NYC Taxi Commissioner Chased From Vigil For Uber Driver's Suicide

NEW YORK — Several enraged taxi workers chased New York City's taxi commissioner away from a Sunday vigil mourning an Uber driver's recent suicide. Video captured at the Washington Heights gathering in honor of driver Fausto Luna shows activists shouting "Get out!" at Taxi and Limousine Commissioner Meera Joshi and as she heads toward a subway station.

Joshi and the agency she runs reportedly became the target of drivers' pointed ire following the death of Luna, whose suicide marked the seventh by a professional driver since last November.

"How many more? How many more?" one person can be heard shouting at Joshi in a video from the scene.

Luna jumped in front of an A train at the 175th Street-Fort Washington Avenue stop on Sept. 26, said Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

The Washington Heights resident was the first app-based driver to take his own life in recent months, according to the Taxi Workers Alliance, which organized Sunday's vigil. His death followed a spate of driver suicides in the months leading up to Mayor Bill de Blasio signing into law a yearlong freeze on most new for-hire vehicles like those used by Uber and Lyft.

"It’s now become a universal story — that from the low earnings and the saturation and the predatory lending, that the forces have combined to leave drivers with very little," Desai said Monday.

Uber said Luna was a highly rated longtime driver who had consistent earnings over time and owned his own car, which was paid for in full. But he had become depressed about growing debts leading up to his death, according to the New York Daily News.

"We are devastated by this news and our deepest sympathies go to Mr. Luna’s family and loved ones during this difficult time," Uber spokeswoman Alix Anfang said in a statement.

Desai said Joshi had told her she would be attending Sunday's vigil, which was held near the train station where Luna died. The drivers who heckled her represented just a portion of the roughly 50 attendees, Desai said.

TLC spokesman Allan Fromberg disputed the idea that Joshi was chased away. He and Joshi left the vigil after a group of people "with a very different agenda ... essentially hijacked it with some of the most hateful and divisive language I've ever heard," he said.

"When it became clear that their bullying tactics wouldn't allow for anyone to say or hear any constructive messages, we left so as not to allow this group to continue to detract from the unity that by all rights should have been at the center of the event," Fromberg said in an email. "Under no circumstances, however, does this in any way diminish our commitment to drivers, or dissuade us from the work we're doing to help them."

Desai called Joshi's attendance at the vigil a "really positive gesture." The drivers were expressing understandable anger at the TLC at an emotionally raw time for the industry, Desai said, but Uber and other big companies are also to blame for the difficulties drivers face.

"Do I agree with the general sense from the drivers that the workers were abandoned in these five years through this business model? Absolutely," Desai said. "I just don’t think it’s only the TLC that abandoned them."

(Lead image: The New York Taxi Workers Alliance held a vigil Sunday for Fausto Luna, an Uber driver who died by suicide last month. Photo courtesy of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance)