The woman who’s taking on Uber
Standing in Beck’s busy dispatch room, you’d never know there’s trouble in the city’s taxi industry.
Two dozen call takers answer phones, and 11 dispatchers send out orders, like frenzied short-order cooks.
In the middle of them sits 38-year-old Kristine Hubbard, wearing an army jacket, Converse shoes, and a headset over her long red hair. She is working channel 3. “On the Yonge and Eglinton, 2766. On the Yonge and Eglinton, 3322,” she sputters, sending her voice into cabs working Toronto’s spine from Steeles Ave. down to Merton St. “In the 1-60, it’s an app order, 1765 it’s yours.”
Hubbard isn’t a regular dispatcher. She’s the boss, Beck Taxi’s operations manager, in charge of everything from strategy to corporate customers. About 200 people answer to her, and she answers to just one — her mom.
But she likes to dispatch for at least an hour every day. It keeps her connected to drivers, she says. And it’s an adrenalin rush.
“In Downsview, 2558, you’re up. What’s that, 7949? I’ll put you top,” she says, checking two computer screens on the desk in front of her. On one is the growing list of orders she clicks with a mouse, sending each directly to the tablet screen of a cab driver she’s just spoken to on the radio.
This is Beck’s new software system, which Hubbard launched in May after a year of sleepless nights.
It is the company’s answer to Uber, the ride-booking company that has disembowelled the taxi industry across North America and Europe, one city at a time. In Toronto, it is gaining up to 20,000 new customers every week.
On the other computer screen before Hubbard is a map of Toronto, splattered with blue dots, each representing a Beck taxi. There are 2,000 of them, each an independent business that pays Beck for its dispatch service and marketing. In Toronto, two out of every five cabs you step into are painted Beck’s signature green and orange. But Beck isn’t just the biggest taxi brokerage in Toronto. It’s the biggest in North America — with more cabs than Yellow Cab in Chicago or Houston. (All of New York City’s Yellow Cabs are hailed, not dispatched.) Last year, Beck dispatched a record 8.5 million rides.
In the roiling transportation battle, Beck Taxi has the most to lose. It also has the most ammunition for the fight.
On the surface, Hubbard seems an unlikely general in this war. She’s young and female, and has never driven a cab herself. But she’s been working the trenches for more than two decades at Beck, so she knows the industry intimately. And for her the fight is personal. Beck Taxi is not just her work. It’s her family.
Her grandfather, Jim Beck, founded the company in 1968. Her mother owns it, and her father, brother and husband all work there, too. “People think Uber came and we were all doing nothing,” says Hubbard. “We knew they were coming. And when they did come, the reality was we had a choice to make — we could compete, or we could complain.”
Hubbard’s choice was to do both. So far, she says, that strategy has been working.
“Despite all the negative press, we’re still very busy.”
What’s more, she adds, Uber is hardly the biggest threat the company has faced over its turbulent 47-year-history.
Ascenic route to success
Beck Taxi got its start, strangely enough, because a new consumer technology was killing an old market. In the 1950s, Jim Beck ran an ice delivery business with his brother Bob. But as customers were shuttering up their iceboxes and buying refrigerators, he decided at 26 to try something different. Jim applied for a taxi licence in 1955. According to his son John, 59, Beck got the idea from a James Cagney movie, The Roaring Twenties, in which Beck’s favourite actor played a tough gangster cab driver.
After a turbulent divorce, Beck sold his taxi. In 1964, he opened a taxi garage with his brother Bob, leasing plates from owners and hiring drivers for different brokerages. According to John, who worked there as a kid, the biggest problem was cheating drivers. “Back then, the drivers split the fares with us. I would run my fingers across the face of the meter, looking for a pin they’d put there to stop the meters from dropping.” Drivers were fired, sometimes after a fist fight, John says.
