Focusing on cab reforms misses the bus
Complaining about cabbies is a beloved Montreal pastime.
Gather more than one person in a room, share an anecdote about an unpleasant taxi experience, and just watch the oneupmanship fly. (“You think that’s bad? Well ...”)
And if you listen to enough of these tales, you’ll pick up on certain recurring themes about our cabbies and their cabs. Surly. Directionally challenged. Ratty cars. Refusal to take cards. No change.
Complaints like those are what has made many of us readily embrace services like Uber X — which, depending on who you listen to, is either skirting the law or outright flouting it. Either way, it is, relatively speaking, a clean, efficient and affordable alternative to traditional taxis. It’s outof-the-gate success is certainly no mystery.
So in a way, it’s commendable that the Denis Coderre administration has made recent decisions aimed at modernizing the taxi experience in the city. Some of them even make sense.
Take for example the edict announced in September that, as of Oct. 15, has made it mandatory for drivers to take credit or debit cards, a move so long overdue that when it was announced, the majority of the reaction to it was in the vein of “Gee, welcome to the 21st century ...”
But it was around the time this fall when city council adopted more new rules for taxi drivers — including a dress code and requiring them to open the doors for passengers who call them — that it occurred me: the city’s intense focus on the betterment of the taxi industry is hogging the spotlight deserved by a far more essential service in dire need of some tender loving care. Public transit. Anyone who regularly takes an STM bus or métro to work will tell you that they have become as uncomfortable, unreliable and unfriendly as they’ve ever been.
There’s data to back up that anecdotal evidence. As my colleague Jason Magder reported last month — after a by-now-obligatory access-to-information request to chisel details out of the secrecy-adoring STM — in the first half of this year, due to repairs to the agency’s increasingly rickety fleet of buses and a dearth of drivers, there were fewer available buses for commuters for the third year in a row. That’s a disheartening trend-line.
Next, consider all of the innovative public transit measures the STM has announced of late ... No, seriously, consider it and get back to me when you come up with one.
One howler that immediately comes to mind: cognizant of complaints that lineups at métro station booths and kiosks had reached ridiculous levels, the STM earlier this year came up with a cutting-edge solution — assuming the edge you’re cutting is located somewhere in the vicinity of 2004.
That’s right, we’re talking about the STM’s OPUS card reader — that you need to pay almost $20 to buy — that allows users to plug a gadget into their home computers and load up their passes. You won’t be surprised to learn that this comically archaic device was widely and immediately panned upon its release. (That the STM does not, in late 2015, have a smartphone app that allows you to automatically buy fares is, in all seriousness, preposterous).
None of this inspires confidence that the city’s best minds are focused on the task of improving the quality of public transit in this city. And given the enormous complexity of ensuring that we have a properly funded, planned and sustainable system, those are precisely the people we need on the case.
From a public policy perspective, it’s not difficult to understand why the city has spiritedly taken the taxi industry to task: they are easy pickings, perfect for scoring populist points with little effort or outlay, political or financial. Collectively, taxi companies and their drivers have not cut a sympathetic figure over the years, with their obstinance and attitude. Few people whose livelihoods are not tied directly or indirectly to the taxi trade can be coaxed to say much nice about it.
But a true populist — and if anyone regularly stakes a claim to being one, it’s our ostensibly people-pleasing mayor — would realize that revitalizing public transit, not regulating what colour shirt a cabbie wears or if he opens the door for you, should be what’s top of mind.
Given the breadth of people who need — not want, not choose to, but need — to use public transit to go to work or school on a daily basis, that’s the least we should expect, but somehow still less than we are getting.