From the Chicago Dispatcher
June 2009

By George Lutfallah

Survey Location

You conducted your survey “predominantly at the taxi staging area of O'Hare International Airport.” This fact alone is troublesome. Your report stated, “As a largely single site survey, the sample responses can better approximate the actual assessment of the larger population than questionnaires spread across multiple groups and locations.”

I disagree. In fact, this sounds absurd to me. Are you actually arguing that having a less representative sample of taxi drivers is a better way of approximating driver income than a more representative sample?

There are many problems with surveying at O'Hare. First, I would argue that there is a disproportionate number of inexperienced drivers who predominantly post at O'Hare. A lot of drivers just starting out will post at O'Hare where there's a relatively safe bet that they'll get a decent fare. Also inexperienced drivers who don't know how to get around Chicago that well will post up at O'Hare because it's a lot easier to always start off from the same origin point. For example, a new driver can more easily figure out how to get to Ohio and Michigan from O'Hare than he or she could coming from, say, Berteau and Bernard. Also, new drivers don't always know where they can go to get fares so O'Hare is a better alternative to driving around aimlessly. Thus inexperienced drivers gravitate to O'Hare.

I noticed on Chart 1.5 it appears that more than a third of your respondents had been driving less than about three and half years. It would be interesting to know if that's representative of the entire population of Chicago taxi drivers. There is a high attrition rate in this industry, which might make that true. But it also might be true that as drivers gain experience, they realize that they can make more money working the neighborhoods than they can by posting up at O'Hare which is often overcrowded with cabs. More than 11 percent of your respondents began driving in 2007. The same was true in 2006. However, notice the relatively large drop in 2005 where fewer than seven percent of your respondents began driving. How much of that is indicative of the attrition rate in this industry versus the experience fledgling drivers gain after a couple of years who decide to leave the O'Hare nest?