Ask a NYC driver about retirement and you will usually get one of three answers: a shrug, a joke, or a plan that consists entirely of "I'll drive until I can't." Across yellow cabs, green cabs, black cars, livery, app rideshare, and delivery, New York licenses one of the largest professional driving workforces on Earth — and almost none of it has access to the thing nearly every payroll job in America takes for granted: a retirement plan attached to the work.

This is not a savings-discipline problem

The standard advice — "just open an IRA" — misunderstands how driving income works:

  • Income is fragmented. A driver may earn across two or three apps plus a base, in amounts that change weekly. There is no payroll department, no HR portal, no automatic deduction.
  • Everything is manual. The entire burden — choosing a provider, setting up transfers, adjusting for slow weeks — falls on someone working 60-hour weeks in a second or third language.
  • The system was built for someone else. America's retirement infrastructure assumes a single employer, a steady W-2, and decades at one company. Most drivers have none of the three.

When a system fails 80% of the people in an industry, the problem is the system's design, not the people's discipline.

The industry has solved harder problems than this

New York's driver economy already runs on small per-trip amounts collected automatically:

  • The Black Car Fund takes a small passenger surcharge and turns it into workers' compensation for black car and FHV drivers — portable across bases, automatic, no paperwork per trip.
  • The TLC minimum pay standard engineered a pay floor into every app trip.
  • Congestion pricing turns a few dollars per trip into billions for transit.

The mechanism is proven. Nobody has pointed it at retirement. That is the entire premise of NY-DIGNITY: a portable, per-trip retirement contribution — independent of any single app or employer, professionally managed, following the driver across platforms and years.

Run your own numbers

Our scenario calculator lets you test the idea yourself: pick a per-trip amount, your trips per day, your years of driving, and a growth assumption — and see what a career of small automatic contributions could become. The results surprise almost everyone who tries it.

What we are asking for right now

NY-DIGNITY is a proposal in development — we say so plainly on every page. The current phase is about building three things: the research (the framework documents on our research page), the public record (your signatures), and the coalition (drivers, policy experts, attorneys, and industry partners). None of that requires you to trust anyone with a dollar of savings. It requires one minute and your name.

Drivers built New York — trip by trip, year after year. The retirement gap is not inevitable. It is unfinished infrastructure. Infrastructure gets built when enough people demand it.