August 14, 2008

Your $7 personal driver
Taxis aren’t just for rides to the airport; in southern New Hampshire, they’re a user-friendly alternative to public transportation
By Brian Early bearly@hippopress.com

Madeline Desjardins and her sister sat outside the Catholic Medical Center waiting for the taxi she called to bring them home after an afternoon of doctor visits and shopping. The two are elderly and don’t drive. But they’re still active, still independent. Often they’ll take a city bus or maybe their family will bring them somewhere. But on days of shopping, they tend to call a taxi, as waiting for a bus and then navigating onto the bus with bags of groceries can be challenging.

Brian Dragon, a driver from Manchester Taxi, picked the two up in the white taxi, which looked almost like a police car, and brought the two ladies to their destination on the east side of Manchester, a fare that cost about $7.

“I take it two or three times a month,” she said. “I don’t go out all that much,” she said, and, “I like to do things myself.”

She doesn’t know the taxis by their name, but by their phone number. She used to have another taxi number memorized, but one time, she said, the taxi made her wait for two hours, telling her that she was a prank call. She ran out of change because she kept calling back to find out where the taxi was, she said. She went back into the store where she was and “they gave me this number.” She’s been a loyal customer since.

Every once in a while, Desjardins will go for a night on the town.

“Sometimes I go to bingo, and I take a cab to get back,” she said.

Driving by the rules
In the last few months, it’s become a little more expensive to ride a taxi, as rates have increased because of the increased cost of gasoline.

Where taxis operate dictates how taxis can increase rates. For instance, for taxis that operate in the city of Manchester, the city’s aldermen set the rates. In Nashua, the taxi company sets the rates, similar to many rural areas of the state. Officials at the airport set the fees for the airport taxis. Manchester has a mileage rate system. Nashua has a system set by zones; the airport does as well.

There are also rules on where taxis can operate. In Manchester, the airport taxis, in general, can’t provide regular taxi service in the state. Likewise, city cabs can’t really operate at the airport. A city cab can drop someone off at the airport, but if a person who needs a ride back to the city is standing near where the city cab dropped off the airport passenger, the city cab can’t pick that person up. If the person wants a ride from the city cab, the person would have to call the cab’s dispatch and ask for a ride. And the passenger can’t pick up the taxi at the curb — it would have to be picked up at a different stop.

The state allows each municipality to set its own rules on how taxicabs operate within their district, like what the license and insurance requirements are and how many taxis can operate in a particular place. As a district, the airport is probably the most restrictive in the state in limiting the number of taxis that can operate as airport taxis. It stopped issuing new licenses, or medallions, years ago. When a new taxi driver wants to become an airport cabbie, he or she has to wait until a license become available. Since they’re valuable, they are usually sold, though they aren’t nearly as expensive as a medallion for a New York City cab, which can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.

A big difference between taxis here and taxis in big cities, like New York or Boston, is that you can’t usually hail a cab here — you mostly have to call for one.

For the most part, taxi companies lease out their vehicles to drivers for a fee. After the driver pays the lease, gas and other transportation fees, like tolls, the driver may keep the rest of whatever he or she makes. Some companies split what a cabbie makes and forgo the lease system. Much of the discussion around whether or not the city or the airport authority would raise the rates for taxis centered on if the taxi companies would raise their lease rates as well. The taxi companies had to give assurances that the lease rates would not rise.

Who takes the taxi
There are no statistics on how many cab companies operate in the state (at least nine taxi and airport transportation services operate in Manchester) or how many people take taxis each day.

In southern New Hampshire, there are a variety of riders. Take folks like Janet Rose, for instance. She lives in Manchester, a couple of miles from downtown. She keeps the three Manchester taxi cab numbers in her phone for whenever she feels the need to head downtown for an adult beverage. She keeps three, because sometimes she doesn’t hear the taxi honk when they get to her house, and sometimes the cabbies will “leave my ass.”

This type of call makes up the bulk of taxi calls on weekend evenings.

Business folks tend to take cabs in the morning, either to a bus stop to catch a Boston commuter bus or to the airport. There are folks who take a taxi to and from work because they don’t have a car and don’t live close to the bus station. There are people who have never had a driver’s license, and some who have lost their license. At night, there are many customers who take cabs because they don’t want to worry about getting a DUI.

