Yellow Lines, No-Stopping Zones, and the Private Troubles of Shanghai's Taxi Drivers

What happened after Shanghai's new traffic rules took effect?

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As events fragment into trending topics, flare up, and are forgotten just as fast, remembering has become more valuable than ever.

We want to be the ones who remember. "Stories of 2017" is one of QDaily's most important series of the year.

At 5:17 in the evening, Lin Huiyi sat in a restaurant on Chaling Road in Shanghai, eating a bowl of wonton soup with her mind nowhere near the bowl. She kept one eye on her taxi parked across the street and the other on her phone, watching Didi orders flash past every three seconds, afraid of missing a good fare. She wolfed down her food, ready to drop the bowl and drive off the moment a traffic officer appeared.

The restaurant owner had seen many scenes like it this year: customers eating mid-meal, police arriving to "move people along" and slapping tickets on cars. Some days the officers came two or three times.

On March 25, 2017, Shanghai announced revisions to the Shanghai Road Traffic Management Regulations (hereafter "the Regulations"). The new rules held that, within the city's Outer Ring Road, no new all-day on-street parking spaces would generally be added, and existing all-day spaces would be cut back over time. After the announcement, yellow "no-stopping" lines went up along 239 roads across Shanghai, reaching into every corner of the urban core.

Article 46, Clause 3 states that drivers must obey no-parking and no-standing signs and road markings. Violations are penalized under the rules for ignoring traffic signs and markings: illegal parking in a yellow solid-line or yellow dashed-line zone carries a 200-yuan fine and three points off the driver's license.

Bus lanes, which drivers had been able to use for a quick pickup or drop-off, were now off-limits too. Article 33 holds that during designated hours, bus-only lanes are reserved for buses and trolleybuses alone; all other vehicles are barred from entering.

Together, the two rules sharply cut the number of streets in the urban core where taxi drivers could legally pull over. Drivers complained: "Where are people supposed to get in? Where are they supposed to get out?"

Five months after the new rules took effect, the 40th session of the Standing Committee of the 14th Shanghai Municipal People's Congress published an implementation report: as of August 31, the authorities had handled 2.471 million instances of "illegal parking," an average of nearly 16,000 a day.

Internal data from the taxi companies pointed the same way. Driver Lu Zongchen learned from Jinjiang Taxi this month that the company's monthly violation count was now 50 percent higher than usual. Where a month once brought 100 tickets, it now brought 150, and that was just one fleet under the Jinjiang Xuhui branch. Jinjiang has several branches in each Shanghai district, and each branch runs three to five fleets. Since the start of the year, traffic fines have become one of the industry's fastest-rising costs.

Veteran drivers usually arrange to have points moved onto someone else's license through the company; the going rate is 200 yuan a point. But once that cost is counted, a single violation can swallow a driver's whole day's earnings.

At 1:43 in the morning, with under four hours left in his shift, driver Xie Yimin pulled a receipt from the meter: 628 yuan. That was what he had earned since 5 p.m. He was not happy with the number.

Over those twelve hours, fuel had cost 150 yuan, the dispatch fee owed to the taxi company came to more than 100 yuan, depreciation added over 50 yuan, and his share of the 14,000-yuan annual insurance premium brought the night's costs to more than 300 yuan. He figured he could push the take to 800 yuan by the time his shift ended at 5 a.m., leaving him just under 500 yuan after expenses.

One fine, 200 yuan plus the real cost of three lost points, could come to 800 yuan.

So more and more drivers now try to stay out of the city center and work mainly in the suburbs. Even when they carry a passenger downtown, they often deadhead straight back to the suburbs after dropping the fare. "There's nothing you can do. Sometimes you don't dare take a fare. You haul someone for almost nothing, and a 200-yuan fine plus three points puts you in the red," said taxi driver Xu Xing. After four years behind the wheel, Xu Xing still doesn't know the city-center roads well.

Yet in 2005, of the 90,000 people driving taxis in Shanghai, 80,000 worked in the urban core.

