How Demoting Christiane Hayashi Backfired

To briefly summarize:

San Francisco voters approved Proposition K in 1978 which put an end of the sale of taxi medallions.

San Francisco voters passed Proposition A in November 2007 giving the Board of Supervisors the option of transferring the powers of the Taxi Commission to the SFMTA. The Supervisors did so and the SFMTA took over the regulation of the taxi industry on March 1, 2009.

In January of 2009, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had promised not to put medallions up for sale if Proposition A passed, came out with a plan to take all the taxis medallions away from the current medallion holders and sell them in order to cover San Francisco's $500 million dollar debt.

How to Stop Illegal Taxis and Limos

Actually - it ain't that hard. I mean, it's not like the phony roadsters are difficult to find.

This is what you might call a classic illegal vehicle. Is it a cab? Is is limo? Or, is it both a cab and a limo?

Whatever - this one's been around for a couple of years, apparently unmolested by any form of enforcement or the police.

As the old saying goes, "where there is a will there is a way." But if there is no will, what you get are illegal limo/taxis.

Sometimes they actually look like cabs. But the one below is lacking the Yellow triangle and has a disconnected phone number.

Sometimes they just steal a name and splash on an approximate color.

Sometimes they don't try hard enough. This one stole Luxor's colors but gave it a generic name.

 If you look closely you can see 401 on the front door and 778 near the back.

"Yellow" is popular word for naming pseudo taxis but it covers a wide variety of sins.

Some of these vehicles might be legal in places like Marin.

Some are just plan ridiculous.

The phone number on the above faux taxi actually did work. The guy who answered wouldn't tell me what city he was in but he did say that he was no longer in the cab business.

Whatever their virtues or lack thereof, these illegal vehicles all have 3 things in common:

1. They don't pay business taxes - at least not in San Francisco.
2. They don't pay license fees in San Francisco.
3. Insurance companies void auto polices if the vehicles are used as taxis or for illegal activities. Therefore, people riding in these vehicles are not insured. 

The SFPD talks a good game when it comes to illegal cab and limo enforcement but the truth is that they're just too busy. In fact they are so busy that they can't seem to gave a ticket to an illegal vehicle unless they're paying themselves overtime.

In May 2010, Chief Murphy promised us a direct line that we could use to report illegal vehicles. As of this morning, nine months later, he still hasn't found the time to set up that phone number.

I checked with the police and you can call 311 to report an illegal taxi although the officer I spoke with thought that 311 was more for complaints about real taxis.

When you call 311 they are very polite and what they do is politely pass your complaint on to the "Taxi Commission" - which no longer exists.  

We cab drivers know either where the illegal taxis and limos are or where they are likely to show up. All we need are a few good men and women who have the will, the authority and a systematic plan to put these clowns out of business.

If the Board of Supervisors passes Taxi Services Director Christiane Hayashi's proposed changes in the transportation code on March 1, 2011, that's exactly what Taxi Services should be able to do.

A Breathe of Fresh Air

At a Taxi Town Hall meeting on 3/10/09, Chris Hayashi, the new Director of San Francisco's Taxis and Available Services showed herself to be a refreshing change from her predecessor on the Taxi Commission, Heidi Machen. Whereas Machen had treated the drivers with overbearing arrogance and privately referred to them as "either criminals or people who soon would be,"  Ms. Hayashi clearly regarded a room full of owners and drivers as respected equals.

She discussed and listened to their opinions concerning the various plans to change how the taxi industry operates in San Francisco.  After a general conversation about possible scenarios, she led an examination of  proposed taxicab rules in the San Francisco Transportation Code.

Ms. Hayashi either changed or eliminated several provisions that drivers objected to including an obscene "snitch" rule that would have taken away the medallion of any owner who had failed to turn in another owner whom he or she knew to have been arrested or convicted of a crime. Such rules have a long, inglorious history and have been used by people as diverse as the commie dictator Joseph Stalin, the anti-commie witch-hunter Joe McCarthy and the Christian Brothers of Cretin High as techniques to humiliate and destroy their enemies. Heidi would have loved it. 

However, the subject that aroused the most passion among the drivers, limousines, wasn't even supposed to be on the agenda. Ms. Hayashi kept telling drivers that it would be discussed at a future date but, they kept bringing the subject up, so she finally promised that the Taxi Detail was going to hunt down, punish and eliminate illegal limos in San Francisco. Among other ideas, she proposed impounding their cars for 30 days when limo drivers were caught violating a law. "That should put a stop to them," she said with a smile.

Hayashi's attitude and approach stands in such sharp contrast to the Mayor's arrogance and indifference toward cab drivers' fates that I can't help wondering what's really happening. 

Historically, Mayors like Diane Feinstein and Willie Brown have used commissions and hearings as way to rubber stamp their own plans while giving them the veneer of democratic processes.

This does not appear to be what is going on here. Or is it? No one I've met has a bad word to say about Chris Hayashi, but it's unclear as to how much power she actually has. It may be that she's an unwitting pawn in an elaborate good cop/bad cop scheme designed by Newsom.