A New Denver Cab Company
Welcome news! According to the December 30 Rocky Mountain News a new taxi company will be roaming the streets of Denver soon.
Union Taxi, founded by formers drivers and operators of other local cab companies, has received initial approval to commence business with a maximum of 220 cabs at any given time. (That number required by PC regulation.)
This is good news for folks like me who live close enough to downtown to walk or bike places at night, but prefer a taxi come real late or in the dead of winter.
Denver currently has two large taxi companies: Yellow and Metro Taxi. There’s also Freedom Cab, which is seen around town but in far fewer numbers. A fourth, Taxi Fiesta, is relatively new and targets the Latino community. All of these are regulated by the public utilities commission, which controls demand, and therefore ultimately doesn’t foster much competition or reason to improve service.
From my experience drivers are friendly and dependent once you are IN a cab, but getting a cab to your door is more burdensome, and on the streets it’s often difficult to accomplish this at night.
In many big cities you can step out of a restaurant on any major street and hail a cab. That’s not done as much in Denver. Procedure is to call first, give your name and address, then a cab shows up 5, 10 or however many minutes later. Again a roadblock of the regulatory nature, but it also creates a buffer of safety for drivers by having dispatch collect a name and number. Many including myself ignore this in the downtown area and flag cabs anyway, and available drivers will pick them up if not en route to a call. And on weekend nights downtown I’ve picked up a cab quicker by flagging one than calling.
With flagging a cab however comes spotty following of the rules. There have been situations where drivers have declined passengers based on distance. (Few drivers want a short hop.) Profiling by appearance comes into account when hailing a cab, and on busy nights cabs can be extremely hard to come by.
Taxi drivers worry about a flood of cabs eating into their slim margins. It’s not an easy job, and long hours are worked to squeeze out a profit. But I do I believe that with more competition, and perhaps someday deregulation, Denver’s service will be a step closer to being “world class.”
I’ve driven a cab for 4 years in two different cities, Las Vegas and Nantucket, MA…and I know what it’s to have too many cabs on the road. The problem comes when theres too many during slow times and not enough during busy times. Vegas would have different types of “medallions” that tried to combat that problem. They also made it illegal for cabs to refuse a ride because of destination (as long as you had a destination). However, in Vegas, drivers were employees as opposed to independent contractors, so the companies were always pushing for more cabs. And there were too many during my time there.
Nantucket was much smaller, but they used a principle that worked alot better. Find a cab driver you like and call them personally. I always went out of my way to pick up regulars, because at least you knew they were going to tip you. That’s why I set up my website, http://www.askacabbie.com. Cab drivers and passengers can find each other, FOR FREE – (this isn’t spam). If people started treating cabbies the same way they treat other professional services (like professionals), we would be able to get rid of the cabbies that rip you off, or don’t know what they are doing, and the # of cabs on the road wouldn’t be an issue. Cabbies could compete the same way everybody does in our American capitalist society – may the best cabbie win.