I come from a city where taxis are a rare and beautiful thing; you will happily wait up to 2 hours for your promised cab to show up and you will smile when they do. If you don’t, they will drive on by and pick up another fare. Good luck if you think that you can flag a cab down in that city; they’re all occupied or on their way to pick up a fare. Apparently Vancouver has about the same number of cabs as Halifax. The difference is that Vancouver needs ten times as many as they have to answer demand, while Halifax has so many cabs that there just aren’t enough people wanting rides.

You would think, that in a world where there are more cabs than fares, that the power would be in the hands of the fare; that you should be able to get a car or a van pretty much immediately regardless of where you are in the city. That much is mostly true, until someone messes with the system.

Ways that you can mess with the system;

• Have a dog with you
• Have groceries, while calling from a grocery store
• Have luggage or parcels or boxes when coming from anywhere but the airport
• Ask questions
• Try to flag a cab anywhere other than a taxi stand (which I’ve only seen in the downtown core

Tania bought herself a desk today and it’s a flat pack like you’d get pretty much anywhere, and the box measures 51″ x 24″ x 5 “. That and three little bags of miscellaneous grocery items, and you’d think she had been dragging a still-twitching corpse by the hair with one hand and holding a running chainsaw in the other when the cab pulled up.

“I’m not taking that in my cab; it’ll ruin my leather seats,” said Disco Stu, styling his ‘fro while he gets back in his cab, refusing to pick up this fare.  He also refused to take the other people waiting there for a cab, driving back off to a Tim Hortons somewhere in town that had a cruller and a double double waiting for him. In a town that’s short of fares, this guy turns one down and goes to the bottom of the list of available cabs, and that’s a better option?

Two other cabs pull up and refuse to take her, based solely on the fact that they can’t just take random fares, as that takes work away from another guy. The thing is, the other guy can’t get rid of the work fast enough. How does one keep themselves in hair products, too-tight polyester shirts, and gold chains (not to mention double-doubles) if they don’t accept fares?

From this end I tried calling cab companies as well, and the first one I spoke with at Casino Taxi told me the most incredible thing when I described how Yellow Cab was dicking us around over a box.

“Oh, the box is 4 to 5 feet long? Oh, we can’t take it. It won’t fit.”

“Right, in the cars, but what about the minivans?”

“Nope, won’t fit.”

“You’re telling me that a 4 to 5 foot long box won’t fit in a minivan?”

This guy has never seen a band van before…

Other than this basic lack of knowledge of space and time that the punk bastard on the other end of the Casino Cabs dispatch line showed, he insisted that he wouldn’t argue with me any further. He finished off his sentence with “All right?”

I answered the only way I know how and say “well, no, it’s not alright” and go to hang up. After years working in tech support you would think I know how to WAIT until after I hit disconnect before swearing. I didn’t.

He called back.

“If you’re going to curse at us, we’ll block your number… blah blah blah”

“Go ahead; I’ll never call you again.”

Casino Cabs; they could have simply replied “Yellow Cabs won’t help you? I’ll send two guys over and they’ll help you load everything you need!” Instead, I get a protestation that they aren’t a moving company. Sure, they’ll carry all your luggage, stow your skis and snowboard, but they won’t touch anything else it would seem.

One driver from Yellow, driving van #518, was helpful and confused by the lack of help other drivers had been. He happily moved the seats and helped put the box into the back of the van and for his trouble he received a 50% tip on top of the meter. He’ll also get a call placed on Monday to the driver supervisor, where we’ll tell him what an excellent driver they have, regardless oh how useless the rest of the drivers and telephone staff were.

Lazy Halifax; don’t move and you won’t make waves…