From the Sightline Institute, on a subject always guaranteed to generate, um, various viewpoints:
What if the Northwest’s cities legally capped the number of pizza delivery cars? What if, despite growing urban population and disposable incomes, our Pizza Delivery Oversight Boards had scarcely issued new delivery licenses since 1975? Pizza delivery would be expensive and slow; citizens would rise up in revolt.
Substitute “taxicab” for “pizza delivery” and you have a reasonable facsimile of the taxi industry in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC: tightly restricted taxi numbers, high fares, and low availability.
Plentiful, affordable taxis facilitate greener urban travel. They help families shed second cars, ride transit more often, and walk to work on could-be-rainy days. They fill gaps in transit systems and provide a fallback in case of unexpected events.
If they looked at European cities, Paris would be worse than Vancouver. In 1937, there were 14,000 taxi licenses in Paris, and 14,900 in 1990! Just to sit in the cab, you’ve already been charged $4, and the minimum charge is $10 for a ride. Thank god they have good buses and a great subway system, and bike lanes and the Vé’lib bike share system to make up for the taxi cartel.
Completely agree Gordon – thanks for posting this on Facebook.
I was in Buenos Aires for a month in ’07 and taxis were the best way to get around. It helped that the peso was flat compared to the dollar, but it also helped that about 1/3 of all vehicles on the very busy streets were cabs: easy to find, easy to use, affordable – it meant that almost none of the Porteños I got to used their cars in town (if they even had any!).
The taxi industry wields considerable political clout. A taxi license has considerable market value due to its artificial scarcity. The regulator is captive to the interests of the industry – and that is even captured by the legislation, which is silent on public interest but firm on the need for “economic stability” i.e. the status quo. No politician has had the intestinal fortitude to tackle this issue for many, many years.
Sure, supply is one part, but so is demand. Run skytrain all night and the demand for cabs would drop, for instance. I expect urban demographics and how much the average cab-user can pay also play a major role.
Just looking at the graph it’s obvious there is no direct correlation:
Boston has the fourth highest proportion of cabs and is the third most expensive. Portland has very few cabs, fewer than Vancouver, but is still much cheaper. Las Vegas (maybe an outlier again because of the industry) is much like Boston, second most cabs, still super expensive. There’s some correlation there for sure, but lots of outliers.
I’m not disagreeing that more taxi licenses is a good thing, I think it would be grand for most of the reasons stated above, I’m just saying it’s not quite that simple as “more cabs=cheaper cabs.”
Substitute “transit” for “pizza delivery” and you have a reasonable facsimile of the taxi industry in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC: tightly restricted taxi numbers, high fares, and low availability.
If it work for cab, why not for bus? if we have so few bus and so high fare, it is because it is regulated by Translink! bring back the jitney…no double they will be plentifull of cheap on on Broadway…in South Surrey less sure but who care: that is free market, isn’it? …I hope people calling for cab deregulation are also calling for transit deregulation to keep consistent with themsleves. Why not?
Are you willing to be haggling the cab fare-bus ride-at the exit of the restaurant on a rainy evening…
That is what is free market after all: where demand meet offer
and free market is good Tatcher told us but people in Oxford has found as a progress to be able to take the first bus to come
Take the first cab to come without needing to haggling the fare…is the “progress” brought by regulation…and cab regulation on numerus clausus is the overwheming modus operandi of cab operation in the western world (trade off to control offer in an industry where fare is fixed by government): it could have some draw back which should certainly need to be addressed but there is good historic reason for regulation…
throw it away the regulation without learning why it has been put in a first place, as illustrated in the linked sightline article, is very shortsighted and recipe for repeated disaster: It looks people have learn nothing of the Bush year’s.
Sorry, the cab industry has nothing in common with the pizza delivery…
…but more with the pharmacist one:
That said, I don’t say the actual system is perfect (may be the Londonian is better), but have everyone and his brother able to be a cab as naively suggested by Sight line is not necessarily a solution.
I would now like to see a comparison of Canadian cities, including Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa…hopefully we can get this information and then have a more active discussion on the availability and pricing of taxis, and the level of income for the drivers.
I think this is a very important issue for Vancouver…we now need to create a better ‘taxi culture’. Here’s a link to an article I wrote on the topic four years ago….http://tinyurl.com/3ml858a
As Tessa and Voony say, taxi regulation is a lot more complicated than ‘deregulate it and taxis will be cheap and plentiful’. In fact, deregulation often leads to fare increases. There are a lot of factors to consider such as whether taxis are being routed by phone/dispatch or just out looking for fares, regulation of cab quality, fares, etc.
I do favour deregulation, but it needs to be carefully done. From my reading New Zealand is probably the best model to follow (strong quality regulation, minimum taxi firm size, all taxis must be affiliated with dispatch service, etc.)
This collection of studies (large pdf) assembled by the OECD makes for good reading on the topic.
One unremarked plus of the Canada Line is that if effectively increased the number of taxis available in Vancouver.
When my brother was here from the Central Interior he took a cab only once.The rest of the time, he took transit. He got to my house in Surrey from YVR for $9, way less than a cab would cost, and his day pass allowed him to take transit for the entire day.
Really, when you can travel around the Lower Mainland for just $9, why would anyone bother taking cabs?