Dear Editor,
It’s not uncommon for people to complain about not being able to get a taxi in the Lower Mainland due to the shortage of cabs. Today, I had a great deal of trouble getting a cab for the opposite reason — there were too many.
After dropping off my car to be serviced, I walked over to the SkyTrain station at Cook and No. 3 roads to get a taxi home. Scattered throughout the strip mall parking lot were about 10 taxis from both Richmond Taxi and Garden City Cabs.
Of all the taxis in the lot, only two of them had drivers seated in them. I walked up to the first taxi and went to get in the car. The doors were locked and, without even rolling down his window, the driver scowled at me and waved me away.
I walked further down the lot to the next cab with a driver and indicated to the driver I wanted to get in. He at least had the courtesy to roll down his window and said I had to take one of the taxis further down the parking lot.
Not one of those cars had a driver in the car and it appeared that all of the drivers were standing around in a group in the middle of the roadway smoking cigarettes. I asked that second driver if I was not permitted to choose the taxi I wanted to take.
He got out of his car and, with much hand waving, started yelling back and forth across the parking lot in a language I didn’t understand to the group of drivers who were standing around.
Then, he just shrugged his shoulders and got back into his cab, waving me away. At that point, I got annoyed and walked away not prepared to hire any of those drivers.
I will not patronize service providers who have no clue about customer service and treat prospective customers shabbily. I ended up walking across the street, taking a bus most of the way home and walking the rest of the way, despite the pouring rain.
I understand there is a hierarchy for cabs at a taxi stand. However, the strip mall parking lot is not a marked taxi stand and there is no formal line of taxis that would indicate to a customer which taxi is first in line, such as taxi stands in Vancouver or Burnaby.
To make a customer go from taxi to taxi to try and figure out which one is prepared (or allowed) to take a passenger is ridiculous, especially when most of the drivers are not in their cars or even paying attention to what is going on around them. To dictate to a customer which taxi he is permitted to hire is even more ridiculous.
The Brighouse SkyTrain station is a busy transportation hub and taxis are part of that system. The local taxi companies need to get their act together and implement a better and more clearly defined system for people wanting to use their services at that location.
I suspect, however, that it may be difficult to get the strip mall to cooperate, given that the taxis take up a lot of the strip mall’s customer parking with their unofficial taxi stand with little or no benefit to the strip mall businesses.
I’ve always been staunchly opposed to allowing the so-called ride “sharing” services to operate in our city without the same oversight, insurance and driver training that taxi companies are required to adhere to.
I’m beginning to have a change of heart.
I think it’s time the taxi industry received a long-overdue wake up call.
Steve Fairbairn
Richmond
