A visit to the van districts of Brooklyn and Queens finds an industry that is a routine part of life, particularly in minority neighborhoods. There are, in fact, virtually no white riders. The vans are a sort of open secret few have signs indicating their destination. Although they are not supposed to do so, vans shadow the bus routes, dropping or picking up riders at any point along the way. Music in this case reggae, though more commonly black pop played unobtrusively.
Some vans have de facto bouncers to deal with troublemakers.
Statistics detail the significant van presence that one can't help but notice on a visit to African-American, Hispanic, or Caribbean Queens or Brooklyn. By the end of 1990, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimated that the vans of those two boroughs had taken away 16 percent of its business in southeast Queens alone. Some 2,400 vans were said to be serving 20,000 riders a day a private mass transit system larger than all but a handful of public bus systems in the country. A report by the New York City Transit Authority, no less, found that riders prefer vans because they are faster, less costly, and more comfortable than TA buses. If the vans provide a service to the public, they serve, too, as a path to upward mobility for their owner-operators, immigrants from Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, Grenada, St. Kitts.