Adam Tetu takes a cab to the airport, where he works as a nighttime custodian. He takes a taxi often, as he doesn’t have a license, and finds it easier to make stops with his child, dropping him off at a babysitter and then getting where he needs to go.

“Taxis are more readily available than buses are, though buses are cheaper,” Tetu said. It’s also easier to drop his young child off at one place in the city and then go to another part.

Then there are others like Desjardins, who depend on taxis to supplement their transportation needs. They’d rather take a bus if possible, as it’s cheaper. But service stops early for buses, and no buses run on Sundays in Manchester.

Putting cabs to work
The State Coordinating Council for Community Transportation is working to understand what transportation is available throughout the state and how taxis could be used more effectively. Currently, the state pays $5 million a year for non-emergency medical trips for Medicaid patients. Patrick Herlihy, who is the transportation coordinator for the state’s department of health and human services, and who represents the department’s commissioner on the SCCCT, said if better information is known about available transportation, that $5 million should decrease. For the most part, taxis aren’t used too much for such transportation, but he expects that will change.

The Easter Seals TRAC (Transportation Resource and Access Coordination) is also working on creating a better patchwork of transportation in the state. When someone needs a ride, they’ll call TRAC who will then refer the person the appropriate provider, which ranges depending on where the person lives. It could be a for profit transport, such as a taxi, or a non-profit or government transport, such as a bus. Beginning in October, TRAC will open their new dispatch office in hopes of better connecting people who need rides with already established transit providers.

“They’re meeting a certain need within a community. They create access for those who don’t have cars,” said Fred Roberge, vice president of transportation at Easter Seals. “There’s a lot of opportunity. We’re trying to put a number of how many taxis are on the ground in New Hampshire and trying to access their geographical location. There’s a lot of opportunity and possibility.”

One challenge with taxis is for those riders who need extra assistance or a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. In Manchester, officials are in the early stages of working with cab companies to see what kind of assistance they could provide.

“Taxi companies are not charitable organizations. They’re businesses,” Roberge said. “Anything we do, we’ve got to show them it’s a good business opportunity and a way of enhancing their livelihood.”

The driver’s view
Brian Dragon has driven a city taxi in Manchester for years, and like a lot of taxi drivers, he has driven for all three companies that operate in the city. And Dragon is his real last name. “I’m Scottish,” he says.

“You get to know your regulars by the street and by the day they call,” Dragon said. “You can anticipate certain people calling.”

The fifth of the month is always a busy time for taxi drivers bringing clients to and from the grocery store. It’s the day state assistance checks show up. When Dragon and I went to the Super Stop & Shop in Manchester to wait for a customer, we met up with another driver of another company. The drivers tend to know each other.

“You can count on death, taxes and checks on the fifth of the month,” she said to Dragon.

Grocery stores these days are almost like easy prey. You drive into the parking lot of a store, Dragon said, and “the shopping carts become alive and they start coming at you.”

Eileen Whitaker waited outside Hannaford with a cart full of groceries. Dragon pulled up to the curb, popped the trunk. While the job of the taxi cabber is to chauffer people around, there’s often a personal touch as well. He helped Whitaker load the groceries into the trunk as well as unloading them at her home a few miles away.

They don’t know each other by name, but they know each other by face. Whitaker has “known” Dragon for about six months, she estimates.

“He knows everyone in my family,” she said, noting that no one in the family has a car.

Taxi drivers have intimate knowledge of the city that even lifelong residents might not have. Dragon is a Manchester lifer. His grandfather drove a city bus for 27 years. He knows the back roads, short cuts, history and even more.

“We know where the drug houses are more than the cops do,” Dragon said, noting that he suspects some of his stops are for people to get their fix. He doesn’t care for those rides or rides for the regular drunks. He’d rather give a ride to a person who needs it, not someone who is destroying their life, he said.

