Sunday, May 01, 2016
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Tuesday, March 01, 2016
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Man pronounced dead on scene after hit by taxi on Princess Street: Kingston Police
Man pronounced dead on scene after hit by taxi on Princess Street: Kingston Police
Kingston Heritage
By Cris Vilela
Kingston Police have confirmed that a man was pronounced dead on the scene after he was hit by an Amey's taxi in the early morning of Sunday, Feb. 28.
The collision occurred on Princess Street near Shopper's Drug Mart shortly after 1 a.m. The dark grey Prius was driving westbound when the collision occurred. Kingston Police, Kingston Fire and Frontenac Paramedics responded within minutes but the victim was pronounced deceased at the scene. Princess Street was closed for several hours, from Sir John A MacDonald Blvd to Bath Road, following the collision.
The taxi driver appeared unharmed. He was not charged at the scene, and was released from custody after providing a police statement. In a written statement, the taxi driver indicated that the victim was laying across the roadway and, because it was night time and the victim was wearing dark clothing, he was unable to stop before it was too late. It's unknown whether the victim had a medical condition that rendered him unconscious crossing the road, whether he fell and knocked himself unconscious, or how he ultimately came to find himself lying on the roadway prior to the collision. Only an autopsy will determine the cause of death.
Kingston Police confirmed that neither speed nor alcohol were a factor in the collision.
Level 4 Traffic Reconstructionists were called to the scene for investigation of the collision, and west bound Princess Street remained closed until just after 10 a.m. Sunday morning.
Police have identified the victim as Robert Shawn Rouleau, 42. Rouleau was a resident of Kingston and a highly respected local tattoo artist.
The investigating officer, Cst. Greg Smith of the Traffic Safety Unit, is asking for any witnesses who either saw the collision or observed a male pedestrian dressed in dark clothing prior to the incident to contact him at 613-549-4660 ext. 6277 or via email at gsmith@kpf.ca. While police should be canvassing the area, local businesses in that vicinity with exterior-facing video surveillance cameras are asked to check their footage to determine if anything of value can be observed.
Anonymous tips can be made to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS) or on the website at www.tipsubmit.com. Tipsters are eligible for a cash reward of up to $2,000. Tips can also be left through the Kingston Police MyPD app that can be downloaded at www.kpf.ca, by private message to the Kingston Police Facebook Page, or via a Direct Message to the official Twitter account.
Kingston Heritage
By Cris Vilela
Kingston Police have confirmed that a man was pronounced dead on the scene after he was hit by an Amey's taxi in the early morning of Sunday, Feb. 28.
The collision occurred on Princess Street near Shopper's Drug Mart shortly after 1 a.m. The dark grey Prius was driving westbound when the collision occurred. Kingston Police, Kingston Fire and Frontenac Paramedics responded within minutes but the victim was pronounced deceased at the scene. Princess Street was closed for several hours, from Sir John A MacDonald Blvd to Bath Road, following the collision.
The taxi driver appeared unharmed. He was not charged at the scene, and was released from custody after providing a police statement. In a written statement, the taxi driver indicated that the victim was laying across the roadway and, because it was night time and the victim was wearing dark clothing, he was unable to stop before it was too late. It's unknown whether the victim had a medical condition that rendered him unconscious crossing the road, whether he fell and knocked himself unconscious, or how he ultimately came to find himself lying on the roadway prior to the collision. Only an autopsy will determine the cause of death.
Kingston Police confirmed that neither speed nor alcohol were a factor in the collision.
Level 4 Traffic Reconstructionists were called to the scene for investigation of the collision, and west bound Princess Street remained closed until just after 10 a.m. Sunday morning.
Police have identified the victim as Robert Shawn Rouleau, 42. Rouleau was a resident of Kingston and a highly respected local tattoo artist.
The investigating officer, Cst. Greg Smith of the Traffic Safety Unit, is asking for any witnesses who either saw the collision or observed a male pedestrian dressed in dark clothing prior to the incident to contact him at 613-549-4660 ext. 6277 or via email at gsmith@kpf.ca. While police should be canvassing the area, local businesses in that vicinity with exterior-facing video surveillance cameras are asked to check their footage to determine if anything of value can be observed.
Anonymous tips can be made to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS) or on the website at www.tipsubmit.com. Tipsters are eligible for a cash reward of up to $2,000. Tips can also be left through the Kingston Police MyPD app that can be downloaded at www.kpf.ca, by private message to the Kingston Police Facebook Page, or via a Direct Message to the official Twitter account.
Uber Alberta threatens to shut down Mar. 1
Source: Canadian Press, 28 February 2016
EDMONTON — The manager for Uber in Alberta says the ride-sharing app will cease operating in the province on Tuesday unless the provincial government makes insurance and licensing changes.
Ramit Kar told a demonstration of about 150 Uber supporters on the steps of the Alberta legislature on Saturday that the government must allow flexibility on requirements that drivers have commercial licences.
He says the province must also approve a ride-sharing insurance product that Uber has obtained from a private insurer.
Uber wants the changes in order to satisfy requirements passed by Edmonton Council that take effect on March 1.
Under the Edmonton bylaw, Uber drivers must carry provincially approved insurance, have an annual vehicle inspection and agree to a criminal record check.
Kar says without action by the province by Tuesday, thousands of people will be affected.
"We hope that the voice this group and the many voices they represent are heard by the province and that we see action soon," Kar told cheering supporters, many of whom were Uber drivers.
"We hope to continue to see you on the road."
A spokesperson for Alberta Transportation Minister Brian Mason said in an emailed statement on Saturday that the government is dealing with several issues, including licensing and insurance, and wants to address all the issues at once rather than in a piecemeal fashion.
"We are committed to finding an appropriate solution allowing ride share companies to operate in a fair manner, while also protecting drivers, passengers, and other road users," Aileen Machell said.
Calgary city council has also passed a ride-sharing bylaw which could take effect in April, but officials with Uber have said those rules are too strict.
Calgary's bylaw requires ride-sharing drivers to have a Class 4 driver's licence — a commercial licence. It also requires an annual $220 operating licence from the city, regular inspections, proof of eligibility to work in Canada and a police background check.
Several Uber drivers addressed the rally in Edmonton, saying the service gives them jobs and provides users with safe rides.
But Isack Isack, an Edmonton taxi driver who observed the rally and challenged Kar when he took media questions, said a commercial license is important for anyone carrying passengers for money. Medical requirements for drivers, he noted, are more stringent with a commercial licence.
"They're carrying other people," Isack said to Kar.
Kar said Uber drivers are driving their personal cars, and that it's no different than carpooling. He said Uber has proposed a number of options to the province for getting around the requirements of a commercial licence.
"A Corolla is a Corollla is a Corolla no matter which way you look at it," Kar said.
EDMONTON — The manager for Uber in Alberta says the ride-sharing app will cease operating in the province on Tuesday unless the provincial government makes insurance and licensing changes.
Ramit Kar told a demonstration of about 150 Uber supporters on the steps of the Alberta legislature on Saturday that the government must allow flexibility on requirements that drivers have commercial licences.
He says the province must also approve a ride-sharing insurance product that Uber has obtained from a private insurer.
Uber wants the changes in order to satisfy requirements passed by Edmonton Council that take effect on March 1.
Under the Edmonton bylaw, Uber drivers must carry provincially approved insurance, have an annual vehicle inspection and agree to a criminal record check.
Kar says without action by the province by Tuesday, thousands of people will be affected.
"We hope that the voice this group and the many voices they represent are heard by the province and that we see action soon," Kar told cheering supporters, many of whom were Uber drivers.
"We hope to continue to see you on the road."
A spokesperson for Alberta Transportation Minister Brian Mason said in an emailed statement on Saturday that the government is dealing with several issues, including licensing and insurance, and wants to address all the issues at once rather than in a piecemeal fashion.
"We are committed to finding an appropriate solution allowing ride share companies to operate in a fair manner, while also protecting drivers, passengers, and other road users," Aileen Machell said.
Calgary city council has also passed a ride-sharing bylaw which could take effect in April, but officials with Uber have said those rules are too strict.
Calgary's bylaw requires ride-sharing drivers to have a Class 4 driver's licence — a commercial licence. It also requires an annual $220 operating licence from the city, regular inspections, proof of eligibility to work in Canada and a police background check.
Several Uber drivers addressed the rally in Edmonton, saying the service gives them jobs and provides users with safe rides.
But Isack Isack, an Edmonton taxi driver who observed the rally and challenged Kar when he took media questions, said a commercial license is important for anyone carrying passengers for money. Medical requirements for drivers, he noted, are more stringent with a commercial licence.
"They're carrying other people," Isack said to Kar.
Kar said Uber drivers are driving their personal cars, and that it's no different than carpooling. He said Uber has proposed a number of options to the province for getting around the requirements of a commercial licence.
"A Corolla is a Corollla is a Corolla no matter which way you look at it," Kar said.
Monday, February 01, 2016
From thewalrus.ca - Uber v. Taxi
In the February 2016 issue of "News from Behind the Wheel," Roy referenced an article which was recently published on thewalrus.ca about the Uber issue.
Here is a link to the article: https://thewalrus.ca/uber-v-taxi/
Uber v. Taxi
One must die for the other to live
Cities by Jonathan Kay
September 2015 • 5,072 words
“It’s a good idea to keep a clean car and dress well,” the UberX instructional video explains. “Strong smells of any kind can make riders uncomfortable.” No doubt that’s true—which is why I kept putting off my on-the-road research for this piece: I’m a middle-aged drive-through aficionado with three messy children. My nine-year-old hatchback smells exactly as you’d expect.
I cleaned and detailed my car before activating my UberPartner smartphone app. I also went to the Shell station to buy a coconut-scented evergreen air freshener (and an extra-strength “black ice” specimen, to keep it company). Aromatic cardboard dangling from my rear-view mirror didn’t completely overpower the lingering scent of Burger King and long-lost Cheerios, but my car smelled better than it had since the Bush administration.
Like air fresheners, Uber services come in different flavours: “black” (limousines and town cars), “taxi” (conventional city-licensed cabs), “select” (stylish, sleek, and meant to impress), and UberX. The last one is the cheapest and by far the most popular, with fares as low as half that of traditional taxis. Any ordinary schlub with a licence, basic insurance, a decent car, and a clean criminal record can work for UberX. (The company also is rolling out a new service, UberPool, which will allow drivers to chauffeur two separate fares to nearby destinations.)
Drivers with UberX aren’t required to present themselves for formal interviews or even meet anyone from company headquarters. The registration process is online, earnings are automatically deposited, and instructions from HQ take the form of peppy, morale-boosting text blasts: “Thousands need a ride to the baseball game right now!” or “Tonight is the busiest night of the week!” My entire training regime consisted of watching a sixteen-minute web video.
Uber launched in 2012 and has since spread to sixty countries and more than 300 cities, including Edmonton, Quebec City, and Ottawa. In Toronto—its biggest Canadian market—the company claims it will create 15,000 flexible, self-directed, high-quality jobs; reduce drunk driving; and take half a million cars off the city’s congested roads. Its critics argue the company is a bald-faced scam that undercuts the traditional taxi system. A recent issue of Taxinews, a trade magazine, printed a column that decried Uber as a “corporate pariah,” a “malignant tumour,” and a “giant octopus” that has “spread its tentacles globally.” Vancouver and Calgary officials have shut down the ride-sharing service altogether; in other cities, including Montreal and Paris, it sits in a sort of limbo, with officials and drivers alike confused about Uber’s legal status.
When I finally got behind the UberX wheel, I felt less like a giant octopus and more like a social reject in my own car. Some drivers have a knack for chit-chat. But not me: Many of my rides went from start to finish in complete silence, with iPhone addicts not once making eye contact. Some passengers never bothered to remove their earphones—though none of that kept me from trying to create chemistry.
“Watching the hockey playoffs? ” I asked one of my first passengers, a young woman dressed in business attire, as we inched into downtown traffic. “I was pulling for Montreal—that’s my hometown—but you’ve got to hand it to Tampa Bay. They just wanted it more.”
