News Flash: Driving Cab Is Difficult

If you spend a lot of time driving down Highway Five from Saint Paul toward the Mall, the Airport, or (as I did for many years) to work, eventually you'll end up stopping in at the Post Road Super America.

The store has two sets of entrances. One leads to the normal lot, where cars gas up and people walk in and buy Tic Tacs and potato chips for the road. The other leads to a large hardstand flooded with taxi cabs. The store is always crowded with taxi drivers, 24/7. My kids, friends and I call it "Ellis Island", because almost all the cabbies are recent immigrants.

Cabbing has been an entree to the American work force for a couple of generations of immigrants, now. It's a job where you need only the most rudimentary of skills, both technical (driving a car) and linguistic (finding addresses or landmarks). If you feel like getting some practice with your Russian, Polish, Arabic, Spanish or any of a couple of dozen near and far Eastern languages, it's the place to be; the cabbies are as polyglot a lot as you can find in the Twin Cities.

It's a tough job, of course, like most jobs where you have to deal with the public. Like every waitress, bartender, bellhop, busboy and cashier in the world, cabbies could probably be persuaded to believe, at least on occasion, the classic dictum of Mr. Carlton, the supremely cynical eternal patient on the old Bob Newhart Show: "People are trash."

Nick Coleman's column yesterday touched on the hard life of the airport cabbie. But the only question it raises is "Who teaches these people economics?"

Not the cabbies. The Strib columnists.

The problem, I think, is that Coleman really doesn't seem to know what he wants. Or what he wants the rest of us to do. Or...

Oh, hell. You figure it out.

Cab drivers need strong bladders.

They also need a fierce work ethic, a pile of cash and a thick skin. Nice, polite Minnesotans don't always show respect for airport cabbies -- most of whom are immigrants from Africa.

"We are part of Minnesota," says Michael Teklu, an Ethiopian who is the head of the Airport Taxi Drivers Association. "We work hard to feed our kids -- seven days a week and 12 hours a day -- and all we want is a fair living. We know Minnesotans are warm-hearted and welcoming."

Maybe. Maybe not.

No kidding. Ten minutes' listening to the Nick Coleman "Show" on the local FrankenNet affiliate will tell you that.

But I digress. So - the point of Nick's column is that cabbies are good, hard-working people who just want a chance to make ends meet. Right?

Waiting hours near toilets and concrete barriers in the middle of a holding lot surrounded by fencing, the drivers feel like prisoners. [Er, does this mean the toilets are in the middle of the holding lot? Perhaps separated from the lot and the cabbies by the concrete barriers? Or that the toilets and barriers are surrounded by fencing, as if to taunt the dougty, benighted cabbies - Ed]

"They see us like animals in the zoo," says Solomon Yigerm, one of the taxi leaders. "They are not looking at us like human beings."

Yigerm leads me to one of the toilets and shows me a label on the door. It says there must be one toilet for every 10 workers. With 600 drivers, that would mean 60 toilets. Taxi drivers have a lot of time to perform calculations.

More, apparently, than Nick Coleman has to check facts. The rule was set up for places like construction sites, where people are on-site, working 12 hours a day for months. Cabbies are driving all over the place - and "all over the place", as it happens, is where other SuperAmericas with their welcoming commodes also are.

But again, I digress. So the point of Coleman's column is that...

And when they do, the bottom line is clear: They occupy one of the bottom rungs of American society.

...and that one of the wages of being the bottom rung is that toilets are scarce?

OK. Fair point. I think.

From 1999 until late last year, the number of cabs at the airport was limited to 577. But the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) has ended the limit and opened the taxi trade to anyone. The result has been a sharp increase in the number of drivers, accompanied by a big increase in down time and a bigger rise in tempers.

Last week, a state Senate committee approved a bill that would limit the number of cabs to 640 (the current number). The drivers, supported by members of Christ Lutheran Church, across University Avenue from the Capitol, are hopeful. But the MAC is lobbying hard against the legislation.

So the number of cabs (we don't know from Coleman's column how many drivers there are per cab) is up (although, again, Coleman doesn't tell us "up" to what); we need to restrict the numbers of cabs, and in turn of doughty, immigrant drivers who can get jobs.

MAC officials say lifting the cap has dried up an informal trade in which some licenses were transferred to other drivers who were not the holders of record.

OK. So the point is that the bureaucrats at the MAC want to keep track of the licenses?

Or that the doughty immigrants' informal trade is being killed off?

