“I’m a very talkative person, and I love the way the city moves. That’s why I’ve been driving a cab since the ’90s,” Balkar Singh told me as we sat in a circle of chairs with other cab drivers on the west corner of City Hall Park, just past 11 PM this past Sunday.

A line of yellow cabs were keeping the lights on in Civic Center, as they’ve done for decades in this city. That night, instead of vehicles for transport, the cabs were symbols of protest, as drivers prepared to pass the first night of a 24/7 picket.

For years, after profiting from a speculative bubble in medallion values, New York City has refused to help struggling taxicab drivers, permitting banks and hedge funds to lock them into predatory loans while also allowing unregulated e-hail services to flood the streets. Drivers who had to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase taxi medallions now face insurmountable debts, and the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed many of them into bankruptcy.