Thoughts on Electronic Taxi Acess (ETA)

Director Christiane Hayashi would have had an easier time with the measure if she'd simply pushed for the Electronic Taxi Access part without including additional data collection. But the Director thinks the information to be gained will be invaluable in helping her regulate the taxi industry and she's never been one to back down from a fight if she thought she was right.

On the other hand, Yellow and Luxor killed a similar measure two years ago so she would have had a battle in any case.

I supported ETA, despite a few reservations about personal privacy, because I think this may be our only chance to get a universal dispatching system. And, without universal dispatch, we'll never be able to compete with Uber and the TNC's (Twit & Nerd Carriers).

Company Opposition

Hansu Kim, President of Desoto Cab, told me that he favored a universal App but was against the Frias Transportation Infrastructure (FTI) platform. He said that FTI had refused to co-operate with San Francisco taxi companies and that the taxi companies had offered their data to FTI but the tech company had refused to give them the technology necessary to transfer their data. He also seemed to fear that FTI (an offshoot of Frias Transportation which runs cab companies in Las Vegas) would try to take over the local business.

The compromise with the SFMTA would appear to render Kim's first objection moot. If the San Francisco companies provide the data necessary for ETA, FTI would have to provide the necessary technology to use it or loose their software contact.

As for Frias taking over ... I guess that is a legitimate concern. However, Hayashi has said that the contract with FTI includes clauses that will prevent them from entering the taxi business in San Francisco.

Down Dinosaur Walk

Nate Dwiri of Yellow cab presented his usual set of dubious statistics at the Board meeting and then pulled my-favorite-all-time-argument-for-more-taxis out of his cellar. He claimed that Yellow was unable fill their dispatch orders which proved (for him) that the city needs more cabs. In other words, he used Yellow's incompetence as a reason for the SFMTA to help him make more money. There is much to be said about this:

1. Sources tell me that, for years, Yellow has deliberately been holding calls in order create the stats that Dwiri gave out at the meeting. In short, Yellow has been deliberately giving poor service so that the city will give them more medallions. Bizarre – but entirely possible under the gate system.
2. Although I don't have definitive proof for the above assertion, the information gleamed from Yelp on Yellow shows that there are drastic problems with Yellow's dispatching service. Out of 91 Yelp reviews, 6 were positive. 80 of the reviews were negative, giving only one star (out of a possible 5). Many of these reviewers expressed regret that they couldn't give a negative rating. 
3. Yellow can't come close to filling their shifts now. Where would Mr. Dwiri park additional cabs?
4. Mr. Dwiri does not drive cabs anymore. If he did he would realize that that there already are far too many taxis on the street most of the time. 
5. I spent a couple of hours with Taxi Services' inspectors last Saturday night (see future post) and we watched empty cabs following each other down Mission and Polk streets while Lyft and Sidecars were picking up right and left. Why? The customers had hailed the same TNC's that had picked them up at home and taken them there.

Charles Rathbone of Luxor Cab, on the other hand, argued that Luxor didn't want to provide the city with their data because their dispatching system gave them a leg up on their competitors.

I guess he means Desoto, Yellow, ect. More to the point might be Bay Cab.

Mr. Rathbone has expressed anger with me in the past for calling Luxor a dinosaur. But I don't know what other comparison to make: Neandrathal? Denisovan (early hominoids who had sex with Neandrathals)? Or, for a non-extinct species, the Ostrich?

Cab companies competing with each other is as relevant to the problems facing the taxi industry today as the Warring States Period of Ancient China is to modern geopolitics.

The real game today is taxi companies vs Uber & the TNC's. It's how to win back the hearts and minds of the riding public. The only way to succeed is to take back our turf in the outer districts and the only way to do that is a universal dispatching system. The only brand that's important for us now is Taxicabs.

Although many companies are against ETA, most drivers are for it, and I have yet to meet a customer who didn't find the idea "awesome."

We win those customers back and they'll be plenty of business for everybody.

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.