INDUSTRY IN REVIEW

By Don McCurdy

There’s an ap for that

NYC is considering allowing taxi users to hail a cab using smart phone aps. There certainly are numerous companies developing aps for use with taxicabs usually charging the driver or passenger a small fee for each trip.

GPS, part of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars initiative, allows the phone to tell the system where the passenger is waiting with that information being passed to the taxi driver. The interesting part of the story for NYC is that they want to let yellow cabs get smart phone hails also. Since yellow cabs aren’t supposed to be dispatched, just flagged, that kind of blurs the distinction between livery cars and yellow cabs. I guess it will require a new law to override the old law governing the dispatch of yellow cabs. Since the outer borough taxi plan hasn’t gone into effect yet, the yellow cabs might actually gain ground on the livery cars.

I’ll be watching you

Ever watch TV? Sure you have. Ever had TV watch you? Well, if you’re a NYC cabbie you can expect that from your ever popular back seat TV. Yep, the TV in the back seat will be watching for the driver to put an extra charge on you and will alert you, even if the TV is turned off, to that charge. It won’t tell you if the charge is legit or not, just that it has been charged.

An article further reported that 70 of the 50,000 taxicab drivers were suspected of adding bogus tolls on the fare. Let’s see, programming every cab, reporting every toll added, reporting every extra added - all to solve a problem involving .14% of taxi drivers? Now, there’s a government solution to a serious problem. Perhaps, if you nuked the city of New York that would also solve the over 16 ounce drink problem.

Famous last words

Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick isn’t afraid of regulators or competition. Gee, I wish I was that nervy. As a small business owner I know that the wrong regulation at the right time can put my business directly under. EPA, OSHA, the Department of Agriculture, who the hell knows all of the regulations I might be violating. I have to admit though, Uber has broken into some markets I thought they’d have a much tougher time getting into.

My understanding of their approach is that they use vehicles licensed in the locale they are dispatching to, which is not what their competitor Lyft is alleged to be doing in San Francisco. According to a recent article, Lyft is putting pink moustaches on regular cars and dispatching them to do on demand trips at a lower price than Uber. How this is legal in San Francisco I have no idea, but it sure makes their taxicab medallions look worthless. I have long believed that the majority of cities regulate the willing and this appears to bear out that theory.

Speaking of Uber

Al “Everything TLPA” Legasse had a recent op-ed in the Boston Herald. He pointed out that Uber walks and quacks like a taxicab company only they want to be unregulated. "Who wouldn’t", says Al. Well, most of the TLPA members wouldn’t, Al.

The unvarnished truth of taxicab regulation, at least in my opinion, is that it controls entry in the vast majority of cases. When you control entry you limit competition and create a value for the right to do business. You could make the argument that lawyers and doctors also have a cost of entry into the market place, but in Boston it’s actually cheaper to go to law or medical school than it is to buy a taxicab medallion.

Gee, how much is too much regulation? My contention has long been that too much regulation, especially on the entry side, creates a lack of competition, artificially inflates fares and takes money out of the industry. In some cities drivers have become a virtual slave to the taxicab companies because they do not have the ability to start their own company. I guess Al left out that part. While I do believe that Uber should be required to play by the same rules as everyone else I see Uber’s success as a clear demonstration that regulations of transportation services periodically need a review to see if they actually serve the needs of the riding public.

It’s a crackdown

Well, the Nevada Taxicab Authority is cracking down on long hauling! Yawn, yep, that’s right. You boys best get straight this time and I mean it! Every so often the NTA cracks down on long hauling. In the day and age of cell phones I wonder how many cabs you can pull over under the runway before every cab in the city is alerted? I’m going with two. The idea that the fifth offense MIGHT cause you to lose your license really shows the teeth put into solving the problem. Keep in mind that the fifth offense means the fifth time you get caught, not the fifth time you do it. I’ll tell you what worked for me as a company manager, thirty days off for the first offense, doubled each offense. I never had a driver commit a third offense. Get serious.

The “Stupid Tax”

Every now and then I do something wrong. Not just wrong, but obviously wrong. Whatever amount of money it takes to correct my mistake, and it usually does cost, I refer to as the “Stupid Tax.” Right now in the US we are paying an incalculable “Stupid Tax” based on our decisions of the past.

What decisions might those be you wonder? Well, I’m going to fill you in. I’m sixty now so I’ve been through several “emergencies” that the government announced had to be dealt with right away and some even had “crisis” status. The “Cuban Missile Crisis” jumps to mind right off. Well you might say that I’m a bit of a skeptic about “emergencies,” especially when it involves the government using vast sums of tax payer funds to attempt to fix the problem. One such crisis is global warming. Yeah, yeah, I’m a flat earther, but I’m not wanting you to give me your money. If you’re old enough you remember global cooling. That wouldn’t work so they came up with global warming.

You remember the “hockey stick” heat surge that was supposed to happen around 2000? I do, didn’t happen. What did happen was the global whatever nut jobs got smarter and said it would happen in a hundred years, you know, like after we’re all dead. Now every weird weather occurrence is “proof” of global warming. Except that they call it “climate change” now since they got busted stacking the evidence for the global warming con. Think about that, an emergency that isn’t going to happen for a hundred years requires you to give politicians vast powers and piles of cash to save the world. How obvious does a con have to be before we pick it off?

Now, if you told me that the extra two bucks a gallon we’re paying was going to pay down the national debt or send every kid in America to private school I’m good with it, but that’s not what’s happening. We’re sending the money to Hugo Chavez so he can smack talk us. We’re running up the price of a barrel of oil high enough for Iran to finish their nuclear research. We’re shutting down coal plants here, choking off drilling and sending our national wealth to countries that hate us. Instead of generating millions of jobs here we’re loaning money to other countries to promote drilling there. The simple fact is that if we don’t have a vibrant economy here, we’re simply not going to be able to pay for all the government programs. We need to wake up and hire people who will do their job. Or we can simply keep paying the “stupid tax.”



If you have any comments regarding this or any of my articles please feel free to contact me at dmc@mcacres.com. —dmc