She hummed in a way that seemed half-interested, so I pressed on by segueing smoothly into a discussion of local construction delays. When I started up with a monologue about the Pan Am Games, she interrupted: “Sorry, I gotta focus.” Moments later we stopped at a red light, and in the relative quiet I heard familiar pops and buzzes. She was playing Candy Crush.
Ten conversation-free minutes later, I dropped her off at a high-rise condo building, and she offered a brief, polite smile on her way out. Uber’s automated payment system makes the passing of paper or plastic between passenger and driver unnecessary, and there’s no tipping involved. So my most meaningful interaction with the woman—with all my passengers, really—took place after we’d parted ways. That’s when the two of us rated each other on a scale of one-to-five stars.
At restaurants and hotels, this sort of after-the-fact evaluation is a discretionary afterthought. But Uber’s rating system lies at the heart of its business model. Passengers are urged to evaluate every trip: if a driver’s rating falls below the local standard (as the company unilaterally defines it), he or she can be expelled from the network. The same applies in reverse: drivers are urged to rate every passenger. I found this feature handy after a foul-mouthed couple got into my car one Monday evening and proceeded to drop two or three F-bombs per city block. Two f’ing stars for you, my dears.
Even if cities around the world shut down Uber through regulation and courtroom manoeuvring, there’s no question that many of its ride-sharing innovations will remain part of the landscape. The five-star rating system, in particular, presents a ruthlessly efficient solution to one of the fundamental problems that has long plagued the taxi industry, indeed retail in general—consumers’ difficulty in appraising publicly the integrity and competence of streetside service providers who populate the nooks and crannies of the economy. For almost two centuries, city cabs were big rolling question marks. Until getting in one, you had no idea whether your driver would subject you to speeding, rip-off routing, cellphone jabber, the reek of cigarettes and yesterday’s lunch. Customers don’t want to go back to that, and traditional taxi brokerages know it. Even as they fight Uber, they’re designing their own smartphone apps with Uber-like features.
Uber may be a tech-darling upstart, but the taxi industry is three decades older than Canada itself. In 1837, Thornton Blackburn, a runaway slave from Kentucky, built Toronto’s first taxi, a wooden red and yellow box drawn by a single horse. The city was a tiny place then, but Blackburn found plenty of business along the docks of Lake Ontario. Business grew, and in 1843 city councillors drafted a comprehensive law “to license and regulate the duties and charges on coaches, carriages, cabs, carts, and other vehicles.”
Many early provisions seem quaint now: Cabs required “two well-lighted lamps” after dark, “unless it be moonlight.” They were prohibited from carrying cargo on Sundays. A driver could not “wantonly snap or flourish his whip.” The basic legislative thrust, however, remains surprisingly recognizable. Like its modern equivalent, the 1843 law stipulated the rates that drivers could charge customers and listed the places where taxis could wait for fares—the direct equivalent of today’s taxi stand. (On Church Street, for instance, they could wait only on the east side, “with the horses’ heads towards King Street.”) Drivers had to be eighteen or older, and they had to register their taxis with the city (requirements that remain in place today). And “a suitable and proper” municipal employee, the forerunner of licensing and standards officers, enforced the rules. The pattern was similar elsewhere, including Montreal, which began regulating fares in the 1850s, and Winnipeg, which enacted its first taxi bylaw in 1881.
Change swept the trade in the late nineteenth century when telephones became, in effect, the original ride-sharing app. In the late 1870s, for example, a Winnipeg man named Dave Storey set up a five-cab stand at the corner of Portage and Main, and stayed connected with his customers through direct lines to the police station, the Queen’s Hotel, and the tony Manitoba Club. Three decades later, automobiles began pushing horse-drawn cabs off the roads. This transformation also had Uber-esque overtones: young drivers seemed better situated to adapt to the new technology than older veterans. In London, the situation was so bad that the Daily Mail started a relief fund in 1909 for out-of-work cabbies.
A primitive version of UberX avant la lettre also emerged. Car owners without taxi licences would drive popular routes and charge small fees to customers who flagged them down; in the 1930s, commuters could travel between downtown Vancouver and the West End for as little as three cents. As with today’s ride-sharing apps, these so-called jitneys (the word means nickel) bypassed regulators and tapped directly into curbside demand.
Yet even in their heyday, such ad hoc services could not upend the regulated model—in large part because taxi brokerages coalesced into vigilant oligopolies. As early as 1926, De Luxe Taxicabs in Toronto stitched together a fleet of 175 vehicles and seventy-five call stations. In Montreal, seven brokerages teamed up in 1922 to share a single switchboard, leading to the creation of the powerful Diamond Taxicab Association.
“The regulatory weapons these groups used to suppress the cut-rate cab and thus to end the taxi wars of the 1930s varied remarkably little from city to city,” Donald F. Davis wrote in Urban History Review. “Those who wished to constrain competition almost invariably sought a uniform fare; sealed, mandatory taximeters; tougher vehicle standards; restrictions on entry into the industry, either through a per capita quota or the requirement to prove the ‘convenience and necessity’ of additional service; minimum wage and maximum hour requirements for drivers; and compulsory personal liability insurance.” Canadians supported such measures, Davis notes. “Regulators proceeded on the assumption that Canadians still believed in the ancient credo that everything has its just price, it being as unethical to pay too little for a product or service as to demand too much for it.”
Until UberX.
Life in a taxi has always been gruelling. Six or seven twelve-hour shifts per week is the norm. And since most cabbies have to fork over fixed amounts to car owners and brokerages, take-home pay on any given day is a crapshoot. Competition from Uber has made it harder just to break even. In Toronto, drivers have lost as much as a third of their business since 2012, when a municipal taxi plate could fetch up to $360,000. Today, that same licence might sell for $120,000 on Kijiji. If city council doesn’t act, medallions might soon be worthless—a disaster for independent cabbies and for investors who once saw taxis as nest eggs on wheels.
But for your average city dweller trying to catch a movie or get home from a bar, UberX beckons as the perfect substitute, with crowd-sourced quality control, infinitely elastic supply, quick response times, and prices that effectively are dictated by rock-bottom suppliers. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians use the service—logging half a million rides each month in Toronto alone. Among the leading evangelists of Uber-topianism are teched-up journalists such as Chris Selley, who raved in 2014 that the service “is absolutely, mind-bogglingly fantastic.”
“The cab companies will protect their precious monopoly ferociously,” he wrote in the National Post. “The only hope, I think, is immediate, massive Uber adoption. Make Uber a way of life before the politicians can take it away. As fond as your average modern urbanite might be of government and regulation in principle, he’s more fond, I think, of technological entrepreneurialism.”
Such comments reflect the idea that Uber is part of a larger, unstoppable trend in the world of retail commerce more generally. It’s been twenty years since the introduction of Amazon, sixteen years since Craigslist burst out of San Francisco, and eight years since Apple released the iPhone. The Internet is a 24-7 reverse auction for all life’s pleasures, from music to sex to your kid’s old bike. Why should urban transportation be any different?
Another, less celebrated societal trend is working against old-school taxis: wage stagnation. Municipal governments have long rationalized regulation of taxi fares as a means to ensure that drivers can support their families. As the Ottawa Journal put it in 1936, “No one has any right to expect a taxi ride . . . at a price that does not permit of decent wages and working conditions for those engaged in providing it.” But in recent years, the expectation that any low-skill job will pay the rent and put food on the table has gone the way of the buggy whip. More and more Canadians must stitch together part-time jobs, home businesses, and transfer payments to make ends meet. Despite the middling hourly wages that many amateur chauffeurs earn with UberX, the service represents a highly attractive, flexible complement to their main incomes. It allows them to focus on those times when demand is high and “surge pricing” is in effect—early mornings, afternoon rush hour, late at night on weekends. Or those times that fit in well with their shift work or their kids’ soccer practice. Uber has tens of thousands of UberX drivers in Canada; it estimates that six out of ten drivers work at least one other job. (Many of the others are licensed cabbies piggybacking on the app—to the chagrin of the brokerages whose brands are painted on their cars.)
“The existing regulations for taxis all are from the pre-web era,” Uber Canada general manager Ian Black told me in his open concept, Ping-Pong-equipped downtown Toronto office. “We need something new, a third category that licenses companies. We need strict rules on background checks, insurance, and whatever else governments think is appropriate—as opposed to the existing system, where drivers license themselves. We need a flexible system with a lighter regulatory touch. We need to ensure public safety but also allow an emerging industry to grow.”
So far, he seems to be winning the battle. In early June, hundreds of cab drivers protested Uber’s unregulated growth in Toronto by abandoning their cars and crippling the downtown core. Uber took full advantage of the situation, texting drivers, including me, “There is a large taxi strike taking place tomorrow during morning rush hour. Lack of taxis will cause UberX demand to skyrocket! This is a huge opportunity that you won’t want to miss!” When Uber can cash in on protests directed at its very existence, what hope does the legacy system have? And if the traditional cab goes extinct, will any of us miss it?
The answer is as much philosophical as it is economic, which is why I decided to take two weeks off work and go back to school.
There is a gritty romanticism that attends the cabbie—an idealized status as the city’s ultimate ear-on-the-ground resource. “The New York City cabdriver personifies the energy and zeal of the world’s greatest city,” the historian and former hacky Graham Russell Gao Hodges writes in Taxi! “It is hard to overestimate the psychic hold images of cabdrivers have on the American people. . . . Like truck drivers, cabdrivers are iconic figures who inherit the restless, rootless, and marginalized traditions of cowboys, loggers, and miners.”
You might add priests to that list. As one seasoned driver told me, “The back seat of a cab is something of a confessional booth. The passenger knows he’s never going to see you again. He’s not worried about you judging him. So he talks and talks and talks.” (He conceded that passengers talk a lot less these days, thanks to smartphones.)
Perhaps more than anything, the cab driver is seen as a human atlas, with an entire city map in his head. London cabbies famously are required to master the Knowledge, which comprises 20,000 landmarks, 25,000 streets, and 320 principal routes and their myriad variations based on daily traffic patterns. Aspirant “butter boys” spend years studying, often by cycling through the city with clipboards and crib notes.
Formal training in Canada, by contrast, takes between two days and four weeks. On the first day of Toronto’s three-week taxi-driver course, Ali Teymouri, a former driver himself, stepped me and my two dozen classmates through 232 principal streets: ninety-two north–south; eighty-four east–west; thirty-seven diagonal; and nineteen “complicated” thoroughfares, such as the Kingsway, Spadina, and St. Clair, that are broken up in the middle. Street names and locations need not be memorized, since maps and smartphones are permitted on the final exam, but Teymouri cautioned us that GPS sometimes can yield sub-optimal routes. Having lived in the city for seventeen years, I found the geography lesson fairly straightforward, and while I did not sit the final exam I like to think I would have been among the nine out of ten who pass.
Then again, I was not part of the core audience. Almost all my classmates were recent immigrants. (The only other white student also happened to be the only woman. The cab has long been a highly gendered workplace.) Indeed, much of the course material focused more on Western mores than driving skills per se: Drivers cannot turn away a sight-impaired passenger because of his or her guide dog. Cannot refuse a fare because of someone’s race or sexual orientation. Cannot kick two men out of the car if they hold hands or kiss. “Anything intimate a person can legally do on the street,” instructor Nooshin Vassef explained, “they can legally do in your cab.” She added, “Your own forms of cultural expression may interfere with the way you serve customers.” Canadians don’t like close talkers, for example, or people who avoid eye contact or gab about their personal lives.
Vassef then led a candid discussion of stereotypes, by calling out various demographics and having us shout the first words that sprang to mind. Jew? “Rich! Lawyer!” Jamaican? “Reggae music!” “Don’t be a Russell Peters,” she warned us, referring to the comedian. “He gets paid for his racist jokes. You don’t.”
Another instructor, the hilariously wry Goldman Chan, taught a section on professionalism and customer relations. “Drivers should shower or bathe regularly,” he said, “and dress like professional golfers.” He detailed the differences between deodorant and antiperspirant. When it came to conversation in the cab, Chan urged discretion: “Avoid politics and religion, unless you’re of the same faith as your customer.”
