Flywheel Amps Up Together with the MTA

Cab drivers are worse gossips than small town sewing circles so let's start with a few rumors.

One had it that Uber had bought out Flywheel. A more recent canard claimed that Flywheel changed its name from Cabulous to get "cab" out of the title because they intended to begin a peer to peer taxi service ala Summon.

I spoke with CEO Steve Humphreys (photo left) about this and he said that Uber would buy Flywheel "over my dead body." He also said that he had no interest in starting a ride-share operation because he thinks that taxis will win out in the long run. Insurance and the superiority of trained taxi drivers over untrained amateurs, in his opinion, will carry the day.

Humphreys, a man with an engaging smile and infectous enthusiasm, agreed with the thought that once the accidents start adding up, "the other options won't look so attractive."

Flywheel Partnering with the SFMTA

Starting tomorrow, June1, 2014, Taxi Services will be running a series of advertisements boosting the taxicab business in which Flywheel will get prominent mention.

This, course, is the brainchild of Director Christiane Hayashi who was the person who first introduced Flywheel (then Cabulous) to San Francisco taxi drivers almost four years ago.  Humphreys has been working closely together with Hayashi and Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin to make the marketing effort pay off.

The promotion will go at least through June and possibly longer.

Chris Hayashi Goes Out in Song

In keeping with her tradition of never quite doing anything like anyone else, the former Director of Taxi Services Christiane Hayashi (as the White Rabbit in photo) turned her retirement party into a buffet concert.

The food, which was contributed by people from Russia, Brazil, Africa and Latin America among other places, would've fed four times the hundred or so of Chris's friends who stopped by.

The bands which came from Burma, Russia, Africa, Brazil among other countries played rock music as well as works from their native lands. Each was better than the other and they were all good. Several musicains also played with other groups.

Against the CPUC Ruling: A Protest in Pictures

Nobody gave a talk so I thought I'd let the drivers speak for themselves.

Jamming the Streets with Lyft, Sidecar, Uber & the Illegals

Taxi Services investigator Eric Richholt invited me to ride with him and his partner Andres Martinez so I could photo & videograph the gridlock caused by a couple of thousand unregulated, fake cabs on the Friday and Saturday nights.

"You wouldn't believe it," he said. "People should see this."

"Is it worse than last time we went out?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah."

MTA Board Tables Gate Increase, OK's Cancellation Fee

The SFMTA Board under the direction of President Tom Nolan (photo) put off a proposed meter increase of $9.75 per shift but authorized dispatching services to charge a cancellation fee of up to $10 for no-goes and allowed cab drivers to charge a flat fee of up to $11 per person for shared rides. The Board also amended several sections of the transportation code with the aim of putting an end to illegal brokering.


The Gate Increase ...

... was the most hotly debated item on the agenda. Its presence there was also a little weird.

Director of Taxi Services Chris Hayashi, Dr. Dan Hara, Luxor Cab's Charles Rathbone and (maybe) Hansu Kim of Desoto spoke in favor of the item but they all stated that nobody would be raising the gates now. The reason? Taxi companies are losing drivers.

Then, why raise gates? Director Hayashi said that it was part of the process that Dr. Hara and Taxi Services had been working through and that its time was now. She said that it would give owners the flexibility to make future changes – an idea concurred with by Dr. Hara and Mr. Rathbone. Hayashi and Hara pointed out that the gates had not been raised when the meter was raised in 2011 and an increase thus was long overdue.

The Director apparently has a short memory. The reason that the gates were not increased along with the meter was hardly an oversight. It was a quid pro quo to the drivers for charging credit card fees to them instead of the the taxi companies as it had been done before. And, this deal was brokered by Director Hayashi herself.

In my opinion she deserved kudos for this. It was a job well done. The drivers were charged 5% for the credit cards. The companies ate the gate increase. My math showed that the drivers were much better off under this arrangement than they would have been if the companies had continued to pay the credit card fees and upped the gates. Many drivers didn't agree and stopped taking credits cards in protest.

