Chris Hayashi & the Wisdom of Solomon

Director of Taxi Services Christiane Hayashi has had an extraordinary impact on the cab business that goes far beyond anything you might reasonably expect from an administrator.

Her uniqueness become evident to me the first time I saw her at a Medallion Holder Association (MHA) meeting in 2009, shortly after Mayor Gavin Newsom had threatened steal all the taxi medallions and sell them to cover San Francisco's $500 million debt.

What struck me about her was the absolute absence of any sense of snobbery or superiority of rank.

Maybe I can best get my idea across by contrasting her behavior to that of MTA Board Member Bruce Oka who also came to the meeting. Oka was all smiles but he also let us know how important he was. He told us that he was in a hurry and could only stay a little while. He also hinted at inside knowledge of Newsom's plans that he couldn't quite express to us. In short, he acted like people of position usually do when glad-handing the lower classes.

Hayashi, who undoubtedly knew more about Newsom's plans than Oka did, simply sat down next to a few drivers and talked to them like they were fellow human beings. I've rarely seen anybody who held power over others act so modestly.

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.

A Change in TAC ... tics?

There were three new faces on the Taxi Advisory Council on Monday who are likely to mean a change in direction. Until now, the TAC has pretty much been an owner's council. But the addition of Rua Graffis, Tara Housman and Tone Lee seems certain to challenge that dynamic.


Ms Graffis (Left) is a leader of the United Taxicab Workers (UTW) and has spent over thirty years fighting for driver's rights. She replaces non-medallion holder not on the list, Timothy Ajaegbu, who regularly missed council meetings.





Mrs. Housman (Middle photo) is a medallion holder who also takes a driver's point of view. As she pointed out at the meeting, medallion holders can also be drivers. She replaces Laurie Graham who routinely gave Yellow Cab a second vote.

Tone Lee is a leader among the drivers at the airport. He replaces Dmitry Nazarov who was a lease driver at Luxor Cab and has bought his own medallion. Nazarov, who was supposed to be representing drivers on the list, voted with President John Lazar of Luxor Cab absolutely every time.


All three of the new councilors have regularly attended and spoken at TAC meetings so that they are already up to speed. 


When you add another recent addition, Richard Hybels (owner of Metro Cab who is well-known as a maverick that sometimes sides with drivers) to the mix, the council promises to be much more evenly balanced than it has been in the past.


Council Business


The council voted to have Chair Chris Sweis and Vice Chair Barry Korengold continue in their positions for another six months.


Driver's Fund


The main subject for discussion was, what to do with the drivers fund?


This was the first time that the council has seriously discussed the issue and it was primarily a brainstorming session. The councilors generally agreed that the sum of money (currently $1,462,500) was too small to pay for medical or retirement benefits. Some ideas put forward for the fund's use were:

• Scholarships for the children of drivers.
• Catastrophic insurance.
• Benefits for injured or traumatized drivers who needed time off from work.

Councilor Barry Korengold introduced a plan to use a 25 cent drop fee to build the fund more quickly but the drivers could not use their share unless they were vested for 5 years.

Christopher Fulkerson liked the idea in general but thought that the fund should be invested in an IRA that drivers could access whenever they wanted.


Tone Lee wanted to set up a lottery that would pay $100 to fifty drivers every two weeks on the provision that they showed up at TAC to collect it.

In the end, the council voted for a motion make by TAC member and general manager of Desoto Cab, Athan Rebelos, to make certain that the funds would be managed by the beneficiaries (i.e. the cab drivers) and not the MTA.