My sixteen minutes of online Uber training can be summed up in a single sentence: Give customers what they want, full stop. My sixteen days of taxi school, by contrast, can be summed up by the many provisions and sub-provisions of Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 545. A few random entries from my notes: If I fail to display the taxi Bill of Rights in my car, there’s a $300 fine. I must retain my operator logs for at least twelve months. I can’t trade rides for sex. If I am convicted of terrorism, I lose my licence for at least ten years. If I break any of the rules—140 pages’ worth of them—I might end up before the licensing tribunal, which sits every Thursday.
To spend one’s days studying the municipal code and one’s nights moonlighting as an UberX driver is to experience first-hand the ideological stakes of the twenty-first-century taxi wars. The industry as we know it is a classic creature of the modern regulatory state, in which customer-merchant relations are closely supervised by government inspectors; whether or not this dirigisme is permitted to succumb to the more primal law of online supply and demand has profound societal implications for a thousand other industries.
In taxi school and behind the UberX wheel, I kept coming back to what might be seen as an existential question: What exactly is the social function of a driver for hire? Uber would put the answer in arithmetic terms. Move the greatest number of customers from point A to point B, cheaply and safely. The only metrics that matter are dollars and stars. Municipal governments, on the other hand, want cabbies to earn a living while protecting and serving the “public interest” (the phrase appeared repeatedly in my course materials). And it is the safeguarding of the public interest that leads to the welter of regulations, and the army of enforcement officers, that govern a taxi driver’s life.
As my course notes attest, cities view the cab driver as a civic actor who brings seniors to the store and patiently helps them with their groceries. A trusted neighbour who picks up children from home and takes them to school. Someone who won’t drive away at night until his or her passenger is safely indoors. The public-interest mandate also includes attracting visitors. “Your product is your city,” one of our instructors said. “You’re an ambassador who can promote festivals, sports teams, museums, other attractions. You’re almost a living advertisement: Come to Toronto!”
Beyond tourism, licensed drivers are seen as mobile temporary social workers, because they are not supposed to discriminate against customers who look impoverished—even if they doubt their ability to pay. “You need to think about your conscience,” another instructor, Sandra Thomas, told us. “Imagine a scenario where it is freezing cold outside, and you have some troubled sixteen-year-old who needs to get home. Yes, there’s a possibility you might not get paid. That sort of thing happens. But when you see him walk in the door, you know he’s safe. You can go home and sleep soundly.” UberX drivers, on the other hand, have no public-interest mandate. They pick up only those with smartphones and available credit—and they are assisted in discriminating against shady characters through the five-star rating system.
Then there are disabled passengers, who don’t fare well at all with the Uber model of transportation. Indeed, nothing demonstrates the fundamental gulf between market-driven and civic-minded car services as much as the issue of accessibility. From a purely commercial point of view, passengers in wheelchairs represent a niche market. And unless compelled to by regulation or personal circumstance, most drivers are not going to invest the $60,000 needed to buy an accessible van.
For the most part, Uber pretends that the issue doesn’t even exist: In California, where a 2013 law requires ride-sharing services to report data about disabled passengers, the company has stonewalled the government. In July, a state judge recommended that Uber operations be suspended statewide and the company fined $7.3 million (US) for violating reporting requirements.
Granted, traditional taxis have not done a sterling job of serving disabled passengers. Edmonton, for instance, will license a fleet of just ninety-five accessible cabs. But things are changing. Toronto recently has begun phasing in a new general licence that will utterly transform the city’s taxi fleet by requiring fully accessible vehicles, such as modified Dodge Caravans and Toyota Siennas, with folding ramps. Taxi school stresses accessibility and safety: We watched a frightening video that shows what can happen to someone in a wheelchair if his or her safety belts aren’t properly adjusted. In our practice sessions, we wheeled one another around obstacles, along ramps, and over curbs. We put on blindfolds to simulate visual impairment, while others led us from door to taxi.
More broadly, our formal training emphasized the fact that elderly and disabled customers are autonomous human beings—not helpless cargo maybe or maybe not to pick up. When driving a passenger with a personal care worker, address your remarks to the passenger directly. When navigating stairs or snow, offer elderly passengers an outstretched forearm but don’t force assistance upon them. Ask before taking away someone’s independence.
New bylaws and municipal training have life-changing ramifications for legions of Canadians who previously did not enjoy the type of on-demand transportation most of us take for granted. Even when accessible public transportation is available, as with the Toronto Transit Commission’s Wheel-Trans program, riders need to plan their trips a day or more in advance. No spontaneous trips to the movie theatre or to that new restaurant.
“I used to have two options to get from home to my job or doctor’s appointment,” Stephen Trumper, a journalism instructor in Toronto who has long used a wheelchair, told me. “I could call Wheel-Trans, which is cheap—but even if I didn’t have to book in advance, the bus is constantly picking other people up and dropping them off. A twenty-minute trip might take an hour and a half. I could also call a private service, but that costs $45 one way—a $90 daily commute.”
The hip—and able-bodied—condo set may have fallen in love with what amounts to a cheap intra-downtown shuttle service, but Uber remains a zero-star performer when it comes to accessibility. I have yet to encounter an UberX driver with a wheelchair-ready vehicle, and when I tap the UberAccess button—which loads the network’s “accessible vehicle supply”—the only rides that pop up are licensed cabs doing double duty.
“The lack of accessible vehicles,” Trumper explained, “is one of the reasons that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is so high—25 to 30 percent. A lot of us just can’t get to our jobs. So when a city says that it’s going to make its entire fleet accessible, wow, does that open up your world.” But opening that world requires government intervention to protect the public interest. Passengers can’t give ratings to cars they can’t enter in the first place.
Toronto unsuccessfully sought an injunction against Uber in November 2014, alleging that the company was operating what was, in effect, an unlicensed brokerage. Even then, mayor-elect John Tory was telling reporters the issue was too big to address through “old-fashioned methods like court cases.”
In his city hall office, Tory told me his attitude is actually more nuanced than the simple “pro-Uber” stance that has been imputed to him: “When I did radio, I used to go out with a microphone and sit in the front seat of a cab. I’d interview everyone who got in, and I’d interview the drivers themselves. I learned how hard it is for them to make a living.”
But Tory does not want to “wipe Uber off the map” either, in part because the traditional industry has grown complacent. “By and large, cab companies had their way,” he says, “and as with other monopolies, they lost sight of customers. I often tell the driver where I’m going, and he’s never heard of the place. That never happens in the world’s great cities. We also have a quality control problem in terms of cleanliness. In that sense, Uber has been a needed wake-up call.”
The mayor wants to create a “level playing field,” where ride sharing can go bumper to bumper with licensed taxis. But for that to work, “Uber can’t continue operating like it’s the Wild West, where you can have anyone you like driving a car around without any regulation whatsoever. That’s not in the public interest.”
From city hall, I visited Beck Taxi, Toronto’s largest brokerage, and met with Kristine Hubbard, a leader of the local anti-Uber brigade. She invited several of her drivers to join us: Joel Barr, a white owner-driver and thirty-five-year veteran; Emmanuel Quaye, a Ghanaian emigrant who has driven a taxi for two decades and has sent three kids to university; and Amir Sepasi-Ashtiani, a forty-eight-year-old, originally from Iraq, who owns his cab. I asked them all the same question: Can the traditional industry coexist with Uber, even in a semi-regulated form? The answer was a resounding no.
“If cities don’t ban UberX, then drivers will have no incentive to go to cab school,” Quaye said. “There’ll be no CPR training, no refresher courses for older drivers. The municipal licensing officers will lose their jobs. Cities will lose money, because UberX guys don’t pay HST. Thousands of people will cheat on their taxes.”
“Drivers don’t have the insurance,” Sepasi-Ashtiani added. “I pay $9,000 a year. The guy driving UberX might pay $1,200. He’s using his private car as a commercial vehicle.”
“It’s all for what? ” Barr asked. “For a business that sends all its profits to California.”
Like my course instructors, Hubbard and her drivers all circled back to the cabbie’s role as a civic actor. “When I’m picking up someone from an assisted-living facility, it might take me five or ten minutes just to get their wheelchair into my car,” Sepasi-Ashtiani said. “Then it’s another five or ten minutes to get them out. The whole trip might take half an hour, all for maybe $10. The city said I had to go out and get an accessible car, so I did. The UberX guy just cherry-picks rides from teenagers and young people in whatever car he wants. How can that ever be fair? ”
The question of fairness is one I now ask myself every time I pass a taxi. Look inside, and you will notice that the passengers skew older and frailer—and not just because many older people don’t have data plans. Cabbies have long relied on the promise that, at the end of the day, the good fares will balance out the bad. With the regulated taxi industry increasingly dependent on the old and the feeble—while UberX skims the easy-fare cream—it’s only a matter of time until it goes bust.
On June 1, lawyers for Uber and the City of Toronto appeared before Ontario Superior Court. Nominally, the hearing revolved around the narrow question of whether the company has violated Municipal Code Chapter 545 by operating an unlicensed brokerage. But Justice Sean Dunphy quickly cut to the chase. The real alleged culprits here, he said, are UberX drivers. Because the city doesn’t have the means or the gumption to go after the small fry, it has decided to go “after the godfather.”
“Is the court the right place to get political courage to change bylaws? ” he asked Toronto’s lawyers. “It’s not my job to help you. . . . It is not for the court to amend the municipal code.” A month later, in dismissing the legal case against Uber, he struck the same chord, declaring, “Questions of what policy choices the city should make or how the regulatory environment ought to respond to mobile communications technology changes are political ones.”
He’s right—and the stakes are high. Mayor John Tory and Uber’s Ian Black may argue that ride sharing and traditional taxis can happily coexist on the same roads if only we get the regulatory mix right. But from where I sit behind the wheel, I can tell you they’re both wrong: one must die for the other to live.
Here is a link to the article: https://thewalrus.ca/uber-v-taxi/
One must die for the other to live
Cities by Jonathan Kay
September 2015 • 5,072 words
“It’s a good idea to keep a clean car and dress well,” the UberX instructional video explains. “Strong smells of any kind can make riders uncomfortable.” No doubt that’s true—which is why I kept putting off my on-the-road research for this piece: I’m a middle-aged drive-through aficionado with three messy children. My nine-year-old hatchback smells exactly as you’d expect.
I cleaned and detailed my car before activating my UberPartner smartphone app. I also went to the Shell station to buy a coconut-scented evergreen air freshener (and an extra-strength “black ice” specimen, to keep it company). Aromatic cardboard dangling from my rear-view mirror didn’t completely overpower the lingering scent of Burger King and long-lost Cheerios, but my car smelled better than it had since the Bush administration.
Like air fresheners, Uber services come in different flavours: “black” (limousines and town cars), “taxi” (conventional city-licensed cabs), “select” (stylish, sleek, and meant to impress), and UberX. The last one is the cheapest and by far the most popular, with fares as low as half that of traditional taxis. Any ordinary schlub with a licence, basic insurance, a decent car, and a clean criminal record can work for UberX. (The company also is rolling out a new service, UberPool, which will allow drivers to chauffeur two separate fares to nearby destinations.)
Drivers with UberX aren’t required to present themselves for formal interviews or even meet anyone from company headquarters. The registration process is online, earnings are automatically deposited, and instructions from HQ take the form of peppy, morale-boosting text blasts: “Thousands need a ride to the baseball game right now!” or “Tonight is the busiest night of the week!” My entire training regime consisted of watching a sixteen-minute web video.
Uber launched in 2012 and has since spread to sixty countries and more than 300 cities, including Edmonton, Quebec City, and Ottawa. In Toronto—its biggest Canadian market—the company claims it will create 15,000 flexible, self-directed, high-quality jobs; reduce drunk driving; and take half a million cars off the city’s congested roads. Its critics argue the company is a bald-faced scam that undercuts the traditional taxi system. A recent issue of Taxinews, a trade magazine, printed a column that decried Uber as a “corporate pariah,” a “malignant tumour,” and a “giant octopus” that has “spread its tentacles globally.” Vancouver and Calgary officials have shut down the ride-sharing service altogether; in other cities, including Montreal and Paris, it sits in a sort of limbo, with officials and drivers alike confused about Uber’s legal status.
