Great column by MARILLA STEPHENSON this morning
Councillors idling again on taxi rules
By MARILLA STEPHENSON
Thu. Feb 4 - 4:54 AM
SOMEBODY, PLEASE, call these clowns a cab and ship them out of town.
It’s past time to demand value for money from our well-paid Halifax councillors, who are better at wasting taxpayers’ time and treasure than shaping a thriving, modern municipality.
They are quick on the draw with the mundane, the minor and the microscopic matters that help the little wheels churn in our regional municipality.
But give them something bigger to chew on than a one-bite appetizer, and they spit it out. And don’t even try to imagine how many wasted hours the bureaucratic chefs spent cooking, in response to council’s original requests.
Last week it was tax reform, then parking in the central peninsula region. Both had been preceded by significant staff efforts to devise options for change to the status quo in response to years of complaints. Needless to say, the status quo remains the daily special.
Councillors did it again on Tuesday, voting to kill the results of five years of meetings, research, discussion, public input and debate over the taxi industry in the region. Honestly, we are fewer than 400,000 people. Do we really need to regulate the taxi industry to the extent of telling drivers where and when to work?
There is plenty of empty talk about regional government, about thinking as regional representatives and crafting a functional government to go along with it. But once again, the decision-makers at city hall have pathetically clung to pre-amalgamation boundaries to keep the cab industry in the clutches of a favoured few.
The so-called zones for taxis are Halifax, Dartmouth and County. Is that not telling in itself? First reading on a new bylaw to eliminate the zones was expected to be a routine matter at Tuesday’s council meeting, but (surprise!) it didn’t work out that way.
As things now stand, drivers from Dartmouth can bring passengers to Halifax, but have to drive back empty. The practice, called "dead-heading," is a waste of gas, hard on the environment, and makes it tough to earn a living.
The Halifax drivers are pushing for the status quo. Why wouldn’t they, given that it enables them — and the people who own the taxi companies — control over the market?
The Dartmouth drivers want it opened up, so they can have easier access to what is now a restricted market.
Those siding with the Halifax industry folks have used that Halifax-versus-the-rest-of-us mentality to chip away at the plan to eliminate the zones. If you kill the zones, their argument goes, you’ll never be able to get a cab in Sackville or Cole Harbour. Meanwhile, the downtown will be flooded with cabs.
If that day ever comes, it would be a sight to see. The downtown is mostly known as a place where it’s very tough to get a cab. Meanwhile, where I live in suburbia, there is usually one at my door within five to 10 minutes, day or night.
Do I expect to stand at the end of the driveway and see one drive by? Of course not; I don’t live downtown or anywhere near the density of the downtown. But to hear arguments about cab availability, you’d think folks expect there to be a cab waiting on every corner, from Carrolls Corner to Quigleys Corner, just in case of the occasional passerby.
It didn’t matter. In the end, the old argument that pits one part of the region against another worked again.
Why are we even having this discussion? To make money in the business, drivers should be permitted where to go and when to be there, in order to meet the demand and cover their costs. It’s called a free market; you know, the opposite of communism.
Instead, we have council voting to protect the already well-cushioned backsides of controlling interests in the taxi industry, under the guise of protecting service for their constituents.
It’s a pathetic excuse for civic government.
Is that taxi here yet?
(
mstephenson@herald.ca)