Taxi drivers don't deny that tougher traffic enforcement is, at bottom, a good thing. The August 31 People's Congress Standing Committee meeting reported that since the new rules took effect, road traffic accidents, deaths, and injuries in Shanghai had fallen 12.8 percent, 12.5 percent, and 21.5 percent year-on-year, while police calls about illegal parking and congestion dropped 49.9 percent and 21.2 percent.

But drivers widely felt the Regulations could have been more "humane." The yellow signs barring extended stops, for instance, don't say how long a stop is actually allowed. Most drivers guess somewhere between three and six minutes, but no one is sure, and no one dares run the experiment.

What bothered driver Chen Daoyuan most was the rule on bus lanes: other vehicles are barred, with only a narrow set of exceptions — emergency vehicles on urgent missions; breakdown and rescue vehicles; school buses carrying students that meet the School Bus Safety Management Regulations; passenger vehicles licensed for more than twenty seats that are actively carrying passengers; and vehicles cleared to use the lane by traffic signals. Taxis did not make the list.

"Bus lanes were always where you picked people up and dropped them off. Banning stopping there makes no sense. Buses carry passengers — what do people think taxis do?" said Chen Daoyuan.

The 2016 Shanghai Comprehensive Transportation Annual Report, published in March 2017, showed that Shanghai's buses carried an average of 6.54 million passenger trips a day. Taxi ridership had been falling, but still accounted for 2.36 million trips a day. Taxis continued to carry a large share of the city's daily travel.

Xie Yimin, who comes from Henan, believed that under the new rules taxis should not be treated like private cars. Private cars should be banned from stopping anywhere along the roadside, but the nature of a taxi's work dictates how it has to operate. "A taxi carries passengers. If someone waves you down and you don't stop, who are you in business for? This is the job," he said.

"Violations are avoidable — just don't pick anyone up," Chen Daoyuan added, in the same vein of protest.

The sudden spread of yellow lines and yellow signs has brought taxi drivers no end of unfair grief. They can no longer let passengers out wherever they like. Xie Yimin often has to drive farther before he dares open the door, but passengers don't understand. "When the meter's running and you keep going, it ticks up another yuan right away, and they won't let you."

He tried to explain, but it was useless; passengers laid into him in Shanghainese. "Explaining does nothing. They just argue with you from the back seat." Before driving a taxi, Xie Yimin had spent a few years as a construction crew boss in Shanghai. Chasing payment was a headache, but at least no one berated him. "I never imagined I'd end up driving a taxi. Driving a taxi — that's when you really get treated badly," he said.

The eating problem that dogs Lin Huiyi is Xie Yimin's top headache too. Xie Yimin usually manages only two meals a day. Taxi drivers keep no fixed hours; you drive as long as there are passengers, and between those two meals there is often a whole day and a whole night.

In the past, when he was hungry he could always find somewhere to eat. A few streets were even lined with "driver restaurants" — places like Guyang Road, Qingxi Road, Yongjia Road, Changde Road, and Chaling Road.

The streets where driver restaurants stood usually allowed parking along both sides; Guyang Road and Qingxi Road even posted the morning and evening hours when drivers could stop to eat. The restaurants served fried rice, noodles, wonton soup, and the like, all at an average of under 15 yuan.

But this year these streets were torn up, painted with yellow lines, or fitted with no-parking signs. Guyang Road was dug up for subway construction. Yellow lines went down both sides of Changde Road, so drivers now park on the nearby side street, Anyuan Road, which holds only a handful of cars; many have to stagger their arrival to find a spot.

"We used to be busy from around 10 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, then again from 5 in the evening until closing at 9," said Chen Mingye, the cashier at a restaurant called Nong Liang Noodle House on Lingling Road. "Now almost nobody comes. Once the yellow signs went up, our driver crowd dropped by a third."

Around 5:50 in the evening, the heart of the dinner rush, the counter of this driver restaurant drew only a trickle of customers, among them, now and then, a taxi driver in a dark work jacket. Chen Mingye had worked there for more than a decade and still remembered the days when a line of taxis filled the open space in front of the door.