When I finally got behind the UberX wheel, I felt less like a giant octopus and more like a social reject in my own car. Some drivers have a knack for chit-chat. But not me: Many of my rides went from start to finish in complete silence, with iPhone addicts not once making eye contact. Some passengers never bothered to remove their earphones—though none of that kept me from trying to create chemistry.
“Watching the hockey playoffs? ” I asked one of my first passengers, a young woman dressed in business attire, as we inched into downtown traffic. “I was pulling for Montreal—that’s my hometown—but you’ve got to hand it to Tampa Bay. They just wanted it more.”
She hummed in a way that seemed half-interested, so I pressed on by segueing smoothly into a discussion of local construction delays. When I started up with a monologue about the Pan Am Games, she interrupted: “Sorry, I gotta focus.” Moments later we stopped at a red light, and in the relative quiet I heard familiar pops and buzzes. She was playing Candy Crush.
Ten conversation-free minutes later, I dropped her off at a high-rise condo building, and she offered a brief, polite smile on her way out. Uber’s automated payment system makes the passing of paper or plastic between passenger and driver unnecessary, and there’s no tipping involved. So my most meaningful interaction with the woman—with all my passengers, really—took place after we’d parted ways. That’s when the two of us rated each other on a scale of one-to-five stars.
At restaurants and hotels, this sort of after-the-fact evaluation is a discretionary afterthought. But Uber’s rating system lies at the heart of its business model. Passengers are urged to evaluate every trip: if a driver’s rating falls below the local standard (as the company unilaterally defines it), he or she can be expelled from the network. The same applies in reverse: drivers are urged to rate every passenger. I found this feature handy after a foul-mouthed couple got into my car one Monday evening and proceeded to drop two or three F-bombs per city block. Two f’ing stars for you, my dears.
Even if cities around the world shut down Uber through regulation and courtroom manoeuvring, there’s no question that many of its ride-sharing innovations will remain part of the landscape. The five-star rating system, in particular, presents a ruthlessly efficient solution to one of the fundamental problems that has long plagued the taxi industry, indeed retail in general—consumers’ difficulty in appraising publicly the integrity and competence of streetside service providers who populate the nooks and crannies of the economy. For almost two centuries, city cabs were big rolling question marks. Until getting in one, you had no idea whether your driver would subject you to speeding, rip-off routing, cellphone jabber, the reek of cigarettes and yesterday’s lunch. Customers don’t want to go back to that, and traditional taxi brokerages know it. Even as they fight Uber, they’re designing their own smartphone apps with Uber-like features.
Uber may be a tech-darling upstart, but the taxi industry is three decades older than Canada itself. In 1837, Thornton Blackburn, a runaway slave from Kentucky, built Toronto’s first taxi, a wooden red and yellow box drawn by a single horse. The city was a tiny place then, but Blackburn found plenty of business along the docks of Lake Ontario. Business grew, and in 1843 city councillors drafted a comprehensive law “to license and regulate the duties and charges on coaches, carriages, cabs, carts, and other vehicles.”
Many early provisions seem quaint now: Cabs required “two well-lighted lamps” after dark, “unless it be moonlight.” They were prohibited from carrying cargo on Sundays. A driver could not “wantonly snap or flourish his whip.” The basic legislative thrust, however, remains surprisingly recognizable. Like its modern equivalent, the 1843 law stipulated the rates that drivers could charge customers and listed the places where taxis could wait for fares—the direct equivalent of today’s taxi stand. (On Church Street, for instance, they could wait only on the east side, “with the horses’ heads towards King Street.”) Drivers had to be eighteen or older, and they had to register their taxis with the city (requirements that remain in place today). And “a suitable and proper” municipal employee, the forerunner of licensing and standards officers, enforced the rules. The pattern was similar elsewhere, including Montreal, which began regulating fares in the 1850s, and Winnipeg, which enacted its first taxi bylaw in 1881.
Change swept the trade in the late nineteenth century when telephones became, in effect, the original ride-sharing app. In the late 1870s, for example, a Winnipeg man named Dave Storey set up a five-cab stand at the corner of Portage and Main, and stayed connected with his customers through direct lines to the police station, the Queen’s Hotel, and the tony Manitoba Club. Three decades later, automobiles began pushing horse-drawn cabs off the roads. This transformation also had Uber-esque overtones: young drivers seemed better situated to adapt to the new technology than older veterans. In London, the situation was so bad that the Daily Mail started a relief fund in 1909 for out-of-work cabbies.
A primitive version of UberX avant la lettre also emerged. Car owners without taxi licences would drive popular routes and charge small fees to customers who flagged them down; in the 1930s, commuters could travel between downtown Vancouver and the West End for as little as three cents. As with today’s ride-sharing apps, these so-called jitneys (the word means nickel) bypassed regulators and tapped directly into curbside demand.
Yet even in their heyday, such ad hoc services could not upend the regulated model—in large part because taxi brokerages coalesced into vigilant oligopolies. As early as 1926, De Luxe Taxicabs in Toronto stitched together a fleet of 175 vehicles and seventy-five call stations. In Montreal, seven brokerages teamed up in 1922 to share a single switchboard, leading to the creation of the powerful Diamond Taxicab Association.
“The regulatory weapons these groups used to suppress the cut-rate cab and thus to end the taxi wars of the 1930s varied remarkably little from city to city,” Donald F. Davis wrote in Urban History Review. “Those who wished to constrain competition almost invariably sought a uniform fare; sealed, mandatory taximeters; tougher vehicle standards; restrictions on entry into the industry, either through a per capita quota or the requirement to prove the ‘convenience and necessity’ of additional service; minimum wage and maximum hour requirements for drivers; and compulsory personal liability insurance.” Canadians supported such measures, Davis notes. “Regulators proceeded on the assumption that Canadians still believed in the ancient credo that everything has its just price, it being as unethical to pay too little for a product or service as to demand too much for it.”
Until UberX.
Life in a taxi has always been gruelling. Six or seven twelve-hour shifts per week is the norm. And since most cabbies have to fork over fixed amounts to car owners and brokerages, take-home pay on any given day is a crapshoot. Competition from Uber has made it harder just to break even. In Toronto, drivers have lost as much as a third of their business since 2012, when a municipal taxi plate could fetch up to $360,000. Today, that same licence might sell for $120,000 on Kijiji. If city council doesn’t act, medallions might soon be worthless—a disaster for independent cabbies and for investors who once saw taxis as nest eggs on wheels.
But for your average city dweller trying to catch a movie or get home from a bar, UberX beckons as the perfect substitute, with crowd-sourced quality control, infinitely elastic supply, quick response times, and prices that effectively are dictated by rock-bottom suppliers. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians use the service—logging half a million rides each month in Toronto alone. Among the leading evangelists of Uber-topianism are teched-up journalists such as Chris Selley, who raved in 2014 that the service “is absolutely, mind-bogglingly fantastic.”
“The cab companies will protect their precious monopoly ferociously,” he wrote in the National Post. “The only hope, I think, is immediate, massive Uber adoption. Make Uber a way of life before the politicians can take it away. As fond as your average modern urbanite might be of government and regulation in principle, he’s more fond, I think, of technological entrepreneurialism.”
Such comments reflect the idea that Uber is part of a larger, unstoppable trend in the world of retail commerce more generally. It’s been twenty years since the introduction of Amazon, sixteen years since Craigslist burst out of San Francisco, and eight years since Apple released the iPhone. The Internet is a 24-7 reverse auction for all life’s pleasures, from music to sex to your kid’s old bike. Why should urban transportation be any different?
Another, less celebrated societal trend is working against old-school taxis: wage stagnation. Municipal governments have long rationalized regulation of taxi fares as a means to ensure that drivers can support their families. As the Ottawa Journal put it in 1936, “No one has any right to expect a taxi ride . . . at a price that does not permit of decent wages and working conditions for those engaged in providing it.” But in recent years, the expectation that any low-skill job will pay the rent and put food on the table has gone the way of the buggy whip. More and more Canadians must stitch together part-time jobs, home businesses, and transfer payments to make ends meet. Despite the middling hourly wages that many amateur chauffeurs earn with UberX, the service represents a highly attractive, flexible complement to their main incomes. It allows them to focus on those times when demand is high and “surge pricing” is in effect—early mornings, afternoon rush hour, late at night on weekends. Or those times that fit in well with their shift work or their kids’ soccer practice. Uber has tens of thousands of UberX drivers in Canada; it estimates that six out of ten drivers work at least one other job. (Many of the others are licensed cabbies piggybacking on the app—to the chagrin of the brokerages whose brands are painted on their cars.)
“The existing regulations for taxis all are from the pre-web era,” Uber Canada general manager Ian Black told me in his open concept, Ping-Pong-equipped downtown Toronto office. “We need something new, a third category that licenses companies. We need strict rules on background checks, insurance, and whatever else governments think is appropriate—as opposed to the existing system, where drivers license themselves. We need a flexible system with a lighter regulatory touch. We need to ensure public safety but also allow an emerging industry to grow.”
So far, he seems to be winning the battle. In early June, hundreds of cab drivers protested Uber’s unregulated growth in Toronto by abandoning their cars and crippling the downtown core. Uber took full advantage of the situation, texting drivers, including me, “There is a large taxi strike taking place tomorrow during morning rush hour. Lack of taxis will cause UberX demand to skyrocket! This is a huge opportunity that you won’t want to miss!” When Uber can cash in on protests directed at its very existence, what hope does the legacy system have? And if the traditional cab goes extinct, will any of us miss it?
The answer is as much philosophical as it is economic, which is why I decided to take two weeks off work and go back to school.
There is a gritty romanticism that attends the cabbie—an idealized status as the city’s ultimate ear-on-the-ground resource. “The New York City cabdriver personifies the energy and zeal of the world’s greatest city,” the historian and former hacky Graham Russell Gao Hodges writes in Taxi! “It is hard to overestimate the psychic hold images of cabdrivers have on the American people. . . . Like truck drivers, cabdrivers are iconic figures who inherit the restless, rootless, and marginalized traditions of cowboys, loggers, and miners.”
You might add priests to that list. As one seasoned driver told me, “The back seat of a cab is something of a confessional booth. The passenger knows he’s never going to see you again. He’s not worried about you judging him. So he talks and talks and talks.” (He conceded that passengers talk a lot less these days, thanks to smartphones.)
Perhaps more than anything, the cab driver is seen as a human atlas, with an entire city map in his head. London cabbies famously are required to master the Knowledge, which comprises 20,000 landmarks, 25,000 streets, and 320 principal routes and their myriad variations based on daily traffic patterns. Aspirant “butter boys” spend years studying, often by cycling through the city with clipboards and crib notes.
Formal training in Canada, by contrast, takes between two days and four weeks. On the first day of Toronto’s three-week taxi-driver course, Ali Teymouri, a former driver himself, stepped me and my two dozen classmates through 232 principal streets: ninety-two north–south; eighty-four east–west; thirty-seven diagonal; and nineteen “complicated” thoroughfares, such as the Kingsway, Spadina, and St. Clair, that are broken up in the middle. Street names and locations need not be memorized, since maps and smartphones are permitted on the final exam, but Teymouri cautioned us that GPS sometimes can yield sub-optimal routes. Having lived in the city for seventeen years, I found the geography lesson fairly straightforward, and while I did not sit the final exam I like to think I would have been among the nine out of ten who pass.
Then again, I was not part of the core audience. Almost all my classmates were recent immigrants. (The only other white student also happened to be the only woman. The cab has long been a highly gendered workplace.) Indeed, much of the course material focused more on Western mores than driving skills per se: Drivers cannot turn away a sight-impaired passenger because of his or her guide dog. Cannot refuse a fare because of someone’s race or sexual orientation. Cannot kick two men out of the car if they hold hands or kiss. “Anything intimate a person can legally do on the street,” instructor Nooshin Vassef explained, “they can legally do in your cab.” She added, “Your own forms of cultural expression may interfere with the way you serve customers.” Canadians don’t like close talkers, for example, or people who avoid eye contact or gab about their personal lives.
Vassef then led a candid discussion of stereotypes, by calling out various demographics and having us shout the first words that sprang to mind. Jew? “Rich! Lawyer!” Jamaican? “Reggae music!” “Don’t be a Russell Peters,” she warned us, referring to the comedian. “He gets paid for his racist jokes. You don’t.”
