By Meagan Kelly
City council’s decision to move to a one-zone taxi system doesn’t fare well with all taxi drivers, especially those downtown who don’t want suburban cab drivers invading their territory.
“The business will be destroyed,” says Abdun Tosha of Capital Taxi.
He is angry that city council voted to implement a new one-zone taxi system that will allow cab drivers to pick up passengers throughout the city.
Under the current three-zone system, taxi drivers in one zone cannot pick up passengers in another zone. This means a driver who picks up a customer in Kanata and drops them off downtown must drive all the way back to Kanata before they can pick up another passenger. Critics say this is inefficient and costly, especially with rising gas prices.
However, downtown cab drivers like Tosha say the new system will actually create more inefficiency.
“It will be a mess,” he says. “Downtown will be crowded.”
He says suburban taxis, with their new-found freedom, will abandon their roots and flock downtown because there is more business there.
This will cause overcrowding in the urban core, and will result in too many taxis and not enough passengers.
Yusef Al Mezel, president of the local Canadian Auto Workers Union, agrees.
“There’s going to be lots of cabs in Centretown. It’s good for the people living in Centretown, they will get good service, but at the same time, there will be lots of traffic and pollution,” he says.
Al Mezel says there are 600 cabs in the Centretown area right now.
He estimates this number will increase to over 1,000 starting in January 2006, when the one-zone bylaw comes into effect.
Michael McDermott, chair of the taxi advisory committee, says there is a financial side to overcrowding as well.
“We’re going to have more service than we need and that will mean less money for the drivers,” he says.
He also says the new system will impact the value of taxicab licence plates.
A suburban cab driver currently pays about $35,000 for a licence, while a downtown driver pays upwards of $100,000. With the new system, licence plate values will equalize, meaning suburban cabbies’ plates will now be worth more and downtown plates worth less. McDermott says this is “just not fair.”
But Hanif Patni, president of the company that owns Blue Line Taxi and Capital Taxi, calls most of these predictions “myths.”
“Services will not be affected, the downtown will not get overly crowded, and the suburbs will have their service, and people will have more choice as a result of the decision that was made,” he says.
Patni says the belief that there will be a flood of taxis into the urban core is “nonsensical” because suburban drivers are not going to abandon the zones where they are familiar with customers and the area. He adds suburban jobs are usually longer, meaning more money, while downtown jobs are more frequent, but are shorter. He says rural drivers will only do business downtown when they need to.
Patni also says suburban service will improve.
“At least 10 to 20 per cent of the cab jobs that the downtown core drivers get today are jobs that actually take those cars out into the suburbs,” he says. In other words, now there will be more cabs able to pick up suburban passengers.
Kozhaya Beaino, a Gloucester taxi driver who has been servicing the area for 10 years, says he is not going to abandon his suburban heritage.
Beaino was involved in talks between the Gloucester union and the city. He says he is happy the city chose the one-zone system.
Beaino says he thinks downtown drivers’ strong reactions to the bylaw can be easily explained.
“They’re afraid of the change,” he says.