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Thursday, January 10, 2008 Cabdrivers at KCI want
relief By RICK ALM The Kansas City (MO) Star Taxi drivers can wait
for hours at Kansas City International Airport to be
dispatched for a fare. They are pressuring the city to find new ways
to shorten their wait times and control other companies they say
are poaching their customers. Kansas City’s
taxicab industry is at war with itself, again. This time the fight is
over how to divvy up the estimated 125,000 fares a year picked up at Kansas City
International Airport. The dispute pits the
rapidly expanding SuperShuttle
service,
which claims to transport around 250,000 air passengers a year, against mostly
small cab companies and independent drivers who often get by on two or three
airport fares a day. Councilman Ed Ford
said the latest proposals could be debated before the end of the month. The options range from
returning to traditional cab queue lines in front of each terminal to granting
exclusive cab service at KCI to the highest bidder. After months of
private meetings with industry representatives, Gary Majors, the city’s
director of regulated industries, is recommending a middle course: redesign and
relocate to more visible locations the free airport taxi phones that summon a
cab within 60 seconds from nearby staging areas. Currently, phones with small
signs are on the walls of terminal entry vestibules. According to a report
by Majors’ office, airport cabdrivers complain bitterly that arriving air
passengers are snatched up by competitors long before they see a taxi phone. Taxi operators said
arriving passengers were routinely recruited by SuperShuttle employees
stationed at exclusive airport franchise booths inside each terminal, or
unlawfully wooed by limousine and town car drivers. “The taxi
industry has been thrown to the back of the pack,” said Craig Bates, a
spokesman for the Checker
and City cab companies, the
city’s second-largest fleet, with 125 vehicles. “The small
shuttles are operating like taxicabs,” said Bates, and “illegal
soliciting is happening” by town car competitors and others who are
supposed to transport only passengers with reservations. When arriving air
passengers exit the terminal, Bates said, they expect to see a cab queue like
at most city airports. But Majors said KCI
was unlike most other airports because arriving and departing passengers and
traffic all converged at the same terminal doors, creating congestion that
would only be worse with lines of cabs at the curb. Majors noted that
waiting cabs also posed problems for airport police who must enforce Homeland
Security rules restricting airport traffic and parking near terminals. That argument
doesn’t wash with Bates and others who want the cab queues back. “It’s OK
with Homeland
Security if
shuttle and town car drivers park and walk away from their cars?” he
asked, asserting that airport officers often looked the other way when those
drivers left vehicles at the curb in search of fares. No matter how the
issue is decided, Majors said, cabbies’ fare-stealing complaints are
valid, and city enforcement efforts against cheating limo and town car drivers
will be stepped up. Ford, chairman of the
council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is undecided on
the next step. He said that the city
shouldn’t make any change that would dramatically reduce the number of
cabs available to work the airport. “If you overdo it, you don’t
have the cabs there when you need them when the big conventions come to
town.” At the same time, Ford
said, “It’s always struck me as silly for cabdrivers to wait for
hours for a fare rather than hustling in the city.” Majors’ report
confirmed that drivers often waited as long as six hours for their turn to pick
up a fare. |