Tuesday's attempt at legislation started out as another quid pro quo thought up by Director Hayashi. This time she intended to balance things up by finally giving the companies their meter increase at the same time as she removed credit card fees from the drivers by passing a fee onto the riding public.

Fine – except for the ancient wisdom that "you don't raise the price of gas during a gas war."

In the end, Hayashi understood that and nixed the idea of out of raising the drop on the meter but she somehow missed out on a few other cliques.

Raising the gates would be like throwing gasoline on the fire of the drivers' frustration and adding insult to injury from a city whose mayor has slapped cab drivers in the face by embracing illegal taxis.

I don't how the Director failed to see the despairing effect that the mere mention of a gate increase would have on the drivers at this time. Maybe she needs to broaden her circle of advisors.

In any case, several drivers, including myself, expressed our frustrations at the meeting. The general opinion was that raising the gates would chase cab drivers out of the business at an even faster rate then they are leaving now.

The SFMTA Board – especially Director Cristina Rubke and President Nolan – discussed the subject at length with Director Hayash and Dr. Hara before finally deciding to go ahead with the rest of the agenda and putting off a possible gate increase for another six months.

Wise choice.

In my humble (Ha ha – have you ever met a humble cab driver?) opinion, any gate increase should be another quid pro quo. When passengers are ready to pay an electronics fee to cover credit card charges, the companies can get their gate increase ... assuming of course that the arcane and antiquated gate system is still around.

How can this come about? How can we compete? Complicated questions? The cancellation fee is a step in the right direction. The universal app will be another. With 2,000 taxis on the same system we can start taking back the business we've lost.

Meter Increase??? Gate Increase??? No-Go Fee. Technology Fee. ETA.

All the above and more were discussed at a recent Town Hall meeting.

On May 31, 2013 Dan Hara will be handing in his final recommendations, which will include whether or not there should be gate and/or meter increases. There will be Town Hall meetings to discuss the issues on June 11th and the MTA Board will look at and possibly vote on the proposals on June 18, 2013.

Not to editorialize but:

 1. No businesspeople in their right minds would raise their rates when they are being successfully underpriced by their competition.

2. It's time to get rid of gate fees and replace them with a split of the meter. I've been saying this ever since I was first hired by Yellow Cab and saw the corruption and incompetence that the gates & gas system caused. And I repeated my ideas to the MTA the moment they took over. The bottom line is that a gate system makes leasing to drivers the business of cab companies - not picking up customers.

There are companies like Desoto, Luxor and Green who consciously try to give good service but they are in the minority. I won't rant about the details. I've already done this enough. The primary problem is simply that the profits and losses of the companies are not directly linked to the amount of business that they do. If the meter were split, the MTA wouldn't have to conduct arcane studies to find out which companies were good and which were bad. All that would take care of itself - and service to the public would drastically improve.

I've said this so often that I sound like a crank but the future lies with me. (See Uber. It might also be a good idea to take a Business 101 course along with a double dose of common sense.)

Electronic Taxi Access (ETA) et al.

I didn’t catch the entire meeting and Director Chris Hayashi (photo, hand) was still presenting the proposals when I left so I can’t give definitive summary. The final plan won’t be presented until May 31^st but the following covers what little I do understand of the system.

1. All available taxis will appear on the map of a customer’s smartphone.
2. The MTA itself will create no app but rather will co-ordinate hails from Flywheel, Uber's taxi app and other legal apps.

3. All the information from the individual apps will be routed through a central system in order to appear on the smartphone.

3. The exception will be calls to dispatch services and e-hails from single company apps like Luxor or Desoto’s.

     A. However, these calls and e-hails will be integrated with the ETA system so that only one cab will be sent to each order.

In other words, this will be the centralized dispatch system that drivers have spent thirty years lobbying for.