Dragon is a recovering alcoholic. He’s been clean for six years, but even so, he doesn’t like to go on calls to bars to pick up the drunks who need a ride home, and his company knows that. Other drivers will take the drunks that he doesn’t want to take, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid. One person, who called for a ride from a local motel, was fairly sloshed for 3 p.m. It wasn’t difficult to smell the breath of a person who probably started drinking early in the day.

But they’re not the majority of the calls. Most of the time, he enjoys his job.

“You meet a lot of interesting people,” he said. Toby Keith rode shotgun in his cab. So did Ty Pennington when he was in town for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. “I picked him up on his birthday.”

“You can’t get rich,” Dragon said about driving. “You can pay your bills and have a little extra.”

For the most part, it doesn’t tend to be a healthy job. The average shift is about 12 hours a day.

He doesn’t get out of his car unless he’s helping a customer or filling his gas tank. “We know where all the drive-thrus are in the city,” he said.

Dragon weighs about 250 pounds now. Around 1999, he stopped driving a cab for a while. He was 400 pounds. “It’s easy to gain weight in this job,” he said.

His son drove a cab recently, though Dragon wasn’t all too excited about that prospect. “You don’t have a life,” he said. “I wanted him to stay with his studies.”

Dragon would drive a truck, he thinks. But he’d have a hard time leaving the business.

“There’s something about this job that gets into you,” he said. Sometimes it’s 3 a.m. in downtown Manchester listening to the sounds of birds chirping. Other times, it’s his regulars. Or it’s just the different experiences.

“Sometimes you take people on their last ride,” he said. “I take them to their destination. I find out the next morning that they died after I dropped them off. It’s happened four times.”

It can be a dangerous job at times. In 1999, Elaine Gosselin was stabbed to death after she took one customer for a ride. The customer pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 35 years to life in prison. In response, the Manchester aldermen voted to require that Manchester taxis have cages installed between the front and back seats to protect the drivers, though the drivers don’t think they will.

“If someone wants to get to you, they’ll get to you,” Dragon said, but he doesn’t worry too much about it.

The cage
Dragon drives for Manchester Taxi, the city’s newest company, started last year. Its office is not too big. It’s settled next to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Elm Street south of downtown. Inside, the small room is open with a table with seats for drivers taking a break. There’s a couch nearby and a television that’s probably always on. There’s a big compressor used to recharge the air conditioning in the vehicles, which are old police cars. There are also a few tires in the room along with a few car doors that lean up against the wall. There’s a bit of a brown stain to the room from the tobacco smoke. Steven Pierce sits at a desk by the window. Sometimes he’s smoking, sometimes he’s not. The phone is seemingly always ringing.

“Taxi,” he says to the customers who call. It’s the same answer you’ll get if you call other taxi companies in the city.

Pierce operates the landline phone with his left hand and calls his cab drivers via radio with his right. Sometimes his cell phone rings as well. In the middle of a desk is the paper that tells him where his taxis are and who needs a ride.

“Twenty-two, where are you?” he asks into the dispatch radio.

A makeshift shelf sits on the desk, full of paper and pencils, and a bottle of aspirin is in easy reach. Conversation is routinely interrupted by a customer needing a ride or a cabbie calling in to dispatch, notifying dispatch of his whereabouts, if they’re “clear,” meaning there’s no one in their cab, and how much the last fare is.

Pierce was, up to last year, commuting to Boston daily to drive taxis there, a commute he did for years. He got his start in Nashua about 25 years ago, soon after he finished a term of service in the Army. He was first driving trucks around until he had a spat with his boss. While driving around, he noticed a sign for taxi drivers. He’s done it ever since.

“It kind of gets in your blood,” he said about driving taxis. “You’re your own boss. It’s more of a free spirit kind of thing.”

Pierce estimates that he has about 300 to 400 passengers a day. In the morning, they tend to be more business people who need a ride to catch Boston commuter bus or to the airport. The weekends tend to be busier, he said, as people who don’t normally take a taxi during the week will take one on the weekends. Often, at night time, cabs are used to ferry people in and out of bars.

It’s a challenging job, dealing with customers, drivers and vehicle issues. Pierce sits in the dispatch chair 50 to 60 hours a week.

“There are no breaks, no breaks in this business,” he said.