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BIG STORY 1 FIX THE LONG-HAUL PROBLEM. NOW. You hear about it all the time, but the problem never seems to go away. Long-hauling. It’s a black-eye symbol of greed. Like 6-5 payouts at blackjack tables and airline baggage fees, they’ve become the kind of thing that makes people not want to come here anymore. Yet it still happens. For the uninitiated, long-hauling occurs when cabdrivers take passengers on an indirect route to generate higher fares. The most common long- hauling incidents occur when drivers go through the McCarran International Airport tunnel to get to the Strip or downtown Las Vegas. It’s several miles out of the way, but if there’s a lot of traffic on Paradise Road and Tropicana Avenue, it can be a faster route. Drivers can skirt long-hauling rules by informing passengers of the alternative routes and that they’ll 2 cost more. Once passengers give drivers permission to take longer routes, drivers are no longer in violation. Because the Taxicab Authority is understaffed, it has a hard time riding herd over long-haulers. To help solve the long-haul problem, the authority needs more enforcement officers. How do you pay for that? Easy. Rewrite regulations to increase fines. Fine cab companies and drivers. In other words, be tougher regulators. Drivers often complain that they are compelled to cheat the public because they’re under pressure to build revenue by cab company bosses. Company executives say drivers undergo training to discourage the illegal practice. Obviously, something isn’t working. The training would go a little better if cab companies felt the pain of stiff fines in long-hauling cases. METER MADE The most common long-hauling incidents occur when drivers go through the McCarran International Airport tunnel to get to the Strip or downtown Las Vegas. ESTABLISH A FORMULA FOR CAB ALLOCATIONS FOR SPECIAL EVENTS AND STICK TO IT. Imagine if representatives of Wal- Mart, Smith’s and Albertson’s figured out how much each would charge for a gallon of milk, and an overseer who has his own thoughts on the price could make all of them stick to an agreed upon price. Members of the public would cry, “collusion!” and they’d be right. But that, in essence, is what happens regularly at Taxicab Authority board meetings. When one or more companies ask to put more cabs on the streets for big conventions, every company is there to hear a recommended allocation from authority staff. Then, each company gets its turn to agree or disagree and make a case for more cabs. Companies playing this role of “intervenor” almost always ask for more cabs than the recommendation, and driver unions, which also can intervene, ask for fewer. The authority board then decides what that number will be. It’s almost always higher than the staff recommendation and closer to what cab companies want than what drivers want. Every cab company gets the same allocation established by the board, which works in favor of the big companies that might have an extra 10 cars around, while smaller companies don’t have as many extras. Drivers don’t want additional cabs because overall revenue is split over more drivers. Cab companies want more vehicles because they’ll make more regardless of how drivers split profits. Although companies argue that some conventions are better cab users than others, there’s no reason why the authority can’t come up with a formula to put extra cabs on the streets for every 1,000 or so convention attendees above the average expected. But don’t let companies ask for more cabs for a boxing match that draws just an extra 20,000 or so people to town. Save the special allocations for big events—such as CES and ConExpo-Con/Agg, or instances in which multiple events are happening simultaneously. 3 4 ESTABLISH A FORMULA FOR RATE INCREASES AND STICK TO IT. Rate increase requests, especially on fuel surcharges, should be treated the same way as allocations. This was actually done once, but the volatility of fuel prices has resulted in the policy being forgotten. So, here’s how you fix it: Set a baseline gasoline price. When the price exceeds the base by, say, 50 cents a gallon over a one-month period, a fuel surcharge is triggered. The rub on automatic price triggers is that it costs $14,000 to change meters on every Las Vegas cab. The industry should pay for that, not the Taxicab Authority (i.e. state taxpayers). If the industry wants the fuel increase badly enough, it should be willing to fork over the money needed to change the meters in its fleet. If the charge is set on a per- cab basis, the big companies would pay their fair share for the changes. Oh, and one more thing: If fuel cost drops by 50 cents a gallon over a one-month period, the companies would have to change the meters to the lower rate. 28 MODIFY SOME ANTIQUATED RULES, SUCH AS METERED RATES FOR STRIP TRIPS. It takes an advanced mathematical degree to figure out how much a cab ride costs. It costs $3.30 to hire the cab (known in the industry as the “drop”), $2.40 per mile (20 cents for each one-twelfth of a mile traveled) and $30 an hour in wait time. The wait time is calculated at 20 cents every 24 seconds that the cab is traveling less than 12 mph. If a trip originates or ends at McCarran, there’s an additional $1.80 surcharge. One suggestion to address the long- haul issue is to charge flat rates for trips between the airport and the Strip, which is effectively done in many large US cities. That makes a lot of sense, considering that the highest percentage of taxi trips involve the airport and a Strip or downtown hotel. It would be easy to develop a chart outlining the cost of a trip. The Taxicab Authority website, in fact, has a chart listing the approximate cost of a trip from the airport to 70 destinations. With a flat rate, it wouldn’t matter whether a driver long-hauls or not—it’s always going to cost the same amount from the airport to a particular property. Because metered rates are part of state law, changing to flat rates would have to be approved by the Legislature. Another rule that Las Vegas visitors don’t understand is that regulations forbid pedestrians from hailing cabs, although many of us have seen cabdrivers violate the rule. Customers can only hire cabs at cab stands or by requesting a pickup. 5 BLOW UP THE SYSTEM AND DEREGULATE ASPECTS OF TAXI OPERATIONS. All right, you knew that at least one of these quick fixes wasn’t going to be easy, and this is it. The state jumped into the taxi regulation game to put an end to the fistfights and shenanigans of four | 23 MAY 2011 |