TO BE OR NOT TO BE
Taxi boss had a choice. Paul Wilson
Jagtar Singh Chahal, CEO of Hamilton Cab, is not a man of idle boasts. But when Uber public policy manager Chris Schafer came to town, Chahal told him with a smile that “we’re going to run you out of Hamilton.”
The Uber manager responded in kind. “OK, and then I’ll come work for you.”
Uber arrived in Hamilton three years ago, and Chahal has tempered his prediction since then.
“If we’re not chasing them out of town,” he says, “we’ll neutralize them.”
Hamilton Cab recently moved from Cannon East. And today we find Chahal in new offices on Frid Street, directly across the street from The Spectator. But to talk to him the first time, it was a trip across town.
The year was 2002, the place a garage on King East near Ottawa Street. A Blue Line cab was in the paint shop, and with a few strokes of bright white spray paint, that bold blue line disappeared. That car was joining a tiny rebel force.
Chahal and friends had about 25 cars in their new company, then called CoOp Taxi. Blue Line had nearly 200. “I am scared, but I believe in God,” said one driver for the new outfit.
Blue Line dissed the defectors. “Most of the worst drivers we had are at CoOp now,” the company’s vice-president said then. “I know people will say that’s sour grapes, but it’s true.”
Sixteen years later, Hamilton Cab — a 50-50 partnership between Chahal and Ron Vankleef of the old Veterans Taxi — has 225 cars on the road, just a couple of dozen less than Blue Line today.
Chahal does not gloat about this. Besides, he knows ridesharing services like Uber are the real competition. And he’s
ready to step into that ring.
He was born to wrestle. He is from a village in northern India called Sanghwal. Every boy there — and some girls, too — learns how wrestle. Chahal, 53, says he can still take his strapping 23-year-old son in less than a minute.
In India, Chahal got his bachelor of science degree. Then a master’s in English, which helped him get an inspector’s job with border security. (In the interview, they asked about Shakespeare’s comic figure, Falstaff.)
But love and a better future led Chahal to Canada. He arrived June 2, 1988. He drove tractor, worked in a meat plant, drove cab. He hustled hard, took rides other drivers would not.
Sometimes Chahal got abused for his turban, but that never stopped him from liking this town. Sometimes he helped people get their groceries to the door, no extra charge.
He was making good money, and then came word from Brock University that he’d been accepted into a graduate science program. Chahal had to decide. “To be, or not to be,” he said. “Shakespeare again.” The rest is history.
Today, at the big monitor on his new desk on Frid, Chahal loves to watch the business grow. The iCabbi software tells him everything. Here’s an up-to-the-minute read, for instance, on how much each cab is making. Tops for one driver in August, one of the slowest months of the year: $9,557 before expenses.
Some 95 per cent of those drivers are immigrants. In the early days, they were mostly from India and Pakistan. Now home countries include Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan.
The old taxi meters are gone. It’s tablets now. And the new Hamilton Cab app. Fares are 20 per cent cheaper for those who book that way. City hall wasn’t happy about that discounting, but Chahal argued “we can’t compete if our hands are tied.”
But there are still plenty of phone calls to dispatch. Many seniors and low-income riders without smartphones or credit cards won’t be using that app.
In Chahal’s office, there is a picture of his 10,000-square-foot, pink-trimmed ancestral home in India. It will never be sold, he says, but he has never returned there.
“This is my city,” he said. “This is my village now.”