Another instructor, the hilariously wry Goldman Chan, taught a section on professionalism and customer relations. “Drivers should shower or bathe regularly,” he said, “and dress like professional golfers.” He detailed the differences between deodorant and antiperspirant. When it came to conversation in the cab, Chan urged discretion: “Avoid politics and religion, unless you’re of the same faith as your customer.”
My sixteen minutes of online Uber training can be summed up in a single sentence: Give customers what they want, full stop. My sixteen days of taxi school, by contrast, can be summed up by the many provisions and sub-provisions of Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 545. A few random entries from my notes: If I fail to display the taxi Bill of Rights in my car, there’s a $300 fine. I must retain my operator logs for at least twelve months. I can’t trade rides for sex. If I am convicted of terrorism, I lose my licence for at least ten years. If I break any of the rules—140 pages’ worth of them—I might end up before the licensing tribunal, which sits every Thursday.
To spend one’s days studying the municipal code and one’s nights moonlighting as an UberX driver is to experience first-hand the ideological stakes of the twenty-first-century taxi wars. The industry as we know it is a classic creature of the modern regulatory state, in which customer-merchant relations are closely supervised by government inspectors; whether or not this dirigisme is permitted to succumb to the more primal law of online supply and demand has profound societal implications for a thousand other industries.
In taxi school and behind the UberX wheel, I kept coming back to what might be seen as an existential question: What exactly is the social function of a driver for hire? Uber would put the answer in arithmetic terms. Move the greatest number of customers from point A to point B, cheaply and safely. The only metrics that matter are dollars and stars. Municipal governments, on the other hand, want cabbies to earn a living while protecting and serving the “public interest” (the phrase appeared repeatedly in my course materials). And it is the safeguarding of the public interest that leads to the welter of regulations, and the army of enforcement officers, that govern a taxi driver’s life.
As my course notes attest, cities view the cab driver as a civic actor who brings seniors to the store and patiently helps them with their groceries. A trusted neighbour who picks up children from home and takes them to school. Someone who won’t drive away at night until his or her passenger is safely indoors. The public-interest mandate also includes attracting visitors. “Your product is your city,” one of our instructors said. “You’re an ambassador who can promote festivals, sports teams, museums, other attractions. You’re almost a living advertisement: Come to Toronto!”
Beyond tourism, licensed drivers are seen as mobile temporary social workers, because they are not supposed to discriminate against customers who look impoverished—even if they doubt their ability to pay. “You need to think about your conscience,” another instructor, Sandra Thomas, told us. “Imagine a scenario where it is freezing cold outside, and you have some troubled sixteen-year-old who needs to get home. Yes, there’s a possibility you might not get paid. That sort of thing happens. But when you see him walk in the door, you know he’s safe. You can go home and sleep soundly.” UberX drivers, on the other hand, have no public-interest mandate. They pick up only those with smartphones and available credit—and they are assisted in discriminating against shady characters through the five-star rating system.
Then there are disabled passengers, who don’t fare well at all with the Uber model of transportation. Indeed, nothing demonstrates the fundamental gulf between market-driven and civic-minded car services as much as the issue of accessibility. From a purely commercial point of view, passengers in wheelchairs represent a niche market. And unless compelled to by regulation or personal circumstance, most drivers are not going to invest the $60,000 needed to buy an accessible van.
For the most part, Uber pretends that the issue doesn’t even exist: In California, where a 2013 law requires ride-sharing services to report data about disabled passengers, the company has stonewalled the government. In July, a state judge recommended that Uber operations be suspended statewide and the company fined $7.3 million (US) for violating reporting requirements.
Granted, traditional taxis have not done a sterling job of serving disabled passengers. Edmonton, for instance, will license a fleet of just ninety-five accessible cabs. But things are changing. Toronto recently has begun phasing in a new general licence that will utterly transform the city’s taxi fleet by requiring fully accessible vehicles, such as modified Dodge Caravans and Toyota Siennas, with folding ramps. Taxi school stresses accessibility and safety: We watched a frightening video that shows what can happen to someone in a wheelchair if his or her safety belts aren’t properly adjusted. In our practice sessions, we wheeled one another around obstacles, along ramps, and over curbs. We put on blindfolds to simulate visual impairment, while others led us from door to taxi.
More broadly, our formal training emphasized the fact that elderly and disabled customers are autonomous human beings—not helpless cargo maybe or maybe not to pick up. When driving a passenger with a personal care worker, address your remarks to the passenger directly. When navigating stairs or snow, offer elderly passengers an outstretched forearm but don’t force assistance upon them. Ask before taking away someone’s independence.
New bylaws and municipal training have life-changing ramifications for legions of Canadians who previously did not enjoy the type of on-demand transportation most of us take for granted. Even when accessible public transportation is available, as with the Toronto Transit Commission’s Wheel-Trans program, riders need to plan their trips a day or more in advance. No spontaneous trips to the movie theatre or to that new restaurant.
“I used to have two options to get from home to my job or doctor’s appointment,” Stephen Trumper, a journalism instructor in Toronto who has long used a wheelchair, told me. “I could call Wheel-Trans, which is cheap—but even if I didn’t have to book in advance, the bus is constantly picking other people up and dropping them off. A twenty-minute trip might take an hour and a half. I could also call a private service, but that costs $45 one way—a $90 daily commute.”
The hip—and able-bodied—condo set may have fallen in love with what amounts to a cheap intra-downtown shuttle service, but Uber remains a zero-star performer when it comes to accessibility. I have yet to encounter an UberX driver with a wheelchair-ready vehicle, and when I tap the UberAccess button—which loads the network’s “accessible vehicle supply”—the only rides that pop up are licensed cabs doing double duty.
“The lack of accessible vehicles,” Trumper explained, “is one of the reasons that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is so high—25 to 30 percent. A lot of us just can’t get to our jobs. So when a city says that it’s going to make its entire fleet accessible, wow, does that open up your world.” But opening that world requires government intervention to protect the public interest. Passengers can’t give ratings to cars they can’t enter in the first place.
Toronto unsuccessfully sought an injunction against Uber in November 2014, alleging that the company was operating what was, in effect, an unlicensed brokerage. Even then, mayor-elect John Tory was telling reporters the issue was too big to address through “old-fashioned methods like court cases.”
In his city hall office, Tory told me his attitude is actually more nuanced than the simple “pro-Uber” stance that has been imputed to him: “When I did radio, I used to go out with a microphone and sit in the front seat of a cab. I’d interview everyone who got in, and I’d interview the drivers themselves. I learned how hard it is for them to make a living.”
But Tory does not want to “wipe Uber off the map” either, in part because the traditional industry has grown complacent. “By and large, cab companies had their way,” he says, “and as with other monopolies, they lost sight of customers. I often tell the driver where I’m going, and he’s never heard of the place. That never happens in the world’s great cities. We also have a quality control problem in terms of cleanliness. In that sense, Uber has been a needed wake-up call.”
The mayor wants to create a “level playing field,” where ride sharing can go bumper to bumper with licensed taxis. But for that to work, “Uber can’t continue operating like it’s the Wild West, where you can have anyone you like driving a car around without any regulation whatsoever. That’s not in the public interest.”
From city hall, I visited Beck Taxi, Toronto’s largest brokerage, and met with Kristine Hubbard, a leader of the local anti-Uber brigade. She invited several of her drivers to join us: Joel Barr, a white owner-driver and thirty-five-year veteran; Emmanuel Quaye, a Ghanaian emigrant who has driven a taxi for two decades and has sent three kids to university; and Amir Sepasi-Ashtiani, a forty-eight-year-old, originally from Iraq, who owns his cab. I asked them all the same question: Can the traditional industry coexist with Uber, even in a semi-regulated form? The answer was a resounding no.
“If cities don’t ban UberX, then drivers will have no incentive to go to cab school,” Quaye said. “There’ll be no CPR training, no refresher courses for older drivers. The municipal licensing officers will lose their jobs. Cities will lose money, because UberX guys don’t pay HST. Thousands of people will cheat on their taxes.”
“Drivers don’t have the insurance,” Sepasi-Ashtiani added. “I pay $9,000 a year. The guy driving UberX might pay $1,200. He’s using his private car as a commercial vehicle.”
“It’s all for what? ” Barr asked. “For a business that sends all its profits to California.”
Like my course instructors, Hubbard and her drivers all circled back to the cabbie’s role as a civic actor. “When I’m picking up someone from an assisted-living facility, it might take me five or ten minutes just to get their wheelchair into my car,” Sepasi-Ashtiani said. “Then it’s another five or ten minutes to get them out. The whole trip might take half an hour, all for maybe $10. The city said I had to go out and get an accessible car, so I did. The UberX guy just cherry-picks rides from teenagers and young people in whatever car he wants. How can that ever be fair? ”
The question of fairness is one I now ask myself every time I pass a taxi. Look inside, and you will notice that the passengers skew older and frailer—and not just because many older people don’t have data plans. Cabbies have long relied on the promise that, at the end of the day, the good fares will balance out the bad. With the regulated taxi industry increasingly dependent on the old and the feeble—while UberX skims the easy-fare cream—it’s only a matter of time until it goes bust.
On June 1, lawyers for Uber and the City of Toronto appeared before Ontario Superior Court. Nominally, the hearing revolved around the narrow question of whether the company has violated Municipal Code Chapter 545 by operating an unlicensed brokerage. But Justice Sean Dunphy quickly cut to the chase. The real alleged culprits here, he said, are UberX drivers. Because the city doesn’t have the means or the gumption to go after the small fry, it has decided to go “after the godfather.”
“Is the court the right place to get political courage to change bylaws? ” he asked Toronto’s lawyers. “It’s not my job to help you. . . . It is not for the court to amend the municipal code.” A month later, in dismissing the legal case against Uber, he struck the same chord, declaring, “Questions of what policy choices the city should make or how the regulatory environment ought to respond to mobile communications technology changes are political ones.”
He’s right—and the stakes are high. Mayor John Tory and Uber’s Ian Black may argue that ride sharing and traditional taxis can happily coexist on the same roads if only we get the regulatory mix right. But from where I sit behind the wheel, I can tell you they’re both wrong: one must die for the other to live.
Tuesday, December 01, 2015
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Ken Osborn of Ozzy's Metal Magic shuts down business, will spend next stage of his life in B.C.
Faithful sponsor of News from Behind the Wheel, Ken Osborn, is retiring. The following is a lovely article about Ken, from the Kingston Whig-Standard.
As he emptied out his shop and shut down his business, Ken Osborn -- owner and sole employee of Ozzy's Metal Magic on Montreal Street -- reflected on his 13 years of bronzing people's memories.
The bronzing business was originally built on baby shoes, he explained. Getting your child's first shoes bronzed was once the thing to do, but by the end of the 1990s it had pretty well died off.
"When I decided to start my company, I decided to take it away from just the baby shoes and let people's imaginations fly," he said.
"And boy did they ever fly. The stuff that came through my doors was just the weirdest of the weird, and I managed to pull off every single one of my customers' orders," he said.
"Baby shoes are fine. But instead of a baby shoe, how about a bowl of popcorn? Or a Tim Hortons coffee? Or a pack of hotdogs? I have even bronzed a cigarette and left the ash on the cigarette."
He quickly became known as the guy who could bronze just about anything.
Osborn's counterparts in the United States would refer their customers to him when they couldn't figure out how to bronze something.
"It's simple to me, but they said it can't be done."
One particularly memorable request from south of the border was to bronze a pile of excrement.
"They had no idea how to do a pile of s---," he said.
He has done toys, coffeemakers, bones and animal skulls.
"Anything your imagination could think of."
Maple Leaf foods once sent him three packages of hotdogs to bronze. There were peanuts from a guy in South Carolina and a coffee cup and bagel from Tim Hortons.
"Everybody likes a cup of coffee in the morning. I just like mine bronzed," Osborn laughed.
He sent a pair of mud-coated boots out to Calgary to commemorate the flood of 2013.
He said he will miss the challenges that came with his customers bringing their requests through the door.
Before the item goes into the bronzing tank, it has to go through a series of preparation stages.
"If it didn't get through a particular stage, then it didn't go in the tank," Osborn said.
