Un-Fare Competition? : Cabbies at Airport Say They’ve Been Shuttled Aside by Vans

Abdul Abdul slowly brings his taxicab to a halt along a curb across from the East Terminal at Lindbergh Field and hops out. Jamming one hand into the pocket of a pair of faded jeans, the Egyptian immigrant plows the other through his close-cropped thicket of jet hair and pitches malevolent glances across the street.

There, idled next to a concrete median in the center of the six lanes outside the terminal, sits the target of his malice: a queue of shuttle vans. The “thieves.” The “shysters.”

The enemy camp.

“You see those shuttle buses,” he said in his Middle Eastern accent. “They take all of our fares, they are so close. They are stealing money from us. Before, it used to take one hour to get a fare; now it takes two hours--at least. They are wrong, and this airport is mixed up.”

Seated in a red taxi three cabs behind Abdul, Endy Nwosu folds his newspaper and scoots closer to his window to complain to an airport visitor. He has been waiting all morning in the 25-car line, he said, and has gotten no riders. Like Abdul, he is irate.

It’s the vans. They are much too close.

Wait All Day to Earn Just $140

“This is definitely not fair,” Nwosu said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the shuttles that block his view of the terminal exits. “Most of the passengers with long fares, they take the shuttle buses now. They used to take the cabs, but they can’t see us over the shuttle buses. I used to make $220 a day; now I have to wait all day if I want to make $140.”

The San Diego Unified Port District commissioners moved the cab stand last May to relieve congestion at the curb nearest the terminal. The shuttle buses--driven by both contracted drivers and jitneys, who work on their own--were moved next to the median and the cabs were placed at the far curb, near the parking lot.

Since then, the cab owners have protested vehemently, triggering what they see as a fight for fares between them and the shuttle drivers, with the Port District on the wrong side and the airport passengers caught in the middle.

The district’s move, the cab drivers claim, is killing their business.

“I can’t do this anymore,” said Jim Knight, who has been driving a Yellow Cab Co. taxi for almost a year. “I’m leaving at the end of the month because I can’t make enough money. I’ve been losing 30, 40, 50 dollars a day. There’s no way we can get the good fares from here.”

It’s not that the cabbies aren’t willing to vie aggressively for their fares, they say. They have always been up for a battle for passengers. But never have the

battle lines been drawn like this.

Until May 23, the day the Port District began forcing the cabs to line up on the far curb, the taxis took up most of the 400-foot-long island that is now home to the shuttle vans. (Officials said that less traffic and the lack of a median have kept the airport’s West Terminal relatively problem-free.)

The vans used to park in front of the Braniff gate at the west end of the terminal and the British Airways gate at the east end. Now, however, they occupy the island’s curb--and much of the conversation three lanes over.

“People here constantly talk about them,” said David Reyes, who also hacks for Yellow Cab. “Those jitneys come over here and they steal our fares. They’re thieves. They’re shysters. They go into the airport and solicit fares; they aren’t supposed to do that. Go in there. You’ll see some of them holding up signs that say stuff like ‘Camp Pendleton.’ ”

Shuttle operators, many of whom ferry passengers between the airport and hotels and long-term parking garages, argue that the new positioning has offered equal opportunities to all of the ground transportation services.

“We have been given equal access to passengers,” said Jim Burnham, a manager of Peerless Limousine Service, which operates shuttle services for several hotels outside the city. “The Port has made steps toward and come closer to its goals of trying to eliminate traffic and construct a level playing field for all types of carriers. I think the Port is doing a great job.

“The cabs say we’re stealing their business, but that’s a crock. If the cabs are losing money, it’s because of the way they look,” he said.

Says Vans More Appealing

Burnham maintains that many of the cabs have begun to lose money because an increasing number of travelers have become aware of the more appealing shuttle vans.

“Our drivers are neat and courteous,” he said. “They also wear uniforms. A lot of the cab drivers are foreigners who don’t speak English or know where they are going. They aren’t well-shaven; they look mad. A lot of women are afraid to ride with them.

“The airport is a very important part of San Diego,” Burnham said. “The city cannot be represented by these type of people. They either shape up or go out of business.”

Burnham said he doesn’t think all cabbies are “shady characters,” but said many of them fail to conduct themselves “in the correct manner representative of the city.”

His is a view that is shared by at least one member of the Port District.

“I’m not saying all of the cab drivers are bad,” said Commissioner Louis Wolfsheimer at a district meeting last week. “I’m sure most of them are pretty good guys. But there are some bad apples in the bunch that are giving this city a black eye.”

Even so, insist airport officials, neither the cabbies’ conduct nor their appearance had anything to do with the decision to move the taxicab line.

Searching for a Policy

“We’re trying to formulate a rational, well-planned ground transportation access policy,” said Bruce Hollingsworth, the director of administrative services for the airport. “The cab companies are trying to make the issue a cab-versus-jitney issue. That has no bearing. It’s not that we don’t like our cabbies. It’s strictly how can we do the most good for the most number of people.”

Hollingsworth, one of the men responsible for safety at the airport, said the move was prompted by the amount of congestion the shuttle and jitney vans were creating at both ends of the terminal.

