Experience the Big Apple through the Eyes of a Taxi Driver

By Linda Orlando

In the online world of personal blogs, it’s easy to get bored with reading the same old stories about college life, nightclub adventures, parenting challenges, and a wide variety of hobby pursuits. When you tire of the "same old, same old" blog rolls, you can hope into Melissa Plaut’s blog for a real glimpse of adventure. Plaut is a cab driver in New York City, home to over 40,000 taxi drivers. Less than 1% of those drivers are women, so Plaut’s blog offers a fairly unique perspective on a career that has been a fixture of Big Apple daily life for nearly a century.

Writing about her experiences and posting pictures of her various encounters with fares and situations in the city, Plaut brings humanity and emotion to a job millions of people in the city see as just a necessary evil. She describes the locker room where the drivers gather to await the beginning of shifts and describes her interactions with the other cabbies, almost all of them men. During the grueling 12-hour shifts and traffic snarls she endures, Plaut eats brings peanuts for snacking in the cab and stops for hot dogs for meals. By the end of a shift her fingernails are black from opening doors, loading luggage, and handling money all day.

Plaut grew up in suburban Pomona, New York, with parents who were both teachers. She attended the University of New Mexico, graduating in 1997 and moving to New York City. After working for several years as a writer and copy editor at an advertising agency, she was laid off about a year ago. She couldn’t reconcile herself to returning to office work, so she decided to stop agonizing over what she was going to do with her life. Instead, she got a job driving a cab. Although she hopes it isn’t going to be a lifelong job, she’s treating the experience as an adventure. Plaut spent about $400 going through the tedious licensing process, which includes a medical exam, three 8-hour classes of taxi school, an English proficiency exam, being fingerprinted, and passing a final test and receiving her license.

Driving a taxi isn’t the easiest job in the world, and Plaut considers it a means to an end, not a career move. One thing that is helping her to cope with the stresses of the job is being able to chronicle them in her blog, which she started in August. Reading about her adventures gives her site visitors—some of whom are nowhere near New York City—a chance to experience the Big Apple firsthand without ever going there. Her website gets nearly 1000 hits on some days, and even more now that her blog has been written about by the Associated Press and spotlighted on an ABC news program.

The sights, sounds, and people Plaut writes about bring the city to life in a way that sometimes is more vivid than actually being there. Passengers’ stories are diverse and colorful, such as the young girl traveling to the hospital because she had a sea urchin stuck in her foot, which she had picked up while vacationing in Puerto Rico. Or the young suburban couple who wanted to smoke a joint in the cab while they were "waiting for the mushrooms to kick in." And just after the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the World Series, a couple got in her cab with the woman obviously in distress. The woman was sobbing, saying "Oh my God…I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it." Concerned, Plaut asked her if everything was okay, and the woman tearfully replied, "Oh yes! We’re Red Sox fans!"

Plaut says she has never been really frightened by a passenger, but traffic accidents do scare her. Once her driver’s side mirror was whacked by a passing city bus, and once she saw another cab get hit by an 18-wheeler. Last month one of her posts detailed a high-speed car chase she "unwittingly drove into" while bringing a tourist into the city from the airport. "When my heart finally started beating again," her post says, "I turned to my passenger and said, ‘Welcome to new York!’"