City in fight with province over taxis
Council wants more wheelchair-accessible cabs, province wants service to suburbs
Everyone agrees more taxis are needed in Vancouver. But don’t expect any more cabs on city streets soon, after council voted on Thursday to extend a moratorium on any new taxi licences for another year.
It’s a political standoff, with the city and the Vancouver Taxi Association on one side and the province’s Passenger Transportation Board on the other.
The board approves licences for taxis, limousines, shuttle vans and buses in the province. But Vancouver also licenses taxis.
The city wants the Passenger Transportation Board to approve a Vancouver Taxi Association request for 58 new wheelchairaccessible cabs. The Passenger Transportation Board refused, but wants 38 cabs from the suburbs to operate in the city at peak periods on the weekends. The city wants no part of any suburban cabs, so it placed a moratorium on issuing any new cab licences in 2014.
Looming over the spat is rideshare services like Uber, which have grown like wildfire across the continent. The city has been in discussions with Uber, but is concerned there are issues with ride-sharing services that should be addressed by the province. So on Thursday it drafted a request for the province to get involved.
“Council unanimously voted to make a really strong appeal to (Transportation Minister) Todd Stone to step up his involvement or the ministry’s involvement in policy-making around ride-sharing and taxi service,” said Vision Coun. Geoff Meggs.
Carolyn Bauer of the Vancouver Taxi Association said there are 708 taxi licences in the city, including 99 “temporary” licences the Passenger Transportation Board approved for peak periods (Friday and Saturday from 3 p.m. until 5 a.m.).
The Vancouver Taxi Association made a request for an additional 78 wheelchair-accessible taxis, but was given approval for only 20.
Passenger Transportation Board chair Don Zurowski said the Vancouver companies didn’t make a compelling argument.
“The evidence provided by them did not support a public need for 78 additional wheelchair accessible taxis,” Zurowski said from Victoria. “Poor service is not evidence that supply is not great enough.
“(Only) two per cent of their calls for wheelchair accessible taxis are from people that need wheelchair accessible taxis. (But) 16 per cent of their fleet is wheelchair-accessible taxis. That simply means they’re not getting to people who require wheelchair accessible taxis in a timely way.”
Bauer vehemently disputes this. “That’s not accurate. He does not take into account the time it takes to pick up a person who requires a wheelchair. He does not take into account that we have a big little city, and our traffic is a mess at the best of times.
“When I bump (a wheelchair client) up to the top, they may be on Boundary (Road) and my taxi may be on Granville. It will take time to get that vehicle out there. It takes time to load them; I have to find parking for them.
“You talk to anybody in a wheelchair, they’re crying. My heart goes out to them. I can’t believe this.”
Meggs thinks the holdup is because council doesn’t want suburban cabs.
“The PTB made a really significant change by saying we’re going to allow suburban cabs in, instead of expanding the existing cab companies,” said Meggs. “That’s led to an enormous amount of conflict. They’ve also said we’re not going to allow these wheelchair- accessible taxis until we get our way. They say explicitly they’re doing so because they want us to do suburban cabs first.”
Zurowski said many taxi users come from the suburbs, so it’s logical to have suburban cabs take them home.
“Every city, every regional centre virtually everywhere is challenged to have supply meet demand at bar flush (closing time),” he said. “Many people from the metropolitan area use downtown Vancouver for their entertainment, there’s a lot of options there. For that reason we approved the 38 suburban (licences), it helps people get home.”
Uber’s effect is being felt, even though the company still doesn’t operate here. Bauer said the value of taxi licences “has dropped off to next to nothing” because “everybody’s afraid” that Uber will decimate the local taxi business.
But she sounds resigned to Uber’s arrival, and thinks local taxis will serve a different market. “Uber is Uber,” she said. “Uber is going to come. It’s a sexy name, the millennials love them.
“But our population is an aging population in Vancouver. Uber can’t do that business. We have to provide care for our senior citizens, we have to provide care for people that are getting elderly, that are disabled.”
Uber’s Susie Heath said the company operates “in over 330 cities (and) over 60 countries worldwide.”
“In Canada, we’re in over 30 municipalities including the Greater Toronto Area, Ottawa, London, Hamilton, Waterloo Region, Montreal, Quebec City, Edmonton and Calgary,” she said via email. “We’ve been in Canada for three years which began with the launch of Toronto and have expanded into other cities since then. Our most recent launch was in Calgary a few weeks ago. In terms of trips, in Canada there are over one million rides per month.”