Five hacks have gone into the taxicab business for themselves. All it took was each driver coming up with $2,200 and an automobile — and putting up with a lot of grief from Tampa's dominant taxi providers. Cabbie-owned taxi companies have come and gone in Tampa. The most recent, Executive Taxi, drove off into the sunset more than a decade ago. Since then, taxi passengers have been pretty much limited to the Minardi family's Yellow Cab Co. of Tampa Inc. and Gulf Coast Transportation Inc., which operates United and several other local cab fleets.
Andy Stevens, founder of the new Tampa Taxi Inc., says the latest driver-owned entry poses the biggest threat yet to Yellow and Gulf Coast. "I want the public to know there's another choice for them now," said Stevens, 43, who drove Yellow, United and Tampa Bay cabs between 1986 and last year. "More importantly, we want to show them what a real taxi driver is about."
Although optimistic, Stevens and his fellow Tampa Taxi driver-shareholders don't seem to have struck fear in the established competition.
The political and legal clout of the Minardis and Gulf Coast's Fort Lauderdale proprietors, the Gaddis family and Philip E. Morgaman, is formidable. Proud owners of 477 of the 498 taxi permits issued in Hillsborough County last year, Yellow and Gulf Coast could have used a convoluted permit-approval process they helped create to delay Tampa Taxi's start-up for months, maybe years.
In October, however, Yellow and Gulf Coast suddenly yielded and let Tampa Taxi go into business against them.
It was an odd reversal. The companies furiously battled to prevent an earlier, precarious incarnation of Tampa Taxi from getting 40 cab permits. Neither Yellow nor Gulf Coast returned Weekly Planet telephone calls before deadline.
Stevens and his Tampa Taxi partners reorganized and lowered their request for taxi permits from 40 to eight, perhaps easing the business minds behind Yellow and Gulf Coast. "They strenuously objected to 40 permits," said Stevens. "So it was a compromise to go for eight."
Are eight cabs enough for Tampa Taxi to usher in a promised new era of improved customer service?
Stevens said the quality of Tampa taxi drivers has declined since 1974, when company owners busted a cabbie union by replacing striking employee drivers with independent contractors. Today, according to Stevens, hailing Tampa cabbies is little better than rolling dice.
"There's about a 50-50 (chance) that they don't know the city or they don't know where they're going," said Stevens. "Or they're trying to rip you off. They do know and they're playing dumb. There's all kinds of horror stories out there."
Stevens attributes the erosion in driver quality to weekly cab leases as high as $455 at Yellow and Gulf Coast. Fuel is extra. "You'll spend up to Thursday making that money," said Stevens. "Then, you're forced to work the weekend if you want any money for yourself."
Consequently, according to Stevens, the ranks of Tampa taxi drivers are filled with immigrants, some of whom cannot afford to live anywhere but in their leased cab.
At only $195 a week, Tampa Taxi leases are more reasonable. Stevens said he and the other drivers don't have to work under the "tyranny" of Yellow or Gulf Coast. "We want people to know that the Tampa Taxi drivers are experienced drivers, know where they're going, are friendly and take a bath every day," he said.
Yellow and Gulf Coast executives denied problems throughout the months that cabbies pleaded the cause of driver self-determination before vehicle-for-hire regulators on the county Public Transportation Commission.
Gulf Coast executive John M. Camillo insisted at a PTC meeting last April that claims of long, sometimes fruitless waits for taxis were trumped up by cabbies looking to justify their upstart company.
A dispatcher and driver for luxury taxi service Cab Plus Inc. offered to furnish the PTC a list of grievances collected from tourists and local residents. A fired United Cab driver who went to work for Cab Plus said passengers were willing to pay his new employer's higher fares because of the unavailability of Yellow and Gulf Coast cabs.
Two months later, Stevens was so concerned about frequent failures of Yellow's computerized dispatching system that he got 87 Minardi drivers to sign a petition. Stevens, still driving for Yellow then, sent the petition to Hillsborough Commissioner Ronda Storms, who also serves on the PTC. Within hours, Stevens said he was fired.
Storms and Pat Frank, another county commissioner on the PTC, have pushed for greater competition in the local taxi business after years of PTC acquiescence to the Yellow-Gulf Coast cab cartel.
Last June, Storms grilled a Minardi lawyer about the dispatching system outages. Some lasted entire weekends and prevented callers from getting a Yellow Cab. When the lawyer blamed the phone company, Storms demanded a copy of the repair work order.
Yellow's dismissal of the whistle-blowing Stevens reaffirmed that there is zero incentive within the industry to publicize the shortcomings of Yellow or Gulf Coast. Drivers griping about dispatching deficiencies or onerous taxi leases have been canned at both companies in recent years. Former drivers and the companies have sued each other.
From outside the industry, the Cab Plus list of customer complaints is just the tip of the iceberg, according to some drivers. Drivers question the paucity of taxi complaints to the PTC.
How many of the well-heeled out-of-towners most likely to complain would know enough to contact the PTC, the drivers asked, when residents who depend on taxis here don't even know about the obscure agency?
The cabbie entrepreneurs at Tampa Taxi and their PTC allies have wondered if the county has enough taxis on the road. A 1993 PTC rule capped the issuance of taxi permits based on county population.
Frank said Hillsborough has roughly 500 permits for almost 1-million residents while Miami-Dade County has 2,200 permits for 2.2-million residents. By Miami-Dade's standard, Frank said Hillsborough ought to have 1,000 permits.
While the PTC looks at raising the cap, Yellow and Gulf Coast want dearly to keep it in place near current levels. Stevens said Gulf Coast executives John Camillo and Nancy J. Castellano urged him last summer to support the status quo. In exchange, Stevens said Camillo offered to help with Tampa Taxi's business plan, which was being refined at the time.
"Even though you get your own certificates, they want to continue to have a hand in it," said Stevens, who rejected Camillo's bid to assist Tampa Taxi.
Yellow and Gulf Coast drivers are emerging from a lean autumn following the September terrorist attacks. Stevens said he expects a handful of them to have saved enough money by this month to switch over to Tampa Taxi. The more who come over, the lower the weekly lease will go. "We don't go up," Stevens said of Tampa Taxi's lease rates. "We go down. We don't need to make $9-million a year. That's what the companies make off these drivers every year. We don't need $9-million, just a million or two." Stevens laughed. For a moment, after months of frustration, he finally could.
Contact Staff Writer Francis X. Gilpin at 813-248-8888, ext. 130, or frangilpin@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2002.