But the drivers argue that prohibiting transfers means that after investing thousands in their business, they can't recoup their investment. There are too many licenses, they say, and the waits between fares are too long. To them, it's a matter of survival.

Ah! I got it! The point is that there are too many drivers earning their livings, and that we need to cull the herd! Because apparently the drivers, and cab owners, are flocking to wait in line for no reason whatsoever, certainly nothing as prosaic as there is enough business to pay the bills. Apparently, cab owners and drivers are so stupid that they wait in line for hours for no reason whatever. They are too stupid to be on the road!

"This must be the '60s again," Teshome Idossa says, putting $15 of gas in his cab (at $2.35 a gallon, he only puts in 6.3 gallons before shutting off the pump). "You know, it is like the struggle for freedom again."

Oops. I mean, the point is that that making cabbies wait in line, staring through the fencing at toilets hidden behind concrete barriers is slavery?

I'm getting confused.

A 27-year-old from Ethiopia who has been driving for four years, Idossa is learning English and American history at a rapid pace. But he already understands Taxi Economics 101.

Idossa rents his cab for $500 a week. After gas and daily rental costs, he needs about $85 in fares to break even. He has been waiting in the holding lot since 10 a.m. It is now noon.

"They are trying to push us out of this business," he says. "I think they are saying, 'Why don't you guys just go flipping burgers for McDonald's?' "

Ah HAH! So the point is that the MAC is an oppressive, racist, socialistic construct that is destroying the livings of the doughty immigrant drivers...

...whose numbers are being whittled down by the bill in the Senate committee supported by the church across the street from the Capitol...

...where a bunch of cabbies go to church? How's that?

Let's read on. I'm sure it'll clear up.

Drivers wait in the holding area as long as two hours. When their number comes up on computer screens at the edge of the lot, they run to their vehicles like fighter jet pilots scrambling to get into the air, leaning on their horns as they zoom into another lot.

Only to wait again.

The second lot is called the staging area, and drivers often spend another half hour there before being allowed to drive "downstairs" (to ground level) at the airport's Lindbergh terminal. There, they wait a third time, in line for a fare.

The final wait may be only 10 minutes, but it's not easy, either. Until recently, drivers had to wait with their rear gates open, even when the security threat level was not high. Drivers spent the winter with blankets around their shoulders; some contracted pneumonia. Again, Solomon Yigerm shows me a label, this one on the lift gate of a taxi: It warns against leaving the gate open and states that exhaust fumes "May Cause Personal Injury."

Now we're onto something: the MAC's rules are oppressive and stupid!

Government - or pseudogovernment, anyway - doesn't operate in the best interest of the governed!

Excellent point, Nick!

"We are not in jail," says driver Tura Wedajo, who is on antibiotics for pneumonia. "But they treat us like we are in jail. If they add more taxis, a three-hour wait will be five hours." Sometimes, a driver gets a passenger who needs a long ride. But often, a passenger only wants a short trip to the Mall of America or a close part of St. Paul. The fare for a five-mile trip -- including a $2.50 airport tax -- is $13.

Do the math: You have worked three hours for just $10.50, after subtracting the airport's take. And that's before you figure your overhead: A $2,675 license fee, a $150 annual inspection fee, gas, liability insurance of $4,000 a year and repairs on your cab, which may have cost $20,000.

When your trip is over, you go back to the Post Road and get back in line. Another three-hour wait is likely.

Er, wait. That's different.

So the point is that there's a ring of businessmen - presumably evil Republicans, probably directed by David Strom - who are forcing immigrants into cabs, to wait endlessly at the airport, where they are forced to shell out gobs of cash and work for a loss on daily revenue.

But up above, Coleman says his cabbie understands economics.

So apparently...Coleman has uncovered a cab slave ring?

Am I warm? Help me, here.

So, hello, Minnesota: Stop by the Post Road SuperAmerica someday and look behind it.

You may see the people of many lands. And you may be amazed by this: That anyone wants to drive a cab in this country.

Yes. Apparently all these people left lands of oppression and starvation, to come to America, only to be forced into taxis where they sit behind barbed wire staring at toilets and demand both more and fewer jobs, even though the jobs guarantee them negative income and an early death from health problems. In the meantime, Minnesotans aren't nice, except for that mysterious church across University Avenue from the Capitol, which wants to abolish a bunch of those jobs that the immigrants need to feed their families.

Thanks! I got it now!

Posted by Mitch at April 7, 2005 08:20 AM | TrackBack