Corrections to Yesterday's Post and an Apology

I was proud of myself yesterday for getting a post out in less than three hours. 

Unfortunately, much of the information in it was not correct. I later had a conversation with Director Chris Hayashi who noted the changes below.

          1.  Dan Hara will not have his report finished by the end of the week so the MTA Board won’t discuss it until the July 16th.

2.    The most important proposal for the June 18, 2013 Board meeting will concern the legalities for the sale of medallions to drivers on the Waiting List.

Electronic Taxi Access

The anonymous commenter to yesterday’s post was partially right but Director Hayashi actually had a couple of meeting on Friday and Monday that included not only managers from Desoto, Luxor and Yellow but reps from Flywheel and Taxi Magic as well. Changes in how ETA will function will result from these meetings but these revisions will not necessarily be as nefarious as anonymous thinks.

The final formulation is still a long way off but here are some of the features or principles that ETA will include or follow:

• ·      The orders will be offered through the PIM monitors instead of separate smart phones.
•     Only apps like Flywheel or Taxi Magic with at least a 1,000 customers will be accepted by the system. 
•     Yellow Cab will probably sign up with Taxi Magic.
•      Dispatching services like City Wide Dispatch with a large number of customers will be included in the system.
•     Dispatching services with less than 100 customers will probably be dropped.
•     The orders from the individual apps will be integrated so that two different taxis won’t be sent to the same address.
•     The same app company cannot dispatch both limos and taxis so the Uber’s taxi app will probably bite the dust. I’m adding the bold assumption that companies dispatching bogus “ridesharing services” will likewise not be allowed to dispatch taxis in SF. Goodbye Instant Cab. May you take your Georgia Tech degrees and do something useful (not to mention legal) with them in the future.
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  A guiding principle for Flywheel and Taxi Magic is that they want “quality” drivers rather than a sheer numbers. In short, they want people who will pick up orders instead of taking a dispatched hail and then blowing it off to grab the first flag they see.

I’m also in favor of this principle. The execution, however, leaves something to be desired – at least with Flywheel. They are much too draconian. I’m being held off their service right now because their app didn’t work properly and I was forced to take cash. I was held off earlier because their GPS gave me the wrong location and I cancelled the order after I took it. When I call them up, I usually get some twenty-two year old techie who cheerfully tells me something like, “Yea – lots of you guys complain about that.”

I would hope that Director Hayashi would use the June 11^th Town Hall Meeting (since it won’t covering Hara et al) for a face to face between Flywheel and Taxi Magic and their drivers. I think it’s time they re-design their software with the end users in mind.

 Finally, I'd like to apologize to President and General Manager of Luxor Cab, John Lazar, for calling him a dinosaur yesterday. He's clearly more in tune with the future than I gave him credit for. Indeed, he's making it. Sorry Mr. Lazar.