In addition:

1. The App Fees will be paid by the customer.

2. There will be a Technology Fee to be paid by the customer instead of credit card processing fees paid by the drivers.

3. A $10 No Go fee also will be automatically deducted from customers’ credit card if they aren’t there.

4. The “Response Time Fee” listed on the white board above is being renamed a “Premier Service Fee.” It will be paid to a driver if his or her taxi gets to a customer within a promised time like under ten or fifteen minutes. Yes this does mean that a driver will get a bonus picking up a ride in time.

Needless to say there are criticisms:

1. ETA won’t improve service because taxi drivers will take a flag before they will take a dispatched call. As the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Well, that depends upon the birds in question doesn't it? Seriously, if you think about it, you are often closer to dispatched calls - unless you spend all your time in Union Square.

Take my situation for instance. I start driving from the inner Bayview at 4 pm. It takes me five minutes to get to the area around Zynga and Adobe where I can pick up flags, and another three to five minutes to get to either Market Street or the cabstand at Cal Trans. All that time I'm within five minute or less of dozens of businesses where people might want taxis.

The unwritten rule is that a driver shouldn't take dispatched calls during rush hour because most of them will be No Go's. The reasons for this are that you don't how old the orders are and the people have probably called three or four companies.

With ETA both these problems disappear. Your cab will be the only one sent to the order and you'll get the No Go fee if the party isn't there. In addition, with all hails going through one dispatch system, you'll have at a minimum of three times more orders to choose from.

2. This will discriminate against people without smart phones or with Paratransit cards.

The orders will be dispatched in such a way that a driver can’t tell what type of order it is.

3. If so, drivers won't take the hails because they might not get a No Go fee.

This comes from the meeting. Cab drivers, man. So many of us look only at the empty side of the hourglass. Eighty per cent of the people in S.F. have smart phones and people who don't have them don't take as many taxis as people who do. Furthermore, No Go's on Paratransit rides are rare. 

The percentage of No Go's will be extremely rare on with ETA and the odds of getting the fee if the customer isn't there are better than 90%.

The Age of the Dinosaurs...

... reputedly passed over 65 million years ago but a few survivors are hanging on in the taxicab business in the personas of John Lazar and the management of Yellow Cab.

Mr. Lazar reputedly killed Open Taxi Access a few years back and is out to waste ETA as well. The problem for him is that it's not as easy to buy politicians as it was back in the day. With Lyft and Uber on the scene the price of corruption has sky rocketed.

On the other hand, maybe Lazar is getting a kickback from Uber and Lyft. The balkanization of the dispatching services in this town is what opened the floodgates for the illegal apps in the first place. The adoption of an ETA system would be the best weapon we could possibly use against them.

But the President and General Manager of Luxor Cab is still living back in the Jurassic Age when the companies with the most medallions necessarily made the biggest profit. If he succeeds, all he's likely to win today is a large cut of a dying industry.

MTA Board Okays Electronic Taxi Access

The SFMTA Board unanimously approved Electronic Taxi Access (ETA) which will lead to the development of a platform allowing smart phone apps to show all the available taxis in San Francisco on a single map.

Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin (photo), who introduced the measure, said that he thought ETA should have been implemented two years ago.

President John Lazar and Charles Rathbone of Luxor Cab along with Nate Dwiri and Bill Gillespie of Yellow Cab spoke against the measure as did a spokesman for Taxi Magic. They talked about the money that they had spent developing wonderful apps of their own which made a universal app unnecessary. Gillespie said that Yellow was working on a new advanced app that would let drivers talk directly to the customers.

Well ... I could talk to customers on Cabulous (now Flywheel) three years ago which is my way of pointing out that much of what these companies are doing is re-inventing the wheel. In any case, most of their innovations are beside the point. The creation of multiple apps from multiple companies merely exacerbates the problem of the customers having too many choices with no way of knowing what the best choice is.

ETA will allow the customers to find the closest available cab and will eliminate the problem of two or three cabs from different companies going to the same address. This should greatly reduce the dreaded no-go, free up more cabs to pick up more orders and lead to better coverage in the neighborhoods.  It's best idea to improve service that anybody has come up with in the thirty years I've been in the taxi business.