Osborn once tried to bronze a pie. He could do the crust, no problem, but could never figure out how to do the filling.
"There are still some things that I would really love to have been able to try," Osborn said.
Soap posed a big problem. The ingredients neutralize the acid used in the preparation stage.
An ice cream cone is also a no-no.
"I could bronze the cone, but I can't bronze the ice cream."
There has been a big "Thank You" notice on his front door since he decided to shut things down.
"You have to thank your customers because they are the ones who kept you in business," he said.
Osborn had intended to stay in business and retire in Kingston but changed his plans in order to give his wife Dianne a special anniversary present.
"This year is unique," he explained. "This year, my wife and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary."
His wife's mother, now in her 80s, had been living in Kingston and the two were very close, he continued. But her mother moved out to Nanaimo, B.C., to be with a son and her grandchildren.
"So, as a 25th wedding anniversary gift, we will close everything up and move out west where she can spend as much time with her as she can. We are looking at departing shortly to our new home."
Osborn has been in the bronzing business for 25 years and only got into it when he was looking for a safe place to sleep.
"I was a stubborn-headed kid," he recalled.
Osborn had moved away from his family to be more independent, but things didn't go quite as planned.
"I ended up sleeping on the streets of Kingston."
He had plenty of other family members he could move in with, but his stubborn streak won out.
"My brain and my attitude at that time -- my stubbornness -- said if you move away from your family, you don't move back. You screwed up, get yourself out of it."
It was too dangerous to sleep on the streets, so he spent his evenings with a friend who worked in a bronzing company in town.
After going to St. Lawrence College to become an employment counsellor, he got a work placement at the friend's bronzing firm.
"Twelve years later, I left the company."
By then, he had mastered the basic technology of bronzing but kept learning more and more about what could and couldn't be done.
"I was able to tinker around and teach myself new ways," Osborn said.
After a brief stint as a caregiver for an elderly gentleman, Osborn went back to school for an upgrade and eventually started his own bronzing business in 2002.
In recent years, many of his customers found him on the Internet.
He fielded calls from Australia, England and Germany. Someone in China wanted him to bronze a Wii controller.
Even though he works with some pretty harsh chemicals, Osborn has never been concerned about his health.
He said he learned first-hand with his first bronzing job how dangerous things could get.
"When I started this company, I took the Ministry of the Environment guidelines that were written in 2001 and doubled them. If it said to do this once, I did it twice."
That included a doubled ventilation system.
"If I turned both of them on, this shop's air got a full replacement every seven and a half minutes."
A big part of his business has always been the donation of his work to area organizations and charities.
His Bronze Poppy Project has included bronzed wreaths, flags, memorials and other military-related artifacts that show his support for the country's Armed Forces.
Osborn calls them his "tribute art pieces."
"I don't tell these organizations I am even doing them. I just do it because it has to get done."
It is all part of his motto: "Help as many people as we can before we leave."
Osborn turned 50 last year and "I figured I would do something unique."
So he decided to carry out 50 random acts of kindness over two years, using his talents to create mementoes that would show his support for local agencies and charities.
One such act was to frame and donate old aerial photos from the 1960s, showing the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, to the University Hospitals Kingston Foundation.
He has also donated to the city a 1918 printing press he got from the former owner of Jackson Press. The press was used to print many of the books for Queen's University and the Royal Military College.
His original plan, should he retire in Kingston, was to take it around the schools to show children how printing was done during the early history of the city.
"I refuse to see any history destroyed, so I made arrangements with the city, and thankfully the city has accepted my request to take possession of it."
Osborn believes it will be cleaned up and placed in a museum.
He decided against selling his business to someone else, since the technology is too advanced for someone to quickly take in. He had taken multiple courses to upgrade his bronzing knowledge and figured it would take six months for him to train someone new.
As far as he is concerned, once he moves out west, "bronzing is done."
Osborn plans to concentrate on his charity work to keep himself occupied.
"I am quite happy. I did over 13 years on my own. I started the company from scratch and decided to close it on my own and carry on with my life," Osborn said.
michael.lea@sunmedia.ca
Originally Published by the Whig-Standard: http://www.thewhig.com/2015/07/15/ken-osborn-of-ozzys-metal-magic-shuts-down-business-will-spend-next-stage-of-his-life-in-bc
As he emptied out his shop and shut down his business, Ken Osborn -- owner and sole employee of Ozzy's Metal Magic on Montreal Street -- reflected on his 13 years of bronzing people's memories.
The bronzing business was originally built on baby shoes, he explained. Getting your child's first shoes bronzed was once the thing to do, but by the end of the 1990s it had pretty well died off.
"When I decided to start my company, I decided to take it away from just the baby shoes and let people's imaginations fly," he said.
"And boy did they ever fly. The stuff that came through my doors was just the weirdest of the weird, and I managed to pull off every single one of my customers' orders," he said.
"Baby shoes are fine. But instead of a baby shoe, how about a bowl of popcorn? Or a Tim Hortons coffee? Or a pack of hotdogs? I have even bronzed a cigarette and left the ash on the cigarette."
He quickly became known as the guy who could bronze just about anything.
Osborn's counterparts in the United States would refer their customers to him when they couldn't figure out how to bronze something.
"It's simple to me, but they said it can't be done."
One particularly memorable request from south of the border was to bronze a pile of excrement.
"They had no idea how to do a pile of s---," he said.
He has done toys, coffeemakers, bones and animal skulls.
"Anything your imagination could think of."
Maple Leaf foods once sent him three packages of hotdogs to bronze. There were peanuts from a guy in South Carolina and a coffee cup and bagel from Tim Hortons.
"Everybody likes a cup of coffee in the morning. I just like mine bronzed," Osborn laughed.
He sent a pair of mud-coated boots out to Calgary to commemorate the flood of 2013.
He said he will miss the challenges that came with his customers bringing their requests through the door.
Before the item goes into the bronzing tank, it has to go through a series of preparation stages.
"If it didn't get through a particular stage, then it didn't go in the tank," Osborn said.
Osborn once tried to bronze a pie. He could do the crust, no problem, but could never figure out how to do the filling.
"There are still some things that I would really love to have been able to try," Osborn said.
Soap posed a big problem. The ingredients neutralize the acid used in the preparation stage.
An ice cream cone is also a no-no.
"I could bronze the cone, but I can't bronze the ice cream."
There has been a big "Thank You" notice on his front door since he decided to shut things down.
"You have to thank your customers because they are the ones who kept you in business," he said.
Osborn had intended to stay in business and retire in Kingston but changed his plans in order to give his wife Dianne a special anniversary present.
"This year is unique," he explained. "This year, my wife and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary."
His wife's mother, now in her 80s, had been living in Kingston and the two were very close, he continued. But her mother moved out to Nanaimo, B.C., to be with a son and her grandchildren.
"So, as a 25th wedding anniversary gift, we will close everything up and move out west where she can spend as much time with her as she can. We are looking at departing shortly to our new home."
Osborn has been in the bronzing business for 25 years and only got into it when he was looking for a safe place to sleep.
"I was a stubborn-headed kid," he recalled.
Osborn had moved away from his family to be more independent, but things didn't go quite as planned.
"I ended up sleeping on the streets of Kingston."
He had plenty of other family members he could move in with, but his stubborn streak won out.
"My brain and my attitude at that time -- my stubbornness -- said if you move away from your family, you don't move back. You screwed up, get yourself out of it."
It was too dangerous to sleep on the streets, so he spent his evenings with a friend who worked in a bronzing company in town.
After going to St. Lawrence College to become an employment counsellor, he got a work placement at the friend's bronzing firm.
"Twelve years later, I left the company."
By then, he had mastered the basic technology of bronzing but kept learning more and more about what could and couldn't be done.
"I was able to tinker around and teach myself new ways," Osborn said.
After a brief stint as a caregiver for an elderly gentleman, Osborn went back to school for an upgrade and eventually started his own bronzing business in 2002.
In recent years, many of his customers found him on the Internet.
He fielded calls from Australia, England and Germany. Someone in China wanted him to bronze a Wii controller.
Even though he works with some pretty harsh chemicals, Osborn has never been concerned about his health.
He said he learned first-hand with his first bronzing job how dangerous things could get.
"When I started this company, I took the Ministry of the Environment guidelines that were written in 2001 and doubled them. If it said to do this once, I did it twice."
That included a doubled ventilation system.
"If I turned both of them on, this shop's air got a full replacement every seven and a half minutes."
A big part of his business has always been the donation of his work to area organizations and charities.
His Bronze Poppy Project has included bronzed wreaths, flags, memorials and other military-related artifacts that show his support for the country's Armed Forces.
Osborn calls them his "tribute art pieces."
"I don't tell these organizations I am even doing them. I just do it because it has to get done."
It is all part of his motto: "Help as many people as we can before we leave."
Osborn turned 50 last year and "I figured I would do something unique."
So he decided to carry out 50 random acts of kindness over two years, using his talents to create mementoes that would show his support for local agencies and charities.
One such act was to frame and donate old aerial photos from the 1960s, showing the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, to the University Hospitals Kingston Foundation.
He has also donated to the city a 1918 printing press he got from the former owner of Jackson Press. The press was used to print many of the books for Queen's University and the Royal Military College.
His original plan, should he retire in Kingston, was to take it around the schools to show children how printing was done during the early history of the city.
"I refuse to see any history destroyed, so I made arrangements with the city, and thankfully the city has accepted my request to take possession of it."
Osborn believes it will be cleaned up and placed in a museum.
He decided against selling his business to someone else, since the technology is too advanced for someone to quickly take in. He had taken multiple courses to upgrade his bronzing knowledge and figured it would take six months for him to train someone new.
As far as he is concerned, once he moves out west, "bronzing is done."
Osborn plans to concentrate on his charity work to keep himself occupied.
"I am quite happy. I did over 13 years on my own. I started the company from scratch and decided to close it on my own and carry on with my life," Osborn said.
michael.lea@sunmedia.ca
Originally Published by the Whig-Standard: http://www.thewhig.com/2015/07/15/ken-osborn-of-ozzys-metal-magic-shuts-down-business-will-spend-next-stage-of-his-life-in-bc
Friday, May 29, 2015
Friday, March 27, 2015
Monday, March 02, 2015
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Thursday, December 04, 2014
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Thursday, October 09, 2014
Monday, June 30, 2014
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Saturday, December 07, 2013
Friday, November 08, 2013
Friday, September 13, 2013
Thursday, August 01, 2013
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Taxi Commission Meeting - November 21
The next meeting of the Kingston Taxi Commission will be held on Wednesday, November 21 at 5 p.m. at City Hall. The agenda for the November 21st meeting is available by clicking here.
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
URGENT - Police are requesting your help
Detectives from the Major Crime Unit are appealing to the public to assist in the identification of an armed robber who held up a female cab driver at knife-point.
On Monday, November 5 at approximately 6:00 a.m. Amey’s taxi #88 attended the Mac’s Milk located by the Red Lobster on Bath Rd to pick up a fare. A male, described as Caucasian, in his 20s or 30s, roughly 5’10” in height and wearing a hoodie or jacket with a hood, entered the rear seat of the cab directly behind the driver.
The suspect directed the cab driver to the Runnymede area, near the apartment building located at the corner of Robert Wallace Dr. Once parked the suspect pulled out a knife and held it to the throat of the driver, demanding her money.
A small amount of cash was obtained and the suspect fled on foot. The victim received no physical injuries. Amey’s taxis are equipped with security cameras and detectives were able to obtain still photos of the suspect.
Anyone with information is please asked to contact Detective Chris Gobeil at 613-549-4660 ext 6190 or via email at cgobeil@kpf.ca.
Anonymous tips can be made to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS) or on the website at www.tipsubmit.com. Tipsters are eligible for a cash reward of up to $2,000.
On Monday, November 5 at approximately 6:00 a.m. Amey’s taxi #88 attended the Mac’s Milk located by the Red Lobster on Bath Rd to pick up a fare. A male, described as Caucasian, in his 20s or 30s, roughly 5’10” in height and wearing a hoodie or jacket with a hood, entered the rear seat of the cab directly behind the driver.
