Chris Hayashi: More Appreciation

I owe Deputy Director Christiane Hayashi an apology for the limp article I wrote yesterday in her defense. I was trying to walk on egg shells and sidestep the critics. What a joke! To act is to create critics.

Let me make a correction: Hayashi is the best thing to happen to the cab industry in the twenty-seven years that I've been in it. And, if you don't like it, you can suck those egg shells.

I was speaking to a MTA official yesterday who said that she thought Hayashi was doing a pretty good job. That's like saying Beethoven was a pretty good pianist.

Putting the Pilot Plan together was not a "pretty good job" it was an impossible feat. The only other person who I thought might have been able to bring the taxi industry together would have been the Obama of 2008.  Maybe you had to be there but I'll try to explain.

The recent protests should give you some idea of how hard it was to put the plan together. For instance, Tariq Mahmood and Brad Newsome are both loudly calling for drivers to strike. They both agree about the 5% but little else. Brad wants to stop the sales of cabs and return to the sentimental days of Prop K while Tariq wants open auctions. How could you make a policy that they will both want out of that?

Hayashi was faced with the same challenge a year and half ago - only it was much more complicated. The sides were:

• Pre-K medallion holders who despised
• Post-K medallion holders who snobbishly looked down upon
• Non-medallion holding drivers not on the Waiting List who hated all medallion holders and disliked 
• Non-medallion holding drivers on the List who, along with all the other groups, hated 
• The owners who hated the medallion holders and each other and, along with all other groups, hated
• The MTA who thought of everyone in the cab business as potential serfs in an endless money stream.

Of course I'm greatly over-simplifying but I'm running out of time. The general wisdom of the day was that nobody could get cab drivers to agree on anything.

Hayashi's dictum was that "everyone will get something but no one will get everything they want."

She listened to everyone's ideas and gradually crafted the plan out of the hostility and chaos using an awesome blend of creativity and critical analysis. She put plan after plan up on her famous white boards, constantly crossing ideas out, adding other ideas, merging thoughts - always working toward something everyone could accept, if not love. Day by day, meeting by meeting, the boards changed as if they were blank music sheets being worked and re-worked by a master composer. In the end, only the UTW failed to go along and they still got a Driver's Fund and a Waiting List left intact.

But what about those damn back-seat terminals?

Once again, Hayashi wanted the back-seat terminals put in because she had been led to believe that the VeriFone prompting system would make the cab drivers way more money than the 5% they would spent on credit card charges. The jury is still out on this but, if she's wrong, she's wrong. It's not a crime.

When she discovered that many drivers did not like the back-seat terminals and hated the 5% she looked around and found Square as a 2.75% alternative.

Perhaps the greatest quality that Chris Hayashi has is her flexibility. If you show her a better option she'll more than likely go for it.

The Town Hall Meeting starts in about an hour. Let her know what you think. She's a great listener.

I don't time to proof this because I have to make the meeting. My apologies for any errors.