Taxicab rates and fares, San Francisco October 2002
Three proposals, discussion and suggestions

San Francisco's taxicab rate of fare is under review at the Board of Supervisors. The current rate became effective in Fall 2000.

The current rate is:

$2.50 for the first 1/5 mile or 60 seconds of waiting time, and

$0.40 for each additional 1/5 mile ($2.00 per mile)or 60 seconds of waiting time ($24.00 per hour).

Some trips over 15 miles may be charged at 150% of the amount showing on the meter. The 50% off-meter charge may cause an abrupt steep increase in the fare between 15 miles and 15.01 miles.

Due to a mathematical quirk in the rate ordinance of 2002, the current initial distance is 1/5 mile, not 1/6 mile as indicated on the rate cards. It means that customers get a little extra distance for the current $2.50 initial charge. In practice, one trip in six is currently undercharged by $0.40.

December 2002 update: the rates adopted in November are the same as the SFTA proposal below, except that the flagfall is $2.85, not $2.75.



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The SFTA proposal:
A 12% increase

The San Francisco Taxicab Association has proposed an increase in the current rate of fare.

The new rate would be:

$2.75 for the first 1/5 mile or 60 seconds of waiting time, and

$0.45 for each additional 1/5 mile ($2.25 per mile) or 60 seconds of waiting time($27.00 per hour).

The following charts illustrate the effect of the SFTA proposed rate change. The first and second charts show the effect on fares over short and long distances. The third chart shows the percentage change between the current and proposed fares.

Observe that the lines in the two fare charts grow steadily further apart. The longer the trip, the larger the amount of the fare increase.

A ride to the airport that now costs $31.30 would go up $3.85 to $35.15, a 12.3% increase.

A 3 mile trip that now costs $9.30 would go up $1.10 to $10.40, an 11.8% increase.



Discussion of the SFTA proposal

The new rate would be, roughly, an across the board 12% increase. Long trip customers would see the largest fare increases.

If there is no decline in business following the rate increase, a driver who currently brings in $170 in fares (not including tips) would get $190, and a driver who currently brings in $200 in fares would get $224. Allowing for additional tips, drivers might see an extra $25-30 per shift. However, this is very unlikely because there is almost certain to be a decline in business following a 12% fare increase.

If New York City's closely studied 1996 fare increase is a reliable indicator, a 12% increase in fares should result in a 9.6% increase in revenue per mile. In that case, a driver currently bringing in $170 in fares would get $186, and a driver bringing in $200 in fares would get $219. Drivers might see an additional $20-25 per shift.

More likely, in my opinion, increased revenues would be less than expected, maybe just 6%. In that case drivers might see a revenue increase of just $12-15 per shift.

The reasons for predicting lower than expected revnues include BART, which begins service to the airport in a few months. A 12% fare increase on trips to and from the airport will give customers even more reason to choose BART. Between a $35 fare, an airport fee and a tip, customers will be paying $40 or more for an airport ride.

More generally, the Bay Area economy is experiencing its steepest downturn in many years. A large rate increase in the face of a severe recession may backfire, even if previous rate increases have always been advantageous.

The SFTA proposal envisions sufficient new fare revenue to more than make up for a proposed increase of $8 in the lease fees charged to drivers, which are currently pegged by regulation to $83.50 per shift. If new revenues are well below what might be expected in better times, then drivers may realize very little from the proposed increase.

An undesireable side effect of the SFTA proposed rate formula is that nickels begin appearing on the meter. Currently, all fares have a cents amount that is either 10, 30, 50, 70 or 90 cents. With five-cents in the picture, there will be 20 different cents amounts that may appear as part of the fare. The meter will show amounts such as $9.95. Why give customers such a blatant invitation to tip the driver a nickel?




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An alternate proposal:
A fifty-cent increase

If the current rate is increased to $3.00 for the initial charge, but everything else stays the same, the effect is a fifty-cent increase on all fares regardless of long or short distance.

The new rate of fare would be:

$3.00 for the first 1/5 mile or 60 seconds of waiting time, and

$0.40 for each additional 1/5 mile ($2.00 per mile) or 60 seconds of waiting time ($24.00 per hour).