The suspect directed the cab driver to the Runnymede area, near the apartment building located at the corner of Robert Wallace Dr. Once parked the suspect pulled out a knife and held it to the throat of the driver, demanding her money.
A small amount of cash was obtained and the suspect fled on foot. The victim received no physical injuries. Amey’s taxis are equipped with security cameras and detectives were able to obtain still photos of the suspect.
Anyone with information is please asked to contact Detective Chris Gobeil at 613-549-4660 ext 6190 or via email at cgobeil@kpf.ca.
Sunday, November 04, 2012
Letter to the Taxi Commission
Please review this letter which was sent to the Taxi Commission this week concerning cameras. You may read their response in the next issue of "News from Behind the Wheel.
Saturday, November 03, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Monday, May 07, 2012
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Thursday, March 01, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Taxing nights behind the wheel
From the Queen's Journal:
Kingston taxi driver Mordeen Bondett opens up about her nights on the road
By Terra-Ann Arnone, Features Editor
Mordeen Bondett said her worst experience as a Kingston taxi driver was with a Queen’s student last year.
"He told me that I was just a servant," the seven-year Amey’s taxi veteran said. "He told me that he judged a person by what they did for a living and what I did for a living wasn’t respectable."
The mother of two teared up and turned away from me as she spoke.
"Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this," she said. "All I’ll say is that at that time, two of our drivers had PhDs."
Bondett, who works the 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, let me ride along with her on Saturday night.
Her car had a surveillance camera installed on the windshield five years ago after studies in Winnipeg and Chicago found that video surveillance was the most successful method for taxi driver protection.
The cameras, which run about $1,700 each, take a picture of customers as they step in the cab and will record video if the driver touches an emergency button beside the steering wheel.
"I was personally against this in the beginning," she said. "I didn’t want my children to see me attacked or killed on camera."
Her outlook changed after a night-time encounter with two men.
"One was wearing a zip-up black sweater in the middle of summer and it tipped me off that something might be wrong," she said.
Bondett watched in the rear-view mirror as the man unzipped his sweater and reached into the breast pocket.
Before she could turn the camera on, the other man said, "I don’t want to do anything that will land me back in jail."
The customers asked Bondett to stop the car, paid their fare and left.
"Now I’m glad we have the cameras because our customers are aware of them and behave differently," Bondett said.
When the emergency button is pressed and the surveillance camera is activated, a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracks the driver’s whereabouts and sends all available taxis to their aid.
She said people are often concerned about a woman driving alone at night.
"You can be afraid of the daylight too," Bondett said.
In 2007, Amey’s driver David Krick was stabbed to death inside his cab at 7 a.m.
"I can’t begin to imagine," she said. "I just have to keep myself strong and alert."
Taxi fares are standardized by the Kingston Taxi Commission, with current rates at $2.85 for the first 77 metres of travel and $0.10 for every 77 metres after that.
Amey’s taxi owns 20 per cent of their fleet, with the remaining cars owned privately by drivers. Bondett doesn’t own the cab she drives.
Drivers who don’t own their own cars make 42 per cent commission off fares. Cab owners bring 100 per cent of fare money home.
"Many students don’t realize that a good portion of our income depends on tips," she said. "Some of the drivers resent the fact that students don’t tip as well."
Bondett averages $2 to $5 in tips per ride.
"I find that most students are friendly, polite and grateful," she said. "But occasionally you have students who forget we’re human beings too."
Bondett keeps plastic bags, bandaids, Kleenex and gum in her car for customers.
"I stock up on plastic bags during Frosh Week and Homecoming," she said. "That’s when most people vomit."
When someone vomits in a cab, a driver can clean it themselves and continue with their shift or send it in for cleaning and forego a night’s wages. Clean-up incurs an $80 charge for the passenger.
"I’m impressed with students who bring their own plastic bags," Bondett said.
The Kleenex is mainly for students coming back from the train station after a holiday at home, Bondett said.
"I can go through a number of Kleenex boxes, especially after Thanksgiving," she said. "That’s when all the breakups happen."
Bondett said she’s noticed differences between Queen’s students and students from Royal Military College and St. Lawrence College.
"I find the university students, maybe because they’re here longer, feel like the city is more their’s," she said. "Whereas the college students are here for shorter periods and act more like guests.
"I always try to treat customers the way I would want my children treated," she said.
Bondett is asked frequently if she is an ex-convict by students during Frosh Week.
"It’s a rumour that runs rampant," she said. "There is no taxi driver in Kingston that is an ex-con."
The Kingston Taxi Commission mandates that all drivers undergo a criminal record check through the Canadian Police Information Centre.
Bondett works a 12-hour shift five times a week.
"I do it so that I can eat," she said. "But if you’re out here for 12 hours at a time, enjoying your job really helps — and I do."
Having a bad night — usually one involving vomit, an unpaid fare or mistreatment — can take a toll on drivers, Bondett said.
"One bad customer takes two [good customers] to erase it from your mind," she said. "One to show you that they’re not all bad and another to wash away the hurt."
Kingston taxi driver Mordeen Bondett opens up about her nights on the road
By Terra-Ann Arnone, Features Editor
Mordeen Bondett said her worst experience as a Kingston taxi driver was with a Queen’s student last year.
"He told me that I was just a servant," the seven-year Amey’s taxi veteran said. "He told me that he judged a person by what they did for a living and what I did for a living wasn’t respectable."
The mother of two teared up and turned away from me as she spoke.
"Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this," she said. "All I’ll say is that at that time, two of our drivers had PhDs."
Bondett, who works the 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, let me ride along with her on Saturday night.
Her car had a surveillance camera installed on the windshield five years ago after studies in Winnipeg and Chicago found that video surveillance was the most successful method for taxi driver protection.
The cameras, which run about $1,700 each, take a picture of customers as they step in the cab and will record video if the driver touches an emergency button beside the steering wheel.
"I was personally against this in the beginning," she said. "I didn’t want my children to see me attacked or killed on camera."
Her outlook changed after a night-time encounter with two men.
"One was wearing a zip-up black sweater in the middle of summer and it tipped me off that something might be wrong," she said.
Bondett watched in the rear-view mirror as the man unzipped his sweater and reached into the breast pocket.
Before she could turn the camera on, the other man said, "I don’t want to do anything that will land me back in jail."
The customers asked Bondett to stop the car, paid their fare and left.
"Now I’m glad we have the cameras because our customers are aware of them and behave differently," Bondett said.
When the emergency button is pressed and the surveillance camera is activated, a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracks the driver’s whereabouts and sends all available taxis to their aid.
She said people are often concerned about a woman driving alone at night.
"You can be afraid of the daylight too," Bondett said.
In 2007, Amey’s driver David Krick was stabbed to death inside his cab at 7 a.m.
"I can’t begin to imagine," she said. "I just have to keep myself strong and alert."
Taxi fares are standardized by the Kingston Taxi Commission, with current rates at $2.85 for the first 77 metres of travel and $0.10 for every 77 metres after that.
Amey’s taxi owns 20 per cent of their fleet, with the remaining cars owned privately by drivers. Bondett doesn’t own the cab she drives.
Drivers who don’t own their own cars make 42 per cent commission off fares. Cab owners bring 100 per cent of fare money home.
"Many students don’t realize that a good portion of our income depends on tips," she said. "Some of the drivers resent the fact that students don’t tip as well."
Bondett averages $2 to $5 in tips per ride.
"I find that most students are friendly, polite and grateful," she said. "But occasionally you have students who forget we’re human beings too."
Bondett keeps plastic bags, bandaids, Kleenex and gum in her car for customers.
"I stock up on plastic bags during Frosh Week and Homecoming," she said. "That’s when most people vomit."
When someone vomits in a cab, a driver can clean it themselves and continue with their shift or send it in for cleaning and forego a night’s wages. Clean-up incurs an $80 charge for the passenger.
"I’m impressed with students who bring their own plastic bags," Bondett said.
The Kleenex is mainly for students coming back from the train station after a holiday at home, Bondett said.
"I can go through a number of Kleenex boxes, especially after Thanksgiving," she said. "That’s when all the breakups happen."
Bondett said she’s noticed differences between Queen’s students and students from Royal Military College and St. Lawrence College.
"I find the university students, maybe because they’re here longer, feel like the city is more their’s," she said. "Whereas the college students are here for shorter periods and act more like guests.
"I always try to treat customers the way I would want my children treated," she said.
Bondett is asked frequently if she is an ex-convict by students during Frosh Week.
"It’s a rumour that runs rampant," she said. "There is no taxi driver in Kingston that is an ex-con."
The Kingston Taxi Commission mandates that all drivers undergo a criminal record check through the Canadian Police Information Centre.
Bondett works a 12-hour shift five times a week.
"I do it so that I can eat," she said. "But if you’re out here for 12 hours at a time, enjoying your job really helps — and I do."
Having a bad night — usually one involving vomit, an unpaid fare or mistreatment — can take a toll on drivers, Bondett said.
"One bad customer takes two [good customers] to erase it from your mind," she said. "One to show you that they’re not all bad and another to wash away the hurt."
Monday, July 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Man not responsible for stabbing cab driver
From the Kingston Whig-Standard Online:
A 25-year-old man, who stabbed an Amey's cab driver for no apparent reason in November 2009 and then stole his taxi, has been declared not criminally responsible for his crimes by reason of mental illness.
Timothy L. McGonegal was arraigned in Kingston's Ontario Court of Justice Monday on charges of attempted murder, stealing a car while armed with a knife, dangerous driving and violating probation by failing to keep the peace and be of good behaviour.
Defence lawyer Dave Crowe entered pleas of not guilty on McGonegal's behalf on the basis that he could not be held criminally responsible for his actions.
Assistant Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis then tendered the video statement that McGonegal gave to police after his arrest and invited Justice Rommel Masse to make a finding that he did commit the acts that gave rise to the charges. A short hearing followed to determine whether McGonegal could be held criminally responsible for his actions. Masse ultimately concluded he couldn't.
Laarhuis told the judge that following the Nov. 4, 2009, attack, a Kingston Police detective broached the subject of counselling with cab driver John Barnes, the stabbing victim. Barnes said he was aware of the dangers inherent to his occupation, the prosecutor told the court, and said he was going back to work.
He just wanted to know why he was stabbed, Laarhuis told the judge, because he said it was so unnecessary.
"Sadly," Laarhuis disclosed, Barnes died early in January from cancer.
The morning he crossed paths with McGonegal, the prosecutor related, Barnes was parked on the Kingston Centre lot waiting for a fare. Laarhuis told the judge that McGonegal showed up at 3:10 a.m., headed directly to Barnes's cab, leaned in and asked if Barnes could drive him to Napanee.
The cab driver agreed. Mc-Gonegal got into the front passenger seat and Barnes called his dispatcher for the flat rate -- $65. Then, after the cab had pulled out, McGonegal asked Barnes if he accepted debit.
Laarhuis said it's company policy to get the money up front, so Barnes pulled onto another lot at Princess and Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard, but as he reached for the debit machine, McGonegal plunged a knife into the centre of his chest without warning.
Masse was told the blade went in about an inch, but Laarhuis said the doctors who treated him believe it failed to penetrate Barnes's heart because the blade was deflected by his sternum.
Laarhuis said Barnes started to tell McGonegal that he'd just begun his shift and had no money, at the same time reaching for the door handle to escape, but his hand slipped.
According to the prosecutor, McGonegal responded by pushing harder on the knife, which at that point was still embedded in Barnes's chest. He ordered the cab driver to get out of his cab.
Laarhuis said Barnes later recalled that he half stepped and half stumbled out the driver's side door and found himself standing at the rear of his cab watching McGonegal slide across the seat and get behind the wheel. Mc-Gonegal then sped north on Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard and Barnes used his cellphone to call his dispatcher for help.
Not long after that, police found the taxi in a ditch off the west-bound ramp to Hwy. 401. McGonegal was on foot, about 300 metres west of the abandoned cab, walking along the south side of the highway.
Laarhuis said Kingston Police questioned him after his arrest and McGonegal told them where he'd thrown the knife out the cab's window after the stabbing. Masse was told that a blue and silver folding knife with a 3 1/2-inch blade was later recovered.
That information came in one of the rare moments, however, when McGonegal was both responsive and relatively lucid.
