Taxi licence prices tell tale

I've written about this before. Getting a taxi at this time of year in Winnipeg is a little like looking for green grass in January. As soon as the snow flies, taxicabs become as difficult to find as flowers on Mars.

Here's my latest story. I'm at work at Portage and Main on a Friday night and I would like a cab to take me to the Fort Garry Hotel. It's a little cold outside. Yes, I could take a bus, but I'm in a hurry and don't want to wait and freeze.

I justify taking taxis whenever I want because having slimmed down from a two-car to a one car family, the cost of hiring taxis pales into insignificance when compared with the cost of getting a second car again. Also, I tell myself I am helping the environment and doing my bit to combat global warming.

This idea works as long as there are taxis available. On a Friday night, though, in December? Who did I think I was kidding? The taxi service phone lines are busy. I debate whether I'm going to walk across the street and see if I can pick up a cab dropping someone off at the Fairmont Hotel, but decide that I can probably walk in the same time that it takes for that to happen.

So, that's what I do. It's really not too cold. Well, "bracing" might be the word I would use to describe it. I walk down Main Street without seeing a bus which confirms that decision was probably a good one and all the way to Broadway without seeing a taxi. Then, as I cross the street to the Fort Garry, there's a taxi with its light on and the driver is looking at me in the way drivers do when they're looking for a fare. How often does that happen? But, it's no help. I've arrived.

I have sympathy for the taxi co-operatives and drivers, I really do. Taxi usage at this time of year is way up on the summer months. The Taxi Board allows for the addition of "Christmas cars" to make up the extra demand, but the system doesn't work. It's just not an economic proposition for drivers to put on extra cabs for a few weeks or even a few months of the year.

Still, the lack of cabs in Winnipeg continues to be a bane of living here and it is becoming increasingly obvious that despite the claims of the taxi operators that there are a sufficient number of cabs on the roads for most of the time, it simply isn't true.

As Free Press columnist Martin Cash reported, the cost of a Winnipeg taxi licence has gone through the roof. Barry Prentice and Charles Mossman at the University of Manitoba's Asper School of Business have reported that the price of a licence has gone from around $100,000 to more than $300,000 over the past decade. Martin Cash wrote that two licences recently went for $412,000.

Ray Mundy, of the Tennessee Transportation and Logistics Foundation who produced a report for the Manitoba Taxi Board in February, pegged the top price for a licence at $250,000. The whopping increase suggests that licencees are benefiting from a scarcity of supply

Believe it. Mundy's report is a carefully considered, well-argued report that concludes that, except for the winter months, the 410 licensed tax cabs in Winnipeg are sufficient.

Mundy warns against making emotional decisions to alter a system that, on the whole, is working well. But is it?

Taxis can be hard to get in other cities. On a rainy day recently in Toronto, hailing a taxi was like looking for a rainbow without sunshine. The difficulty of hailing a Yellow Cab on a rainy day in New York is a standing joke that appears in film after film.

The Winnipeg situation, though, is different. Buried in the appendices of Mundy's report are many complaints from hotel and restaurant operators about the taxi service they receive. People I have talked to who would use taxis as an alternative to owning a second car all feel the same as I do: Winnipeg isn't a taxi city. Hailing cabs on the street is nearly impossible. There are no real taxi stands and availability in the cold at this time of year, doesn't pass muster.

The answer is to put more cabs on the street and make it easier to hail and order them. I have no confidence that it will happen. Winnipeg is determined to remain a city where everyone has to own a car, no matter what the cost.

Nicholas Hirst is CEO of Winnipeg-based television and film producer Original Pictures Inc.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 17, 2009 A14