Give The Halifax Cab Industry A Chance, Says Company President
HALIFAX — Not long ago, the Halifax Regional Municipality asked Haligonians how they felt about taxi service in the city. About seventy-five percent said they weren’t satisfied.
The growing frustration with long wait times and unreliable dispatchers is a large part of what led Regional Council last week to support new rules welcoming ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft into the city.
“We had a strong push from many of our residents, and our businesses and hotel association, restaurant association, retail, the list goes on and on, expressing their displeasure with not having a consistent taxi service,” Coun. Tony Mansini told his council colleagues on the day of the vote.
But the head of one of the city’s oldest taxi companies says those reliability issues stem from factors largely outside the control of the city’s dispatchers.
Brian Herman is the president of Casino Taxi. He says Halifax dispatchers have been forced into sometimes sub-par service by strict regulations the city imposed almost three decades ago.
Decades-old caps the culprit
In the mid-1990s, Halifax was flooded with independent cab drivers. Many worked only on weekends, and those weekend workers made it impossible for full-time drivers to make a living.
“Drivers were saying, listen, you need to bring the cab numbers down, we’re not making enough money, so we need to have caps imposed,” Herman explained.
Council agreed and capped the number of cabs allowed on HRM streets at 1,000.
At the time, the population in the HRM was just over 340,000. Today, it’s creeping closer to 440,00. But until November of last year, the 1,000-cab cap remained in place.
Herman says that the widening gap “started the snowball of service unreliabilities” that, until recently, appeared to grow every year.
“You can read Reddit and Twitter threads and everyone’s pointing to the cab company being the worst folks in the world [saying] you can’t get through at peak time. From our perspective, the reason you can’t get through at a peak time is that we’re already flooded with orders that we can’t satisfy,” he said.
The solution, according to Herman, was to let more cabs on the road so dispatchers have more resources to send to all those calls.
Last year, the city did just that.
In November, council approved updated bylaws that raised the cap to 1,600 and eliminated taxi zones that restricted where cabbies could pick up passengers.
According to anecdotal accounts from both Herman and HRM staff, the changes have started to improve service in the city.
Give local industry more time
Despite the recent changes, most Haligonains still want ridesharing in the city.
Herman accepts that Uber’s arrival in Halifax is “absolutely” inevitable but argues there would have been less clamouring for the service if the city had allowed more time for the November regulatory changes to take effect before passing the new law.
He said Halifax dispatchers have adapted with in-app payments and tracking features similar to the ones Uber set the new market standard with. Herman added Uber’s business model changed customer expectations and local regulators need to decide where their priorities lie.
“When Uber came on the market 10 years ago they were able to flip the thinking to ‘who really cares about the actual operator?’ It’s all about the customer and giving the customer the cheapest fare and the fastest ride,” he said.
“So really it comes down to what are you looking at from a regulatory perspective? Are you looking to create a healthy industry and to satisfy an earnings level for the operator base, or are you looking to satisfy every customer instantaneously at any point in time at the expense of the operator?”
‘Things have to be equal’
Council’s new rules welcoming ridesharing into the city haven’t passed their final reading, but once they do they’ll be a tick squarely in the “satisfy every customer” column.
Herman understands ridesharing companies were always going to come to the city eventually, but he takes issue with the rules city council has set for them. He argues the new rules stack the deck against cab companies by making it much harder to become a cabbie than an Uber driver.
“I think the big concern… we’re going to see going forward is the ability for the taxi industry to recruit new entrants is going to be eclipsed by rideshare’s ability to recruit new drivers,” he said.
The city’s updated bylaw requires both taxi and Uber drivers to pass several background checks to be allowed to drive a vehicle for hire in the HRM.
However, prospective taxi drivers must also pass an English-language test and three “knowledge-based tests” about the city’s streets and bylaws. That gets them a “conditional” license that gives them 12 months to complete the Taxi and Limousine National Certification through the Tourism Industry Association of Nova Scotia.
Add in some still-unresolved regulatory issues hampering new taxi drivers’ ability to enter the market and Herman says you’ve got huge recruitment issues Uber won’t have to face.
“There are a number of additional steps required to become a taxi driver, and a lot of additional burdens put on taxi drivers just to get in through the door,” Herman said. “Why would new drivers choose to drive a taxi when it’s so much easier to just go with Uber?”
Herman said he was disappointed when council chose to forge ahead with its new bylaws instead of delaying the vote to address those concerns. Now, he has “very, very little” faith they will ever be addressed.
“If everything is equal that’s fine. It is what it is, you can’t keep progress out,” he said. “But things have to be equal.