Happiness in Full Gear: An Interview with Toronto’s Cheeriest Ride-Share Driver
When you book a cab, all you expect is for it to take you from point A to point B.
But when you book a ride on Forest Atkinson’s van, you get a whole new world on four wheels.
Forest Atkinson decorates her Festive Van Toronto as per the season. Her wheelchair-accessible van is always brimming with stickers, decorations, stuffed animals, candy and so much more according to a theme be it St. Paddy’s Day, Easter, Halloween, or Christmas.
Forest’s kind-heartedness changes gears in many other ways. Through a freecycling group called Stooping Toronto and on her own drives, Forest offers to help people pick up curbside finds that are too big to be transported via public transit or a smaller car. As per her availability, she also helps people with small moves. For occasions like Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day, she promotes small businesses and breweries through giveaways.
Kindness has always been a running theme in Forest’s life, from being Ottawa’s Turtle Lady to Toronto’s Happiest Uber Driver.
The brand that Forest has built around her van has been a personal investment of time, money, and resources as she decorates her van, organizes giveaways, and helps people move.
Forest’s answers below remind us that our return of investment can simply be making someone else happy.
What’s your favourite part of driving your festive van?
My favourite part about driving this amazing decorated van is surprising all of my passengers. When I’m logged onto the Uber app and picking up unsuspecting passengers, they don’t know that their Uber driver is going to have a whole van full of stuffed animals, lights, and stickers! It’s very exciting to explain to them what my van is all about and how I got started.
I love that this van always creates conversation and excitement. It truly is a perfect icebreaker for me and my passengers!
Every theme is amazing but in the summertime, I have stickers of flags of every country in my car. I have 197 flags, one for every country in the world. So when a passenger gets into my van, they can find their country and it creates some amazing conversation!
I know more about geography and the world being an Uber driver here in Toronto than I ever did living in Ottawa. It’s so diverse and multicultural here and I’m absolutely in love with it!
I also truly love that I can express myself in a sort of artistic way, not everybody else can do that with their job. I love that I can constantly think of the upcoming project because I continue to do themes throughout the year and my decorated van.
What’s something that people seem to misunderstand about what you do?
I’ve never really had much misunderstanding towards what I do. The only real big misunderstanding is that people think that I do Uber on the side and my main job is making this into a party van.
Although I would love to market this as a party van, there are really only three seats so I can’t really be marketed for large quantities. Also I’ve learned in my business that it is difficult to organize things like that, so honestly opening up the app and just doing fare after fare after fare makes me more money than being a “party van”.
Not to say that I would not organize picking somebody up with their friends, I honestly do appreciate the element of surprise, but doing that exclusively can’t be my main source of income.
Where do you get your inspiration from, for your giveaway promotions and Instagram videos?
I get my inspiration from driving around the city of Toronto! Driving around every day and having time to think in between picking up passengers allows me to have constant “shower thoughts” throughout the day, while having a view of the city and perhaps getting inspiration from it.
Passengers also give me ideas as well, when I’m talking to them and telling them about what I’m thinking about doing for my next project. They can add onto it just through conversation.
Honestly, I thought that I would be a personal support worker [Forest’s previous job] for much longer in my life. But with the pandemic I just got very tired, tired of that job and tired of being in Ottawa. I just wanted to be with my boyfriend in Toronto.
This is how I began decorating this van: I moved to Toronto from Ottawa in October 2020 and started leasing this wheelchair accessible vehicle from Uber. It was right before the lockdown of Christmas 2020, the first Covid Christmas, and I had simply thought to myself, “I have so many windows in here, I should get Christmas stickers”
And with that getting a positive reaction, I got lights, then garlands, then stuffed animals and then finally a 4-foot decorated Christmas tree with its own lights! And then I made it to CTV News!
So you see, the inspiration kind of came from the Covid boredom we all dealt with throughout the pandemic. The pandemic did give us time to try and do projects that we wouldn’t normally do.
I didn’t think that I would ever be a “Decorated Uber driver” But I’m very happy that I am! And I suppose because I took this job as an “in between” job while I moved to Toronto. I never took it too seriously and always wanted to have fun with it and in turn made sure that my passengers had a lot of fun as well!
My giveaways started because I started to have quite a number of followers on Instagram and it was a lot of fun to always stay connected with passengers who want to follow my van on its adventures.
Normally when you call a cab, you have a great conversation with the driver, then you leave the car. That’s the end of it. But because I made an Instagram account for my van, if somebody needed something like moving an item or if they knew somebody who actually needs to be transported in a wheelchair accessible van, I could be there for them, which is great!
With so many followers and such a fun niche Instagram page, I decided to do more with it! And that was giving back to my community, so all my passengers that I met I thought it was amazing because they too have ‘pandemic projects’ such as making their own earrings or candles or doing resin pieces.
When I started the giveaways for the 12 days of Christmas [in 2021], I was trying to highlight local businesses. It was fun and it gave my boyfriend and I a nice project that we could do together while deepening the connection to my passengers and followers!
You make personal investments of time and money into decorating your van and covering some trips, how do you always put people before profit when you’ve got bills to pay?
That’s a good question! I try not to spend too much money on the decorations but sometimes it happens that I spend more than I think I’m going to, for sure. The only way I can justify this is as I mentioned before—this is not a forever job. I really truly want to have fun with it as much as I can, while I can.
If I put a limit on what I do and how much I spend I wouldn’t stick out there, I wouldn’t have the news stories that I have today. I know that someday, I’ll move on to another job within transit and it will be fun to look back at the fun I had with Festive Van Toronto!
I have spent so much money to stick out, make a niche for myself and that’s been important as an Uber driver, especially with being a wheelchair accessible van driver. I hope that putting myself out there will inspire others to drive vehicles like this on the Uber app.
Also, if I do need to make more money to make ends meet, I can always stay out later and collect fares from the hours of 2 to 4 AM on weekends when the price surges. That’s the earning potential with ride sharing apps. If you need to make money, you can find ways to do it.
Thank you Forest for all that you do!
As entrepreneurs, we are no strangers to building brands. But we sometimes let the bottom line dictate our goodwill. I personally believe that however well you run your business, it amounts to nothing if your heart's in it for revenue. Entrepreneurship is so much more than about profit, it’s about people.
I’m a big believer in putting humans first. And after all, that’s why our brands and businesses exist, doesn’t it? You probably started your business to fulfill a human need or bring joy to people. Everything we do is for humans—the ones we love, and the ones we meet along the way.
Forest’s brand reminds us of all this and more, follow her on Instagram to see why she really is Toronto’s happiest Uber driver!
