Uber Driver 'Bathroom Crisis' Has Turned JFK Parking Lot Into Wasteland Of Pee Bottles

JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, NY — The hot, desolate "cell phone lot" at JFK Airport, where drivers for ride-share services like Uber, Lyft, Juno and Via wait their turn to pick people up from the airport, has been transformed into a "grim" wasteland of bottles filled with the drivers' pee, according to the Independent Drivers Guild, a quasi-union representing more than 50,000 ride-share drivers in NYC.

And in one particularly disgusting corner of the parking lot, drivers say they've been forced to turn a patch of foliage into their own oversized litter box.

Want more local news? Sign up here to receive Patch's free morning newsletters and real-time alerts for your NYC neighborhood.

"Half-filled bottles of questionable origin and odor litter the cell phone lot," Guild officials said Tuesday, "where the only place to go to the bathroom currently is a section of the parking lot where there are a few anemic bushes."

Accordingly, the group has declared an official "JFK Bathroom Crisis" — the latest move in what organizers say has been a six-month campaign to convince the Port Authority of New York and Jersey, which runs the airport, to install some sort of bathroom facility in the lot.

A Port Authority spokesperson said in a statement sent to Patch, however, that ride-share drivers have access to bathrooms at the nearby "central taxi hold" parking lot (where yellow cab drivers wait their turn), but that they avoid leaving their own lot because they're "concerned about losing their place in line."

Still she said, "Uber and the Port Authority are seeking to install portable toilets in the limo lot and cell phone lot at JFK for the drivers’ convenience."

An online petition targeting the Port Authority had collected nearly 2,000 signatures by late Tuesday afternoon.

"The choice between bottle or bush is not a choice at all," ride-share driver Gwen Fairleysmith said in a statement issued by the Independent Drivers Guild.

Nine out of 10 ride-share drivers in NYC are immigrants, according to the Guild. So the fact that the Port Authority has been denying drivers a place to respectfully relieve themselves while they wait for riders at the airport, organizers argue, is effectively racist.

Here's how Ryan Price, the group's executive director, sees it:

“Travelers, taxi drivers, and even pets have access to a restroom at JFK, but ride-hail drivers endure grueling waits in a hot satellite lot where there is no dignified place to use the restroom. The state and the port authority have stripped for-hire vehicle workers of the basic right of a place to use the bathroom because they’re primarily immigrants, so they think they can get away with it. If these workers were white and from the United States, this would never happen."

If nothing else, Price said, the increasingly smelly situation at JFK's cell phone lot is a "huge public health issue" in need of immediate intervention.

Any readers out there have any anecdotes or images from this sewer of a parking lot allegedly stinking up JFK? We'd love to hear from you: simone.wilson@patch.com.

This story has been updated. Lead photo by Spencer Platt/Getty News Images