Driven to Insanity

Despite the deep-seated economic forces at play, the cab union has so far been focusing on fairly small stuff. When I spoke to Donna Blythe-Shaw, the union organizer, one of the first things she complained about was the Hackney mandate that cabbies wear collared shirts. Then it was Hackney’s unquestionably silly insistence that the inside of each taxi’s trunk be painted white, and the rule requiring drivers to get a new car after six years. Those are all superficial, though. Drivers wouldn’t necessarily consider the collar rule harassment, nor object so strenuously to the trunk-color nonsense, if they were making a decent living. And if the medallion system were somehow made more equitable, buying a new car every six years wouldn’t be as financially crippling.

But even if the drivers succeeded in eliminating some of the smaller annoyances they endure, there would still need to be a quid pro quo so that it’s not the customer that gets soaked, as per Massachusetts custom. Hackney licensing chief Mark Cohen suggested that, in the short term, pushing owners and owner-operators to buy more hybrids to save gas, and use GPS and other technologies that cut cabs’ response times—and potentially add a few more fares a day for the drivers—might be a start. While we’re at it, there’s a rule in New York City that requires owners to buy cabs stretched 7 inches, to allow for more legroom. Maybe we can phase out our current fleet of mobile veal cages and implement something similar here.

In exchange, we could look into programs like those in San Francisco and New York that help cabbies get access to decent healthcare, which could improve their quality of life and build up the kind of good faith that could be tapped while negotiating solutions to the thornier economic problems. But no one’s really pushing anything like that. Instead we get the proposed riders’ bill of rights, which does nothing but punish drivers for being poorly trained, and a drivers’ bill of rights that is equally useless—because, frankly, a sticker telling drunks not to spit at the driver isn’t going to stop them from spitting at the driver. (Surely Bostonians have a better understanding of the nature of drunken savagery than that.) And you can’t do what the union wants and hike the fares to keep up with rising gas prices—as they did with a 50-cent surcharge in 2005—because that will only punish the rider without improving service (see: the MBTA).

Cohen acknowledged that the medallion issue is at the real core of all this discontent, but also said his department hasn’t figured out what to do about it. He did point out, however, that in the past year or so Hackney drove down the number of leased medallions by cracking down on abuses by owners—like overcharging lessees, or selling a medallion while a lease is still active without making restitution—which would seem a positive step, even if it was a long time coming. He even said he’d be willing to back the cabbies in some of their disputes with Massport, if they’d only stop throwing muck at him.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric is just getting hotter—which is rather ominous, considering the recent cab strikes in New York and Washington. Blythe-Shaw said of Cohen, “I heard that he referred to me as his toothache. I would have preferred an abscess, quite frankly.” Cohen responded that saying such a thing is “sad,” adding, “There’s more to it than the working man versus the evil empire.” When you start hearing exchanges like that, it makes you hope that the T has enough Silver Line buses and Blue Line cars to service the airport for a few days. Possibly in the very near future.