The amount of expected new revenue would be linked to the number of trips, not the mileage as in the SFTA proposal. A driver who works the airport exclusively might see as little as $3 extra per shift because he has few trips. A driver with many short trips in the city might get an additional $10-15.

Since the increased price is small on any one trip, just fifty cents higher, customers may not perceive it as a significant increase. In that case, there is reason for optimism that most of the fare increase may actually materialize as additional revenues.



A fifty-cent increase to the initial charge may be better than a 12% fare increase. It will be seen as a small increase and will be less likely to drive customers to competing transport services. A fifty-cent increase will reward radio players for concentrating on short trips in the City. It will not increase mileage and waiting time charges, nor will it cause nickel amounts to appear on the meter.




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A third proposal:
Increase the flag by 90 cents and double the distance

A better way to accomplish a fifty-cent increase is to increase the initial distance to 2/5 of a mile, and increase the initial charge to $3.40.

The new rate would be:

$3.40 for the first 2/5 mile or 120 seconds of wait time, and

$0.40 for each additional 1/5 mile ($2.00 per mile) or 60 seconds of waiting time ($24.00 per hour).

The charts reveal that there is almost no difference bewteen this proposal and the previous one. Its advantage is that a customer may perceive additional value in the increased initial mileage. Our current initial distance is too short at 1/5 mile because very few trips are that short. It's better to merge the first "tick" into the initial charge and point to the increased initial distance as a selling point.



A less immediately obvious benefit of using this approach is that it gets SF on track for a more sophisticated fare structure utilizing multiple intervals of time and distance. There is a tendency to shy away from the slightly more complex arithmetic involved, but it has been put to good use in other places, notably London. SF should abandon the very restricted rate formulas of the past, which have used just a single intervals of distance such as the current 1/5 mile.

After increasing the initial distance to 2/5 mile, our next step ought to be adding a third interval, 1/10 mile that would apply after 15 miles. It would substitute a London-style "clock and a half" rate for our current "meter and a half" surcharge. The long distance surcharge would appear on the meter instead of off-meter as happens now. It would increase the number of long trips by removing the current large sticker shock that happens at 15.01 miles.




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This was SF fare talks of last year...Comments??? e-mail me at trose@cox.net

--- In taxidriversofamerica@yahoogroups.com, "edwarddenaut"
wrote:

Why do they kill cab drivers?

In the August 2001 trial of a man accused of murdering a
taxicab driver, Assistant County Prosecutor George Rukovena told a
Cleveland jury:

"He killed David Link because he wanted to brag about it."

How often does this happen, that the motive in a taxi
homicide is not really robbery, but rather to act out a tough-guy role? The driver
is just as dead whether it is robbery or something else, so does the motive
even matter?

I think that motive does matter. It makes a difference if the
person is after your money, or if he is working on his self-esteem.

Based on a close reading of hundreds of news articles, I
believe that easily half of all taxicab driver homicides are motivated by
something other than robbery. Compelling evidence is seen in the fact that
most cab homicides are "senseless murders" and on the unpleasant fact that
grossly excessive violence is a characteristic feature of taxi homicides.

Senseless murders have a pattern to them. According to UCLA
sociologist Jack Katz, many violent criminals are acting out a
role.

They don't really care about the victim or the money, and they are only
dimly aware (if at all) of the predictable scripts that they are
following.

The sociologist argues that robbing the victim is almost an
afterthought, helping the criminal make sense out of his own actions in
committing the murder.

In my opinion, cab drivers are absolutely barking up the
wrong tree to approach driver safety as an exercise in robbery prevention. It
is about preventing people from using our taxicabs as a theater or stage for
acting out specific patterns of behavior.

One pattern in behavior associated with senseless murder has
to do with defilement of the victim. I'll skip the detailed argument
here, noting that scores of examples are readily at hand, and ask instead: how
many times does an assailant have to shoot a man in the head if his
purpose is simply to get the driver's money?

A second pattern associated with senseless murder has to do
with chaos. The assailant is unconsciously driven to create a chaotic situation.

If it is true that many violent criminals are acting out a
definable role, then it should be possible to recognize when the script
begins to unfold in a taxicab. We should be able to get an early warning when
extremely dangerous patterns of behavior begin.

I do not claim to have the answers, but here are some of the
questions.