The details of how this will be implemented have yet to be worked out. After the Board meeting, Director Chris Hayashi said that she will be holding meetings involving Frias Transportation Infrastructure, the cab companies and the public as to how best to implement the technology. Issues such as allowing companies to keep their own dispatch systems and brands as well as pre-tipping will be studied and discussed.

Too Many Cabs

The indefatigable Tariq Mehmood brought in somewhere around fifty drivers to speak against more cabs and Electronic Waybills. He handed out a script that they were supposed to follow which ended with a call for Tariq's favorite fetish - firing Director Hayashi. It turned out that Electoronic Waybills were Okayed by the Board over a year ago and were not on the agenda. As for Hayashi ... apparently only a couple of drivers shared Mehmood's weird obsession.

What most of the drivers did speak about was the decline of income caused by unfair competition from the illegal, uninsured vehicles of Lyft and Sidecar etc. Many drivers said that their were making 50% less than they were making a year ago. One driver said that he had started driving for Uber but quit and went back to Yellow after Uber put out so many fake cabs that his income at Uber dropped in half. Medallion holders spoke about being unable to find drivers to fill shifts. A little humor was injected by a driver named Ben who talked about a date that didn't go too well with a woman who turned out to be a Lyft driver.

Director Ed Reiskin, who is apparently powerless to go anything about this, suggested that the drivers tell their tales at the CPUC hearings that begin on April 10th.

Good idea.

Electronic Taxi Access

Kudos to Director Christiane Hayashi. For over thirty years cab drivers have wanted a universal dispatching system in San Francisco. Thanks to the Director, this dream is finally being realized.

Of course such a system was really impossible thirty years ago because the technology for it didn't exist. And, while said technology has existed for the last five years or so (Remember Open Taxi Access?), the political landscape was not ready for such a venture. To spell this out in plain English - the good ol' corrupt boys' network kept it from happening.

But, thanks to Hayshi's persistence in overcoming hurdles  (including the MTA Board's indifference, opposition from Luxor and Yellow cab companies, mindless personal attacks, cab driver paranoia and the Byzantine weirdness of the MTA) the idea is about to come to fruition as Electronic Taxi Access (ETA).

Under ETA, all apps would be required to show all the available cabs in San Francisco thus allowing the customers to choose the closest taxis on their smart phone apps. The benefits of this have been immediately obvious to every customer I've discussed the subject with but I'll spell them out anyway.

The customers will no longer have to guess which company (or companies) to call or hail because they will able to know what cabs are nearest to them. The taxis will be color coded by company so the customers can also select companies that they prefer. Coupled with pre-tipping or similar perks this should pretty much insure that the customers will get a ride in the shortest possible time.

The drivers will get the similar benefits. A Desoto driver will no longer have to go back downtown empty from the Richmond or the Sunset because a customer one block away from him or her called a Luxor and visa versa.

The balkanization of the cab industry into competing dispatching fiefdoms is one major reason that Uber et al have had such an easy time taking away our business. Drivers have been reticent to go into the neighborhoods because they have been afraid of no-goes caused by customers calling several taxi companies at once.

Electronic Taxi Access will help make us competitive again while improving service to the neighborhoods.

President Hansu Kim of Desoto Cab, on the other hand, is concerned that his company might lose its distinct brand with this system. While he agrees that all electronic hailing should be linked, Desoto is developing an app of its own which he thinks will give the public better service than anybody else in the business. He does not think that his app should be required to show taxis from cab companies that have invested nothing to improve service.

I wonder if this is as serious problem as he thinks it is? The color coding should distinguish Desoto from the other companies and, if his drivers continue to give superior service, customers will select them over the opposition and they should continue to make more money and want to stay with Desoto. If his app is really good customers will go to it to choose his cabs first. In addition, Desoto drivers will have the benefit of getting rides from other apps.

A Request for Information was put out a few months ago and the bid to create ETA was won by Frias Transportation Infrastructure (FTI) of Las Vegas.  FTI was chosen over CMT,  Digital Dispatch, Electronic Connect, Flywheel and Veriphone.