In 1968, Jim was living in east Toronto with his second wife, Myra, when his personal car broke down. He called Diamond Taxi, the brokerage his garage supplied taxis for, to order a cab to work. He didn’t like the way the call taker spoke to him, the family story goes, and the car took 20 minutes to arrive. “He said, ‘I can do better than this,’ ” says his daughter Gail Beck-Souter, 64. So he converted the garage on Queen St. into a brokerage, tucking a single dispatcher and call taker in the office. Beck cabs worked the city’s east end only, and the company promised customers a pickup within five minutes.
Beck Taxi was a family business from the start. Myra oversaw the books, Bob was a dispatcher, and all three Beck kids answered phones or cleaned cars on weekends and after school. “If you said you didn’t want to work to him — you couldn’t say that. He’d smack you across the face,” says Denise Tuchow, now 62. She and John dropped out of high school to work fulltime, in between blow-ups.
Over the next 15 years, Beck Taxi grew from 40 to 200 cars and moved to a rented corporate office on Don Mills Rd. Tragedy struck in 1985 when Jim died of a heart attack at 55. His children went to war. John, who was managing the business, contested his father’s will, which left the company in their stepmother’s hands until she died, when it was to be divided equally among his three children. Soon after, John was escorted out of Beck’s office by police, he says, and two years later, the will was upheld in court. Myra made Beck’s elder daughter, Gail, the manager, but insisted she be joined by her husband, Don Souter, since “it was a man’s business.” Denise worked as a dispatcher along with her husband, Steve, until they had a fight with Gail and quit. “We were best friends,” says Denise. “I haven’t spoken to her since.”
In 1993, taxi drivers with Toronto’s three largest cab companies — Co-Op, Diamond Taxi and Metro Cabs — voted to join the Ontario Taxi Union, a branch of the United Steelworkers of America. When the ballot boxes were opened, it was revealed that Beck drivers had not followed suit. “We breathed a sigh of relief,” says Gail BeckSouter. “It really was the beginning of the end for the others.” The next summer, almost half the city’s cab drivers went on strike for a month, and their brokerages shut down. Business and drivers moved to Beck, doubling the company’s fleet to 500, Beck-Souter says.
Before 1995, Beck cabs had two different numbers on their glowing roof signs. BeckSouter wanted them replaced with one memorable number. On a whim, she dialed 755-5555. George Dimos answered his home phone, but wanted more money than Beck-Souter would pay. So she chose 751-5555 — less catchy, but unassigned. Even now, at least one person a day calls Dimos’s Scarborough house demanding a taxi, says George’s wife, Maria. “In bad weather, it’s more often,” she says. “Some people they are very rude, too.”
In 1998, an investigation by the Toronto Star revealed the city’s cab industry had become a fiefdom — with lord-like licence owners, often living abroad and collecting monthly fees, and serf-like drivers barely scratching out an income. The result was a fleet of dirty, run-down cabs and drivers who didn’t know their way around town. Denzil Minnan-Wong, now deputy mayor, led a task force seeking solutions. That resulted in a passenger bill of rights, age caps on taxis and a new class of licence, called the “ambassador cab,” which had to be strictly owner-operated. Beck-Souter called the new licence a “disguise to . . . deregulate this industry.”
By 2000, four family members were working full-time at Beck Taxi: Gail, Don and their two children, Kristine and Michael. That year, the company bought its own building near Eglinton Ave. E. and Bermondsey Rd. — ironically, a former union headquarters. With 545 cabs, it was already the city’s biggest company and would purchase Toronto Taxi, Metro and Arrow Cabs. Beck-Souter was a consultant for a Showcase TV drama about the cab industry, called The Ride.
The past five years have been marked by more drama, both personal and business. Web brokerage companies Hailo and Uber set up shop in Toronto in 2012, offering drivers new customers without the monthly brokerage fees. When Myra Beck died in 2013, the long-estranged Beck siblings showed up at Beck’s corporate offices, demanding to be let in as the owners of twothirds of the company’s shares. In fact, their shares had been sold off to pay their legal bills and their sister Gail eventually bought them all.
