Kevin at BlogHouston posts on the "pressing" issue that the CoH is considering making cabbies take street tests in order to make sure that they know their way around Houston before they get behind the wheel and take their patrons for a spin. As it was, I read the article this morning since I am still stupid enough to pay for the dead tree, environmentally unfriendly, fish wrapper version of the Houston Chronicle.
But I digress. I know from my time in London that London's famous black cab drivers are required to take and pass a street exam before they are allowed to drive a cab. One cabbie told me this process took him about 4 1/2 years to complete. This cab driver told me that he was a former London police officer who had gotten injured while on the line of duty. Afterwards, he thought he had a possible career decision of either becoming a lawyer (perhaps in criminal law) or a cab driver. Interestingly, this driver had lots of lawyer friends who told him that he would be better off becoming a cab driver because there are so many lawyers in London that their numbers have seriously driven their wages down.
Still, requiring a knowledge test for a cabbie to complete before turning them loose on the roads represents a barrier to entry into the job field that must be overcome before gaining employment. Such an idea could also serve as a backdoor method for shutting out competition, both within the cab industry itself and to Metro. If (Heaven forbid!) private jitney services were to spring up for example, the City could legally clamp down on such enterprising individuals by commanding them to pass a street knowledge test.
When I got out of high school many, many moons ago, I worked for a Dominos Pizza franchisee for 2+ years. An endlessly pressing issue which we encountered was driver training. No matter how much effort you put into driver training, ultimately drivers had to learn their way around the store's delivery area the hard way. The best we could do is give them maps in case they ran into trouble, particularly at apartment complexes.
We also occasionally got phone calls at the Dominos store from delivery drivers, even highly experienced ones, who might have gotten confused or bad directions on delivery orders. That issue brings up one idea that would possibly mitigate the need for such tests. That would be that taxi drivers, who are in radio contact with call centers who route them to customers anyway, would be able to get instructions to a street address from the call center.
Another idea would be to possibly require the installation of GPS type mapping systems in taxis which would show the location where the customer wants to be either picked up at or to be dropped off at. What would be cool about such an idea is that out of towners who have no idea of the city's layout could potentially see where they are going and hopefully avoid getting taken for a ride by the cabbie. The libertarian in me hesitates at making such things mandatory and would hope that the taxi companies would do this on their own accord if the economics are there.
As for the functioning of the market place, the usual argument for letting things be is that customers would notice that the driver didn't know their way around town and that this would be reported to the cab company. In theory, then bad drivers would be driven out of the job field on part of their incompetence. In practice, neither I nor anybody else knows how efficient the marketplace is on this matter.
But that isn't the end of the taxi cab article. Indeed perhaps the most interesting piece of information that came from the article involves how many customers were reported as taking paid rides from Bush Intercontinental and Hobby airports. The article states that cab ride passengers numbers went from 445,216 in 2002, to 426,315 for 2003, to 504,660 for 2004. In 2005 539,137 passengers were taken, while 600,270 passengers were taken in 2006.
Two thoughts come to mind from this information. First, the City's (and urban area) population growth have probably been in the area of about 10 percent over the past 5 years, which would account for some of the growth in cab passengers coming from the airports. Don't forget that we had a massive influx of Katrina evacuees in those numbers too.
Secondly, the spike in cab rides from the airports seems positively correlated with the price of fossil fuels. The rise in oil prices started circa 2002 and rises in fossil fuel prices are still great news for Houston. What would be a more interesting tas would be to hit up the CoH Finance and Administration people for further historical data as to how many cab rides were taken from city airports and correlate them to the fortunes (read prices of natural gas and petroleum) of the energy industry.
But wait folks! The fact that 600,000 people took cabs from the city airports in 2006 has even more implications. That number breaks down to an average of 1,643 people taking cabs from both of Houston's airports in 2006. Now the article does not mention how many people use taxis to go to the airports. But for the sake of argument, let just be liberal here, take a SWAG, and say that the number of people who take cabs to the airports equals the number of people who take cabs from the airports. That would mean that the average number of people taking cabs to and from the airports is 3,286 or about 3,300 people per day.
Now this is an important piece of information because arguments are floated from time to time that it is mandatory for Houston to build some rail system that links downtown or some other destinations to our airports. Two major issues come into play here. One is price sensitivity and the other is, as always, flexibility and accessibility.
Now I was one of those 600,000 people who took a cab from the airports to my home last year. The trip fare was $65 dollars, and that was with the fixed zone fares which are posted on the insides of cabs. Clearly that is a lot of money to a lot of people, but that ride was 30 miles long. As a frame of reference, I know that you can take a 5.10 pound tube ticket from Heathrow Airport in London to downtown London, about $10 at current exchange rates. That is clearly the dreams and selling points of people who demand the building of a rail link to the airports, but they fail to think that London is a city which sees about 15-20 million visitors every year and that Heathrow Airport is the busiest airport in the world. Economies of scale and scope are of paramount importance when contemplating the construction of rail lines.
The problem of course is accessibility. If we throw away invest large sums of money building rail lines to our airports, then where are those lines going to run? I would not be surprised if most of those cab passengers were business travelers, ergo they were probably going to downtown, near one of the energy corridors, to the Galleria, or some other prestigous location. The bottom line of all of this is that if cab passenger figures are anything to go by, then the numbers for potential passengers traveling by a rail line to our airports are rather small. Would be passengers would have to first get to the rail line (or BRT line), then transfer unless they just so happened to be within striking distance of such lines (I know I am not). Since even light rail lines run in the range of $60+ million per mile, a downtown link to George Bush would run $1.5 billion plus. Even accounting for lots of stops along the way, I am very pessimistic that such line would attract more than 30,000 passengers per day since it would be competing with automobiles anyway. The bottom line here is that the numbers are not there and that we should stick with cars, vans, buses, and taxis for handling our transit needs going to and from the airports.
Addendum - May 8, 2007: In Metro's FEIS for the Northside corridor dating from December 2006, they mention that the 2007 price tag for building light rail as costing about $68 million per mile. Ergo, a 25 mile long light rail link from downtown Houston to Bush Intercontinental would cost $1.7 billion at that price. From what I can sleuth out about Metro's annual operating costs for the current 7.5 mile Main Street light rail line, it seems to run about $15-20 million per year to operate. A reasonable assumption would be that operating a light rail link between downtown Houston and Bush Intercontinental would run - at minimum - about $50 million per year and maybe more than that. If passengers were charged a $2 boarding fee and paid the fee - don't forget that the current Main Street rail line has no barrier between the prospective passenger and the train cars - then such a train would have to draw at least 25 million passengers per year without drawing away resources from elsewhere. Don't forget that every 25 years or so that the train cars have to be replaced and don't forget that in 50 years the entire track would also have to get overhauled. Good luck paying for that.
Addendum: In addition to paying for at least 50 percent of capital costs on rail, the feds will now help pay for operations and maintenance costs. They will also give federal grants to allow for transit oriented development to occur around rail stations (your federal tax dollars at work), and have recently started a pilot program to help local agencies write off any carrying costs associated with bond issues which are issued by said local transit agencies to pay for rail or BRT transit. At this rate, I sometimes wonder whether it's worth it to be opposing this stuff.
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at February 13, 2007 02:05 AM