When he was subsequently in-t erviewed, Laarhuis told the judge McGonegal talked about secret societies, his need to get in touch with his "heritage" as a member of a race apart from the rest of us, and "vampires of Ohio" among other themes.
McGonegal even declared, at one point, that "the universe needs dead bodies ... strung across the universe" to protect the earth from the effects of a thinning ozone layer. He suggested the human shield effect could best be accomplished by people swallowing TNT.
When his police interviewer asked him if his victim was a selection or random, McGonegal replied, "honestly ma'am, just happened to be the unfortunate one," and when she invited him to describe what happened between him and the cab driver, he told her "I broke," but he quickly went on to claim he was a Hells Angel and made a series of cryptic and seemingly random remarks.
Later in the interview, Mc-Gonegal compared himself to the fictional villain Hannibal Lecter and claimed to be a cannibal. He then went on to complain about being tortured and about having a chip implanted somewhere in his body that controlled his behaviour.
Laarhuis told the judge Mc-Gonegal has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and added that "he's had very active symptoms" since about May 2009.
Consequently, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Hucker was asked by the Crown attorney's office to conduct a psychiatric evaluation for the court. It was Dave Crowe who called the doctor to the witness stand, however, and under questioning by him, Hucker testified that when he met Mc-Gonegal at Providence Continuing Care last November, what struck him was "a very prominent thought disorder," characterized by disorganized ideas and individual words imbued with special potency or underlying meanings unique to McGonegal.
The doctor said there's also a medical history, provided primarily by the man's father, of his deterioration through 2009, "but I think he's been ill a lot longer than that," Hucker told the court.
He also calculated that by the time he interviewed McGonegal, nine months had passed since the court ordered that he receive treatment. He was on anti-psychotic drugs, Hucker said, but he saw little improvement and told the judge, "he has shown no insight into his illness."
"What we're getting now are variations on why he did what he did," he told the judge. "He's drawing on his delusions for explanations."
Hucker said he had no doubts McGonegal was delusional when he stabbed a complete stranger.
suey@thewhig.com
Copyright © 2011 The Whig Standard
A 25-year-old man, who stabbed an Amey's cab driver for no apparent reason in November 2009 and then stole his taxi, has been declared not criminally responsible for his crimes by reason of mental illness.
Timothy L. McGonegal was arraigned in Kingston's Ontario Court of Justice Monday on charges of attempted murder, stealing a car while armed with a knife, dangerous driving and violating probation by failing to keep the peace and be of good behaviour.
Defence lawyer Dave Crowe entered pleas of not guilty on McGonegal's behalf on the basis that he could not be held criminally responsible for his actions.
Assistant Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis then tendered the video statement that McGonegal gave to police after his arrest and invited Justice Rommel Masse to make a finding that he did commit the acts that gave rise to the charges. A short hearing followed to determine whether McGonegal could be held criminally responsible for his actions. Masse ultimately concluded he couldn't.
Laarhuis told the judge that following the Nov. 4, 2009, attack, a Kingston Police detective broached the subject of counselling with cab driver John Barnes, the stabbing victim. Barnes said he was aware of the dangers inherent to his occupation, the prosecutor told the court, and said he was going back to work.
He just wanted to know why he was stabbed, Laarhuis told the judge, because he said it was so unnecessary.
"Sadly," Laarhuis disclosed, Barnes died early in January from cancer.
The morning he crossed paths with McGonegal, the prosecutor related, Barnes was parked on the Kingston Centre lot waiting for a fare. Laarhuis told the judge that McGonegal showed up at 3:10 a.m., headed directly to Barnes's cab, leaned in and asked if Barnes could drive him to Napanee.
The cab driver agreed. Mc-Gonegal got into the front passenger seat and Barnes called his dispatcher for the flat rate -- $65. Then, after the cab had pulled out, McGonegal asked Barnes if he accepted debit.
Laarhuis said it's company policy to get the money up front, so Barnes pulled onto another lot at Princess and Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard, but as he reached for the debit machine, McGonegal plunged a knife into the centre of his chest without warning.
Masse was told the blade went in about an inch, but Laarhuis said the doctors who treated him believe it failed to penetrate Barnes's heart because the blade was deflected by his sternum.
Laarhuis said Barnes started to tell McGonegal that he'd just begun his shift and had no money, at the same time reaching for the door handle to escape, but his hand slipped.
According to the prosecutor, McGonegal responded by pushing harder on the knife, which at that point was still embedded in Barnes's chest. He ordered the cab driver to get out of his cab.
Laarhuis said Barnes later recalled that he half stepped and half stumbled out the driver's side door and found himself standing at the rear of his cab watching McGonegal slide across the seat and get behind the wheel. Mc-Gonegal then sped north on Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard and Barnes used his cellphone to call his dispatcher for help.
Not long after that, police found the taxi in a ditch off the west-bound ramp to Hwy. 401. McGonegal was on foot, about 300 metres west of the abandoned cab, walking along the south side of the highway.
Laarhuis said Kingston Police questioned him after his arrest and McGonegal told them where he'd thrown the knife out the cab's window after the stabbing. Masse was told that a blue and silver folding knife with a 3 1/2-inch blade was later recovered.
That information came in one of the rare moments, however, when McGonegal was both responsive and relatively lucid.
When he was subsequently in-t erviewed, Laarhuis told the judge McGonegal talked about secret societies, his need to get in touch with his "heritage" as a member of a race apart from the rest of us, and "vampires of Ohio" among other themes.
McGonegal even declared, at one point, that "the universe needs dead bodies ... strung across the universe" to protect the earth from the effects of a thinning ozone layer. He suggested the human shield effect could best be accomplished by people swallowing TNT.
When his police interviewer asked him if his victim was a selection or random, McGonegal replied, "honestly ma'am, just happened to be the unfortunate one," and when she invited him to describe what happened between him and the cab driver, he told her "I broke," but he quickly went on to claim he was a Hells Angel and made a series of cryptic and seemingly random remarks.
Later in the interview, Mc-Gonegal compared himself to the fictional villain Hannibal Lecter and claimed to be a cannibal. He then went on to complain about being tortured and about having a chip implanted somewhere in his body that controlled his behaviour.
Laarhuis told the judge Mc-Gonegal has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and added that "he's had very active symptoms" since about May 2009.
Consequently, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Hucker was asked by the Crown attorney's office to conduct a psychiatric evaluation for the court. It was Dave Crowe who called the doctor to the witness stand, however, and under questioning by him, Hucker testified that when he met Mc-Gonegal at Providence Continuing Care last November, what struck him was "a very prominent thought disorder," characterized by disorganized ideas and individual words imbued with special potency or underlying meanings unique to McGonegal.
The doctor said there's also a medical history, provided primarily by the man's father, of his deterioration through 2009, "but I think he's been ill a lot longer than that," Hucker told the court.
He also calculated that by the time he interviewed McGonegal, nine months had passed since the court ordered that he receive treatment. He was on anti-psychotic drugs, Hucker said, but he saw little improvement and told the judge, "he has shown no insight into his illness."
"What we're getting now are variations on why he did what he did," he told the judge. "He's drawing on his delusions for explanations."
Hucker said he had no doubts McGonegal was delusional when he stabbed a complete stranger.
suey@thewhig.com
Copyright © 2011 The Whig Standard
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Skipping out on cab fares proves costly for man, 46
From the Kingston Whig-Standard Online:
A 46-year old man who developed an aversion to paying for his taxi rides has been sentenced to jail for 26 days and placed on probation for a year.
In addition, Samuel W. Parkinson was ordered Friday to pay the $383.90 he owes taxi drivers in Kingston and Ottawa after he pleaded guilty in Kingston's Ontar io Court of Justice to two counts of transportation fraud and violating a police-issued release undertaking by failing to keep the peace and be of good behaviour.
Justice Judith Beaman was told that Parkinson committed the first fraud on March 16 when he hired a Blue Line Taxi in Ottawa and had the cabbie drive him to Gananoque.
Upon arrival, however, Parkinson got out of the cab and disappeared into Gananoque's Bell Tower Mall, according to assistant Crown attorney John Skoropada, leaving the cab driver on the hook for the $370 fare.
Skoropada said Parkinson was subsequently arrested for the crime but police released him without requiring him to seek bail from a justice of the peace. Instead, he signed an undertaking agreeing to obey the law while waiting for his day in court.
On Nov. 1, however, Beaman was told Parkinson repeated his crime, albeit for a much smaller amount, this time with an Amey's Taxi in Kingston.
Skoropada said Parkinson took a trip from Division Street to College Street, running up $13.90 on the meter. The judge was told he was more brazen the second time around, however. When he got to where he wanted to go, Skoropada said, he got out of the cab, told the driver, "I'm not paying," and left.
As a result, Parkinson ended up spending 34 days in pretrial custody before entering his pleas and his defence lawyer, John Dillon, said his client's wife finally decided she'd had enough and left him.
Dillon also told the judge Parkinson suffered abuse as a youth in the Maritimes and is currently in therapy where "he hopes to get to the bottom of his criminal behaviour."
Parkinson had been in Ottawa looking for a job, according to his lawyer, when he committed the first fraud.
Dillon said his client didn't have any money to get home to Brockville but he hoped when he got into the cab in Ottawa that a friend in Gananoque would pay for his ride. Unfortunately, the friend wasn't home, according to Dillon.
The defence lawyer offered no explanation for his client's reprisal of the offence last month but the judge was assured that Parkinson wants to make restitution.
"I want to get out and grab this right by the horns and get my life straightened out," Parkinson told her.
Beaman agreed to accept the lawyers' joint recommendation on sentencing, but she didn't sound optimistic.
"You have an unbelievably bad record," she told him, for like offences, violence and drugs.
suey@thewhig.com
Copyright © 2010 The Whig Standard
A 46-year old man who developed an aversion to paying for his taxi rides has been sentenced to jail for 26 days and placed on probation for a year.
In addition, Samuel W. Parkinson was ordered Friday to pay the $383.90 he owes taxi drivers in Kingston and Ottawa after he pleaded guilty in Kingston's Ontar io Court of Justice to two counts of transportation fraud and violating a police-issued release undertaking by failing to keep the peace and be of good behaviour.
Justice Judith Beaman was told that Parkinson committed the first fraud on March 16 when he hired a Blue Line Taxi in Ottawa and had the cabbie drive him to Gananoque.
Upon arrival, however, Parkinson got out of the cab and disappeared into Gananoque's Bell Tower Mall, according to assistant Crown attorney John Skoropada, leaving the cab driver on the hook for the $370 fare.
Skoropada said Parkinson was subsequently arrested for the crime but police released him without requiring him to seek bail from a justice of the peace. Instead, he signed an undertaking agreeing to obey the law while waiting for his day in court.
On Nov. 1, however, Beaman was told Parkinson repeated his crime, albeit for a much smaller amount, this time with an Amey's Taxi in Kingston.
Skoropada said Parkinson took a trip from Division Street to College Street, running up $13.90 on the meter. The judge was told he was more brazen the second time around, however. When he got to where he wanted to go, Skoropada said, he got out of the cab, told the driver, "I'm not paying," and left.
As a result, Parkinson ended up spending 34 days in pretrial custody before entering his pleas and his defence lawyer, John Dillon, said his client's wife finally decided she'd had enough and left him.
Dillon also told the judge Parkinson suffered abuse as a youth in the Maritimes and is currently in therapy where "he hopes to get to the bottom of his criminal behaviour."
Parkinson had been in Ottawa looking for a job, according to his lawyer, when he committed the first fraud.
Dillon said his client didn't have any money to get home to Brockville but he hoped when he got into the cab in Ottawa that a friend in Gananoque would pay for his ride. Unfortunately, the friend wasn't home, according to Dillon.
The defence lawyer offered no explanation for his client's reprisal of the offence last month but the judge was assured that Parkinson wants to make restitution.
"I want to get out and grab this right by the horns and get my life straightened out," Parkinson told her.
Beaman agreed to accept the lawyers' joint recommendation on sentencing, but she didn't sound optimistic.
"You have an unbelievably bad record," she told him, for like offences, violence and drugs.
suey@thewhig.com
Copyright © 2010 The Whig Standard
Monday, December 06, 2010
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