In a series of shaky videos of the encounter posted to YouTube, Hubbard can be seen calmly meeting her aunt and uncle in reception and then waiting with them until the police — called by John — arrived. She calls the encounter “a bucketful of disaster.” Each of the siblings points a finger at the other.
“We’ve got quite a colourful family, eh?” says John. “Greed got in the way.”
Charting her own course
Unlike her mother, Kristine Hubbard wasn’t forced to work at Beck. She was the one who begged her parents for a summer job there at age 16. They hired her for the call centre.
Her second day, she learned the delicate politics of working for your parents. “I paged, ‘Gail, line 1,’ and she came out of her office and said ‘I’m your mother,’ ” Hubbard says. “Later, I paged my dad, ‘Dad, line 2,’ and he came out and said ‘My name’s Don.’ ”
She worked at Beck on nights and weekends while at university, even driving home from London’s Western University.
“I loved the action, the people — there is never a dull moment,” she says.
Hubbard was the first Beck to go to university, earning a degree in history. She planned to become a lawyer, because “I have red hair and like to argue.” But her heart lay with Beck Taxi. At the company, Hubbard quickly climbed the ranks, working in billing, invoicing and staff scheduling. She began to teach herself Urdu, to charm drivers — most of whom come from Pakistan — who came in to pay their monthly dues. “Aap ke paws charges heh,” she says. “That means ‘Can I add your charges?’ ”
She was on track to take over the office, says her father, Don Souter. “Then, there was a problem with Michael.”
Kristine’s younger brother had been working full-time at the company longer her than she had.
While their father got a kick out of being ordered about by Kristine, he did not.
They fought, then stopped talking altogether. When Kristine was pregnant with her first child, she worried she would never talk to her brother again.
It’s amusing to think what her grandfa- ther, Jim Beck, would have made of her solution: Hubbard booked a counselling session for the family.
The first session was a bust. The family members left thinking “our counsellor needs a counsellor,” Souter says, laughing.
The second session, with a new counsellor, was very different.
“It was absolutely unbelievable,” says Souter. “Kristine started talking and crying, Michael couldn’t believe she felt that way. It was like magic,” says Souter.
Today, Michael Hubbard, 37, says his sister is a “very, very good businesswoman” who makes the right decisions “every time.”
A new page was turned in Beck’s family history.
“I love my brother,” says Kristine. “No matter how crazy it gets here, I refuse to allow work to get in between our relationship . . . You will never see us on YouTube.”
Take me to city hall, please
Wednesday was one of those mornings at city hall when politics seems a cross between a tailgate party and a medieval battle.
It’s only 9:30, and the grand council chambers are already packed with spectators, come to witness — and influence, they hope — the city’s licensing and standards committee members as they either approve Uber or effectively banish it.
Uber supporters are decked out in matching dark blue “Toronto Heart Uber” Tshirts. Many taxi drivers wear black bands above their left elbows — symbols of mourning.
“There’s no middle ground here. Either you have Uber X or taxicabs,” taxi fleet operator Sam Moini tells a phalanx of television cameras. If committee members approve the report today, he says, “it will be the death of the taxi industry.”
Across the room, sitting quietly in the spectator stands, is Kristine Hubbard. If you didn’t know she ran Beck Taxi, you’d assume she worked for Uber — young, female, dressed in the professional-casual uniform of millennials.
“I feel like I’m in an alternate universe right now,” she says. “One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t predict what happens in this place.”
Hubbard has been a fixture at city hall for years now. All the councillors gathering in their seats below know her well.
Those who disagree with her positions call Hubbard aggressive. Those on her side glowingly describe her determination.
Lobbying is the part of her job she says she hates. But she feels compelled to do it — not just to defend her company, but to speak for taxi drivers who, she says, always get a bad rap.
“I know about the business and industry. I’ll get in there and fight,” she says. “(The drivers) don’t feel they’ll be heard. I’d think if I ever stopped, I was abandoning people.”