The driver restaurant that once stood next door, shoulder to shoulder with this one, had been replaced by a newly opened Lianhua supermarket.

With far fewer places to eat, and dreading that a quick lunch might cost 200 yuan and three points, many taxi drivers now keep a portable rice cooker in the trunk. When they're hungry they pop it open and eat a few bites; the advantage is that they can pull away the moment an officer shows up, scattering like street vendors fleeing the city inspectors.

The Hongqiao taxi holding lot is, for now, the city's last semi-official gathering place for drivers. It works something like a school cafeteria, serving communal hot meals — though drivers say the food tastes like fast food, bland and forgettable. The lot is not only a canteen but also a legitimate pickup point. Drivers who enter automatically join a queue; outside the iron fence, passersby can hear a loudspeaker announce every minute, "Will fleet X-Y please proceed to the passenger pickup point." After one to two hours, a driver moves up to the Hongqiao pickup zone, and the wait gives him a window to eat.

The lot closes at 10 p.m., though.

Lu Zongchen doesn't like going to the Hongqiao lot. For one thing, he can't always land a passenger heading that way, and deadheading out there just to eat doesn't pay. Sometimes, after queuing for one to two hours, the next passenger only needs to go a kilometer or two — but you still have to take the fare. "However short the trip, you take it. You can't refuse," he said.

Near Pudong Airport there is a similar queuing and dining area, but when flights are sparse, drivers sometimes wait five hours for a single passenger. Once a driver joins the queue, there is no leaving partway through.

In the past, beyond Hongqiao and Pudong, Lu Zongchen had plenty of options: driver restaurants were scattered across the city, so wherever his passengers took him, he could find a nearby place to eat. Staggered stopping hours — say, 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. — also gave him enough time to pull over. Now eating has become one of Lu Zongchen's biggest headaches. He calls the new rules "one-size-cuts-all."

The wonton shop on Lingling Road is the "hidden gem" Lin Huiyi has found in the city center. On lucky days she can park there for a while; better still, a public restroom sits diagonally across the street. As yellow lines and no-parking signs have spread through the urban core, finding a spot that both allows parking and offers a restroom has grown harder and harder. To cut his restroom trips, Xie Yimin holds himself to one bottle of green tea a day. "I don't dare drink more. Nothing to be done," he said. During the morning and evening rush hours, drivers go into what they call a "no-water" period — however thirsty, they tough it out.

Xu Xing, four years on the job, can't even name a single public restroom in the city center. "In the city center I don't know where any restrooms are. I just can't find them." He won't take chances either. "What if a ticket lands while you're in the restroom? You never know."

Drivers often have no choice but to hold it and rush out to the suburbs, ignoring passengers who flag them on the street; they explain that they aren't always trying to brush passengers off. The restroom problem weighs even harder on women drivers like Lin Huiyi. "Using a restroom is the biggest headache for women drivers. Men have it much easier for a quick pee — some, when they have no choice and no shame, just go anywhere and drive off right away. How could a woman do that?" said Lin Huiyi.

Lin Huiyi and her husband are both taxi drivers. Each works 365 days a year, a pace they have kept for more than three years.

Chen Fang, chairman of the Shanghai Taxi Association and of Qiangshen Taxi (formerly Johnson Taxi), said in an interview this year that over the past decade Shanghai's average social wage had risen 125 percent, while taxi drivers' incomes had risen only 82 percent — and even that gain came from working longer hours. The statutory monthly working hours are 174; taxi drivers put in 274, a hundred more. By the hour, the citywide average wage is 37 yuan; taxi drivers earn only 25.

In 1991, when Lu Zongchen started driving, the job was known as "Shanghai's third profession," meaning taxi drivers ranked third in income among all the city's occupations. "You could make 5,000 yuan a month. Back then, 5,000 yuan could buy you several square meters of housing in Shanghai," Lu Zongchen recalled.

Now Lu Zongchen calls himself one of "the last old-timers" in Shanghai's taxi trade. He is 55, has worked in it for 25 years, and the only reason he is still holding on is "to reach 60 and collect my pension."

