Inside the Dollar Van Wars

For nearly four decades, commuter vans have served New Yorkers who live far from the subway. The fares are low. The music is loud. And the competition is cutthroat.

By Photographs by

June 8, 2018

The photographer Edu Bayer first noticed them on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Unmarked vans with tinted windows that slowed down and honked their horns. They were dollar vans — or commuter vans, as they’re officially known — fishing for customers.

“It was surprising to me,” said Mr. Bayer, who is originally from Barcelona, “because I have seen similar transportation networks in Latin America, Asia, maybe in Africa — buses where you sit and wait until it’s full.”

The first dollar vans are thought to have appeared in New York around 1980, when drivers offered rides to strangers for $1 during a transit strike. These days, vans pick up as many as 100,000 riders a day, according to industry advocates: Caribbean immigrants ferry people through so-called subway deserts in Brooklyn and eastern Queens; Chinese immigrants shuttle people among the city’s three Chinatowns.

While gentrification has transformed much of New York City, the vans represent a vestige of the city’s past and the enduring energy of its immigrants. “This is a network made by the working class for the working class,” said Mr. Bayer. “It has to do with the entrepreneurial spirit of the city.”

For this series, he rode the city’s major commuter van routes, which were mapped by Aaron Reiss for The New Yorker in 2014, spending time with some of the industry’s hundreds of licensed drivers and dispatchers, and catching glimpses of their competition: unlicensed rogue drivers, who may outnumber them.

Since the 1990s, van owners have been allowed to apply for permits from the city, but the stringent licensing requirements and the high cost of insurance have led many of them to choose to stay illegal.

Brooklyn