Cab Strike

Tuesday, Jun. 21, 2011 - 1:05 a.m.

I am forty-six. I don't walk places if I don't have to.

Today, I would have been at lunch with my teacher from 7th grade. She's staying in a hotel here that I can't get directly to on a bus; there's a three block walk from the nearest stop, and it's going to be hot and I am not going to walk in the heat and be a sweat-ball by the time I get there.

So I'd planned to take a cab from 3 Embarcadero over to just beyond Union Square where she wanted to meet me.

I'd planned this for one in the afternoon.

But instead, there's a cab drivers' strike between noon and two pm, and some Muni drivers are also participating.

I'd mentioned this to Old Buddy Dave last night, and after he sympathized, he quoted the following paragraph from the above article:

"Twenty Muni operators have decided to join taxi drivers as they protest credit card fees, electronic tracking systems in cabs and other issues the transit workers have with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency."

And Dave said it looked to him that cab drivers were protesting the GPS systems being installed in their cabs because the installation of them would make it more difficult to take an unsuspecting tourist on a longer ride.

Hm.

When I was in Australia, all of the cabs I were in had GPS systems, and to a one, the driver would put the destination address into the GPS and have us look at the screen and ask if that looked right.

There was no nonsense, no doublespeak, no bullshit, and no backroads.

And I spoke to every driver I encountered. They all assured me they were doing very well, incomewise.

So, like Dave, I'm wondering why San Francisco cab drivers don't want GPS devices in their vehicles.

I guess it's too easy and too lucrative to screw tourists by taking longer routes than necessary.

And tips show up accurately when credit cards are used to pay the drivers, which is why they don't want to process credit cards; cash always makes it easier to lie about the amount of income one has from gratuities.

But we all know that San Francisco cabdrivers are the best and most honest bunch of folks in the world, so obviously all of the above suppositions are baseless.

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Okay, off my soapbox. See you next time.

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