How, for instance, should a cab driver regard a difficult
customer who spits or who deliberately dumps a beverage in the cab? Are
those acts of defilement? What is the appropriate response, and is the response
different if you know that acts of defilement are associated with
acts of senseless murder?

How important is it for a driver to maintain order in the
cab?

Where is the boundary between a boisterous or unruly situation and a
chaotic situation? Is there a line between customer service and driver
safety, and does "chaos" define that line?

Maybe the solutions that work to prevent robberies are also
the same solutions that work to prevent senseless murders. But maybe not,
especially the standard advice to be a compliant victim in an assault. If the
antagonist seems more intent on playing a role than getting the money, a
driver might be better off fighting back or trying to get away even if
attempting to do so is a high risk move.

My strategy is to laugh and smile a lot with my customers,
and to share many good words, and also to keep a bullet-resistant partition
between us whenever possible. The shield is a minor inconvenience
most of the time, but when the one-in-a-thousand, or the one-in-ten-
thousand, starts spitting or trashing the place or causing me to think the
word "chaos," I will have some time and space to consider what's next in
this script!

-
Charles
Rathbone



(Charles Rathbone currently drives a cab in San Francisco. His
interest in taxicab driver safety dates from 1992 when he attended the
funeral of a coworker, the second driver slain in less than a year. Since then
he has played a lead role in organizing a campaign that led to ten public
hearings and passage of the 1994 taxi safety law in San Francisco, performed
an analysis of the information available on hundreds of fatal assaults,
testified as an expert witness in the trial of a taxicab driver accused of
murder, and prepared articles on safety issues which have been
printed in many taxi publications. )



Pattern in taxi homicides

The typical fatal scenario is a night time shooting from inside
the cab.

Most of the deaths are due to head or neck injuries, and most of the
assailants are in their teens. The following are the main findings
from my report "606 Taxicab Driver Homicides, United States and Canada,
1980- 1994"



94% of the attacks occur when the driver is inside the cab.

85% of the fatal injuries are gunshot wounds.

82% of the assaults occur at night.

74% of the deaths are due to head and neck injuries.

64% of the deaths are from gunshots to the head.

66% of the assailants are under age twenty.

47% of the assailants act alone.

25% of the assailants are outside the cab.



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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 03:00:35 -0000
From: bassmaster_65321
Subject: Ottawa Taxi Dispatchers go out on strike

Bringin' in the New Year on the picket line - Ottawa taxi
dispatchers on strike
[January 1, 2004] OTTAWA - Moments before the clock struck twelve,
taxi dispatchers, members of CUPE 4266, filed out of work and
gathered at the picket line. Last minute talks broke off between the
union and Coventry Connections' ZipTrack as the central demands for
a wage increase and a benefit plan were not met by the company. The
47 taxi dispatchers take calls for BlueLine, Capital, Veterans and
DJ Taxi in Ottawa.

"Before negotiations these were low-waged workers with no benefits.
After negotiations, they remain low-waged workers with no benefits.
This is why we are on strike," said Andy Mele, CUPE National
Representative and chief negotiator. "ZipTrack has given us no
choice but to fight for what is fair." Mele characterized the
negotiations as "slow and like pulling teeth."

"It's a slap in the face," said Donna Reaney, a dispatcher and Chief
Steward, CUPE 4266. Reaney has been with the company for over 15
years. "We've waited a long time for a fair wage and benefit plan
and can't wait any longer. It's time ZipTrack learned to respect the
work that we do." The dispatchers take between 500 and 1000 calls a
night.

Over 100 people brought in the New Year on the picket line outside
ZipTrack offices at 455 Coventry Road. BlueLine and Capital Taxi
cabs lined both sides of the street in support of the dispatchers
and were greeted with load cheers as they pulled in. Families
brought their children and together they braved the cold in support
of this fight for a fair contract.

The taxi dispatchers make on average $9 an hour and have no benefit
plan. A leaflet distributed on the picket line urges supporters not
to call a cab, but to flag them down or use alternate means of
transportation for the duration of the strike.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) represents over half a
million workers.




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EYE-OPENING FOR SURE

Maybe NOW is the time to call for an "Omaha Taxi Drivers Association"or OTDA and citizens of Omaha should call for an "Omaha TaxiCab Commission"before something happens and the public asks...WHY DIDN'T WE DO SOMETHING YESTERDAY?.

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