blinking notification on the screen tells Hashimoto his ride has pulled up and prompts him to make for the exit. His is the second from the rear in a line of six cars when he leaves the coffee shop, but it has advanced to the front by the time he reaches it — new cars arriving at the rear, boarded cars leaving at the front, in a continuous stream of black metal.

Hashimoto climbs into the back seat, the door closes, and the car rolls to a smooth start with a whirr of the electric that fades into the pounding rain.

An LED hologram welcomes him and notifies him that his smartphone has synced. A few ads stream by, offering to pull over the car for an electronics store, for a snack, for companionship. All of these ads are based on a profile the operating system has built on him using data about places he’s visited, things he’s purchased, his bank account balance, and the like.

Then an ad for a card loan, “Approval in 30 seconds or less!” This rain isn’t going to hold forever, Hashimoto tells himself. May as well feed the bank account before the drones are back in operation and I’m dry again.

Hashimoto waves his hand right, a gesture meant to inform the hologram to proceed. Just after the disembodied voice of the car’s avatar indicates the gesture was accepted, the car pulls itself over and slows to a steady stop. Hashimoto steps into the cool rain and heads toward the red light of the ATM booth.

Taxi Timeline

Hashimoto navigates his car up a narrow cul-de-sac in Shibuya.

The passenger in back is looking out the window, smiling at no one in particular. Hashimoto finds this endearing in an aloof kind of way. “Wonder when this rain is going to let up,” he says, inviting the passenger to have a conversation.

The passenger laughs a bit, then sucks her teeth. “When, indeed. Would be nice to see the sun again.”

A voice from the GPS interrupts to tell them they’re approaching the passenger’s apartment, then fades into the persistent tapping of rain on the windows, the rooftop, the surface of street puddles.

Like so many of Hashimoto’s younger passengers, she has probably left her phone at home. The evidence that those devices are a health hazard — that notifications, dings, and buzzes were making us all incapable of paying attention for more than a few short bursts, that social networking was anything but social and in fact was feeding our depression and neurosis — it had all become too convincing to ignore. 10 years ago, sitting had become the new smoking. Now, smartphones were the new sitting. Maybe we should all be avoiding things that start with “S.”

Hashimoto pulls up to a modest two-story house and the GPS stops the meter and activates the car’s overhead lights. A screen on the back of the headrest comes to life, flashing in soft blue the digits on the meter and offering options for non-cash payment. The passenger opts for cash and puts out three one-thousand yen bills. “I don’t need the change,” she says, and steps out.

It was a busy night, the way rainy nights always are for a taxi driver in Tokyo.

Hashimoto issues a few verbal commands to the car’s navigation — turn off the vacant sign, take me to a return spot. A few lights flash and auto-drive tugs at the wheel. The avatar announces the time and distance for the closest dispatch — 700 meters, 4 minutes. It’s far from home, but rather than instructing the car to drop him off first, he decides he’ll hoof it back tonight.

A few text messages materialize on the heads-up display along with some news, synced with Hashimoto’s docking station back home. The car pulls itself into dispatch just as Hashimoto finishes reading them. “Thank you for your hard work today,” the car tells him.

Hashimoto steps out of the car and into the rain. Maybe he’ll grab a drink on the way home. In Tokyo, the night is young and there’s still life to be lived.