From 2017 to 2019, Qiangshen Taxi — Shanghai's largest taxi company — will see 2,400 drivers like Lu Zongchen reach retirement age, and a labor shortage could open up and widen. "A driver shortage isn't Qiangshen's problem alone — it's the whole industry's," said Chen Fang.

In fact, short of hands, the taxi trade — once open only to Shanghai residents — quietly opened its doors to people from other provinces after 2014.

In those years a flood of out-of-towners applied to taxi companies for operating licenses. Still, "opening the door" did not mean lowering the bar. Lin Huiyi had to go through a taxi company's referral to find a middleman, paying 10,000 yuan just to register.

On the screens in taxi company offices, a list of drivers' plate numbers, names, and household registrations scrolls all day, ten to a page. Drivers interviewed said they noticed that six or seven of every ten were often from out of province.

These people had paid a steep price to get into the trade, only to taste its early sweetness. "Back then you could easily pull in seven or eight thousand yuan a month," Xu Xing recalled of his first year, four years ago.

Now his monthly net income hovers around 5,000 yuan. He even tried trading his compact for a larger car — the small car's starting fare was 14 yuan by day and 19 at night, he reasoned, while the larger car would add 2 yuan to each. A few more trips a day might cover an extra meal, or 500 extra yuan a month. The result was nearly the same.

Many drivers handed back their cars this year, or chose not to renew their contracts. The lots at the Dazhong Yonghe Road branch and the Jinjiang Yanchang Road branch were packed solid with idle cars — more than 200 at each. Scrapped cars go straight to the used-car market; only cars still serviceable but unclaimed pile up here.

Qiangshen drivers interviewed said that this year the number of plates Qiangshen freed up from scrapped vehicles topped 1,000. Dazhong Transportation chairman Yang Guoping also said in an interview this year that Shanghai has been steadily losing taxi drivers, with roughly 5 to 10 percent of the city's taxis sitting idle on returned contracts.

Handing back the car looks like the simplest way out, but for some drivers it is a damned-if-you-do choice.

Taxi drivers usually get their cars from the companies one of two ways: buying or leasing. Buying takes a bigger upfront sum but means a lower monthly dispatch fee, easing the month-to-month pressure somewhat.

In 2014, Xie Yimin paid 210,000 yuan for his current car, pouring nearly all his savings into it and signing a contract for five years and eight months. He has done the math: hand the car back now and he'd be out 50,000 to 60,000 yuan. And "buying" the car does not mean owning it — it means "buying it under the company's management." The plate still belongs to the company, so Xie Yimin can't sell it to anyone; he can only return it.

He had assumed the gap between buying and leasing would be large, but his figures showed only twenty or thirty yuan a day. So even though the thought "I'm done with this" has crossed his mind countless times, he keeps grinding, because "as long as I keep at it I'm making something. At least I'm not losing money."

Drivers who return leased cars or whose contracts run out tend to leave Shanghai. Driver Xu Xing lives in Yangjia Lane Village, at the northern edge of Minhang District. The village has 12,000 people, nearly 10,000 of them migrants. It was once home to many out-of-town taxi drivers. This year, as the Shanghai government cracked down on Didi drivers, "of the people who used to live in my village, more than half have gone home by now," he said.

The rule that only drivers with Shanghai household registration and Shanghai plates could operate pushed many out-of-province drivers out. Together with Shanghai's rising cost of living, these forces have sped up the departure of migrant workers in no small way.

Yangjia Lane Village has changed along with the departures. In the past, whenever Xu Xing came and went, he would see "old people sitting by the road with children — it was like that all through the village." Young people worked in Shanghai by day while their parents stayed behind to mind the grandchildren. "This year, you basically don't see it anymore."

Xu Xing is 36, still young, but over four years of driving a taxi he has developed a herniated lumbar disc and prostatitis. He calls these the "occupational diseases" of taxi drivers.

"The driving has worn the body out," Xu Xing said. But he still has to keep driving, and he's in no hurry to fix the machine.

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