Hubbard’s voice often breaks when talking about drivers. She considers many of them friends, having gone to their children’s weddings or birthday parties. In extraordinary cases, like that of veteran driver Yemane Tesfu, who was charged with “failing to be civil and well behaved” for allegedly shouting at a cyclist out the window of his cab, she has taken on their fights personally — consulting with lawyers and joining them in court. (The charges against Tesfu were withdrawn after three court appearances.)
“People think Uber came and we were all doing nothing. We knew they were coming. And when they did come, the reality was we had a choice to make — we could compete, or we could complain.” KRISTINE HUBBARD
This would be expected, were she their employer. But like all brokerages, Beck Taxi does not hire drivers. The plate licence owners pay Beck Taxi for its dispatching service and marketing.
“There’s a big misunderstanding that drivers work for us. It’s the other way around,” says Hubbard.
“If we don’t do a good job for them, they are going to go someplace else.”
All that sounds fine, in an unfettered capitalist way. Except, since Beck has grown so large, drivers’ other options have shrunk. When many began picking up Uber clients in their Beck-branded cars, they saw their contracts terminated.
“It’s an age-old policy,” Hubbard says. “If you work with Beck, you are part of our brand. You can’t put a Royal computer in a Beck car, or a Co-Op radio.”
Interestingly, Uber X has put more power in Beck’s hands.
Taxi drivers say they’ve lost up to 30 per cent of their business. Most of that is downtown flagged fares among the city’s weekend party crowd. The business that is left, then, is the orders coming through the dispatch. It’s no wonder, then, that all but one of the cabbies I flagged down on the streets had glowing things to say about Hubbard. She may not be their boss, but they consider her their boss — the woman who can get them business in a shrinking market and fight for them at city hall.
Hubbard scoffs at Uber’s claim that is it merely a technology company and that it has revolutionized the way people travel.
“We were the first taxi company in Toronto to come out with an app in 2012,” she says. “We had 100,000 downloads immediately. People were using it like crazy. Now, it’s 17 per cent of our business.”
You might have heard her say this on talk radio or television recently, or read it on her busy Twitter feed. In its fight against Uber, Hubbard is increasingly becoming the public face of Toronto’s taxi industry. Not being what most people expect is part of her power.
“I don’t even call it male-dominated. I call it a male industry,” Hubbard says.
Another part of her power reveals itself, when she finally makes her way to the speaker’s podium — three hours after the raucous meeting began.
Uber X drivers have described how their jobs have pulled them from poverty, allowed them to spend time with their kids, given them security in retirement.
Conversely, taxi drivers have predicted they will soon be living on welfare. One even compares Uber to Nazi Germany.
Into this, Hubbard injects the tone of a measured, utterly normal human.
“The idea that Toronto would license a black-market taxi service that is today operating illegally and in fact snubbing every single rule this place has ever passed is very concerning,” she says.
Those regulations make taxis safe. Uber X cars, on other hand, are just private cars — breaking the “tried and true safety message ‘Don’t get into a car with a stranger.’”
The crowd claps when she finishes, and on the walk back to her seat, Hubbard is greeted by drivers and taxi plate owners.
City council moderate Josh Matlow — the one committee member who remains silent through much of the meeting, and the only one who later votes in favour of Uber — tweets that Hubbard was “articulate and argued your position well.”
It will be five more hours before the committee members vote essentially to ban Uber X as it now exists — forcing the company to follow the old rules of licensed taxi brokerages and not drafting new rules for “transportation network companies.” Cheers go up around the council chambers.
Hubbard is no longer in her seat. She’s jumped a cab home to pick up her two daughters and shuttle them to their dance class. But she’ll be back in less than two weeks: city council will decide to endorse the committee’s position — or completely change it — during its next meeting starting Sept. 30.
“It’s just the first step,” she says over the phone later that night. “This is a battle. We’ve been in this place before. Today was a good day. Who knows what happens tomorrow.”