“The interaction of the commercial vehicles with private autos at curb side causes congestion,” he said. “The larger contributors were the jitneys and vans.

“We couldn’t move them to where the cabs are now because they load from the right-hand side. Passengers would have been loading into traffic. The center island was the best place for them. The logical choice was to move the cabs across the street.”

Hollingsworth said the move had been studied carefully and was attempted in January on an experimental basis.

“We had tested out the new arrangement during the Super Bowl,” he said. “It seemed to work pretty well, so we decided we would go with it. We had been talking about as early as November, 1987. We didn’t hear any complaints then.”

But the drivers claim they were caught unaware by the new policy and, against their wishes, relegated to the far curb.

“The most basic problem with this whole thing,” said Floyd Morrow, a lawyer who represented several of the cab owners at the Port District meeting, “is that the Port authority staff simply took action arbitrarily without consulting with or working with or asking the industry about what the result could be. They just up and moved the cab lines farther and farther away from the servicing public.”

What’s more, Morrow said, the move has done little to alleviate the problems that prompted the reshuffle.

“What they have done is create more traffic congestion,” he said. “Now people have to drag their stuff across six lanes of traffic to get to a cab, and they tie up traffic. They haven’t solved anything. It has hurt the passengers, the owners and, most of all, the working person who drives the cab.”

Naturally, the cabbies agree. But so do some passengers.

“I’ve never seen a setup like this,” said Howard Crane, a Salt Lake City man perched atop a rail on the island. “It’s not good. It’s a death trap.”

Squinting in the afternoon sun, Crane wagged a finger from the terminal toward the cab line.

‘Good Chance of Getting Hit’

“If you have to go from the terminal to there, you stand a pretty good chance of getting hit.”

Nearby, Leon Salzberg added: “This is my first time here in San Diego, but this traffic looks pretty dangerous. The way the traffic goes by, it’s just a matter of time before they have an accident here.”

Such comments are not uncommon, claim the cab drivers. They say a survey they conducted in late July showed that 91% of the 150 air passengers who responded agreed that the location of the new taxi stand is dangerous and inconvenient.

But not all of the cabbies’ statistics may be valid, said a skeptical Hollingsworth.

“It’s been reported to me that some of our traffic enforcers observed some of them handing out questionnaires that were already filled in,” he said. “I don’t know how many of them were, but our enforcers did see some.”

And though he chooses not to refute the numbers, Hollingsworth says his own observations have convinced him of the success of the reshuffle.

Arrangement Defended

“This is not an unreasonable arrangement. The cabs can still pick up passengers and unload them at the terminal curb side; they just can’t wait there. The only reason it’s a problem is because the cabs have made it one. I think they’ve blown it out of proportion.”

Still, Hollingsworth said, the airport is continuing to take steps to accommodate people leaving and arriving at the terminal.

He said the airport will place new signs along the outside of the terminal to direct passengers to the various transportation services available. There are also plans to mount synchronized crosswalks to regulate the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

Port Commissioner Wolfsheimer has even suggested placing armed police officers around the terminal to make sure both cabbies and jitneys comply with the airport’s rules.

However, Hollingsworth points out that such plans do not add up to an admission of mistreatment of the taxi drivers or preferential treatment of any of the other services.

“The airport doesn’t operate so that people can take cabs and shuttle vans and jitneys,” he said. “We’re here to offer people a way in and out of San Diego.”

Nonetheless, the ground transportation services continue to complain. And the clarion of discontent is not sounding from the cab lines only.

“It’s not all that great for us,” said Joe Illes, a jitney who has been driving his Airport Shuttle Services van for about a year and a half. “I don’t know why the cab drivers complain so much. We can only stay here five minutes.”

Illes stopped talking momentarily as he spied one of the traffic enforcement officers who monitor the traffic lanes and make sure the vehicles obey the Port District ordinances.

“If we stay longer, those guys in the blue uniforms come over here and give us a ticket. They’re really the ones causing all the problems.”

The shuttle drivers insist that the officers show favoritism to the cabbies by not informing passengers that the shuttles are also available.

“There is no justice here,” said Sam, who asked that his last name not be used and who had just received a $29 ticket for exceeding the five-minute limit. “They don’t mess with the cab drivers or any of the rentals. And they don’t tell people about us. They show them straight to the cabs.”

Standing near the head of the cab line, a traffic enforcement officer laughingly tries to put the brouhaha into perspective.

“Look,” she said, smiling from behind a pair of sunglasses, “they are both going to be upset. The cabs don’t want to be here, and they are going to lie and say the vans are taking from them and that we treat the vans better. The shuttles are going to lie and say we favor the cabs.

“We just work for the airport. We’re like the airport, trying to get our job done. If they don’t like it, why don’t they go and work someplace else?”

To that, Reyes had a quick rejoinder.

“As long as the vans are over there, we’re never going to be happy,” he said, turning his back to the East Terminal to sit on the hood of his cab. “Since it’s getting too tough to make a living out here, we just might go somewhere else.”

He glanced at the line of “shysters” again and complained a bit more.

“Yeah, we just might,” he said.