I drove last Saturday and helped with an early beta test. John taped the first successful Cabulous hail:

A few weeks back, Cabulous had nice coverage on the old fashioned TV tubes:

Link – more info on Cabulous including a live demo of the app in use.

I wasn’t so sure that we needed another street closure, especially on a Sunday when so many tourists rely on the Embarcadero to come downtown or to the piers to spend money in our City.

So I’ll admit I was surprised to find so many people participating in the second iteration of the Mayor’s “Sunday Streets” program when I went out yesterday to shoot this quick story. I wasn’t surprised, however, to find folks in their cars a bit peeved about the closure.

As I concluded in the piece, it’s a tough balance to meet the needs of all transportation modes in a shared City.

I’m happy that the City was able to pull this off without too many problems. I’ll be interested to see what happens next year — will they do it again? Will they extend the hours? Will they perhaps have better signage warning incoming visitors and regulars to avoid the Embarcadero?

• I picked up an older guy from the Kaiser. I’d guess he was 60+. I have a hard time judging ages, especially those +/-5 years from mine.

  He was heading back to his home in the Castro near the Seward Street slides.

  He’s gay. We talked a bit about that, especially about the recent hubbub surrounding legalization of gay marriages in California. “What’s the big deal?” he responded. “I lived with my partner for 40 years until he recently passed away. We didn’t need marriage to consummate our partnership.”

  He was still very affected by the recent passing of his partner. I acknowledged this sadness, but worked around it so it didn’t dominate our conversation.

  I prodded him and he spoke at length about the history of the Castro and gay bars around the City. Much to my surprise he mentioned the Castro as a gay neighborhood is a relatively recent invention. 50+ years earlier he remembered the Polk gulch as being the centerpiece of gay nightlife in the City.

  I live near the middle Polk neighborhood, so the rather prevalent gay venues I noticed in the area started to make more sense. From the Cinch gay bar to a gay photographer’s retail outlet near the Walgreen’s, Polk street still retains a lot of its gay heritage.

  My passenger continued to explain that upper Haight was the next stop on the tour, hosting a number of gay bars up through the 70s. The Castro as a gay haven developed most recently.

  We talked a bit about politics too. He was a huge Hillary supporter and rather worried about the seemingly ubiquitous Obama mania taking hold of young folks in the City.

  I was most impressed with his involvement in the gay community. He founded and continues to volunteer as a coach for a gay softball league. He did a few other community service things which I can’t remember now since I procrastinated a week to write this damn post.

  He admitted he was quite lonely with the recent passing of his partner, but his community involvement provides a wonderful and much needed regular social connection.

  I enjoyed our conversation and his willingness to openly share his emotional state and his knowledge of City history, especially with regards to gay culture.

  Thanks, guy.

• I took a Chinese family to the Excelsior/Outer Mission district. As is usual with fares heading this way, I had no idea where I was going. Their limited English was effective, but difficult to parse at times. I had a few good natured laughs to myself as I asked things like, “Should I turn right up here?” only to be answered with, “No! No! Turn this way!” as they pointed right.
• I took a bunch of lawyers from the Hall of Justice to their office in the Financial District.

  A couple things struck me as funny: as I was driving a van, the lawyers piled in. Thus, the vehicle held passengers whose combined yearly salaries most likely exceed $2,000,000. Yet, they entrust their expensive earning potential lives in the hands of unknown drivers. This is yet another good argument in favor of permitting of taxi drivers.

  I also found it worth noting that this $2 million taxi headed back through the Tenderloin, where we pass by pedestrians who make less in a year than the lawyers make in a day.

• I picked up another older guy from the Kaiser. He was in a happy, happy mood, having just been let ‘out of jail’.

  He was in the Kaiser for 12 days. He complained at length about the TVs in the hospital, claiming they only featured Spanish speaking channels. It seemed odd to me, but he insisted it was all over the hospital — all Kaiser hospital TVs only have Spanish speaking channels. Who knew?

• Sometimes I really, really have to pee, but I see people hailing. “I can’t pass up a fare!” I say.

  So I take them to their destination. Then I really, really, really have to pee. If I again encounter someone hailing before I can find a restroom, I’ll pick ‘em up.

  Then, I really, really, really, really have to pee.

  I reached the four-’really’-pee-alert level, but luckily no one was hailing as I sped toward the nearby Hyatt Regency and felt much better.

• I picked up a Dutch family who had called for a vancab at their Fish Wharf hotel to head toward the airport.

  Funny enough, they had just come from Indiana. The younger son of the family had just finished a yearlong exchange program at a high school in Fort Wayne.

  We shared tales of our enjoyment and frustrations with Indiana life. We compared transportation options in Indiana, San Francisco and the Netherlands. The Netherlands win. SF is runner-up. Indiana didn’t even get an honorable mention.

• I picked up a lady Tuesday mid-morning heading to her downtown job with a large piece of luggage. She mentioned she was heading toward the Oakland Airport later, what time should she get a cab? Did I want to take her? Based on her flight time, I thought she probably wouldn’t leave before my shift was over, so I told her to call dispatch and arrange a cab. But, when she called dispatch they suggested she get a cab quite early, early enough for me to have taken her.

  Hmm, I thought, this sucks. I could have gotten an easy $60 fare. So, I noted the cab appointment time in my head and planned on swinging by her office around that time when it was dispatched over the radio.

  Unfortunately I was a bit late from another fare. Another cab from our company was loading her luggage as I approached.

  But, here’s the funny thing: I ended up making more money in the 1 hour that remained in my shift than if I had gone to OAK. I wondered, does this happen more often than I realize? Maybe airport runs aren’t as lucrative as I thought? Closer to the truth, perhaps since it often takes so long to get BACK from the Oakland Airport it’s not really a super-great deal. Sure, if it’s early and quiet in the City, and traffic isn’t bad, an OAK run is great. But, late-morning, midday OAK runs may not be as lucrative as expected. Noted.

• I picked up a couple at the top of Nob Hill heading out to a performance of the Stern Grove Festival. They were fun.

  After a few blocks, the guy asked me if he could open a beer in the cab. Of course! (It’s legal in San Francisco for passengers to drink alcohol in taxicabs.) He knew it was legal, but was politely asking as some drivers still frown on the practice. I don’t care unless the passengers are openly drunk already.

  They were Frenchies from Paris and we chatted a lot. Even with their prodding I was to embarrassed to speak much in French, but I understood them well enough. They were very encouraging and suggested I check out a wine bar on Polk where Frenchies regularly congregate.

  We also realized that we’re both neighbors — we both live in Nob Hill.

  This got me thinking: do I serve my neighborhood more than other cabbies? Probably yes. Is this a bad thing? Probably not.

  In the mornings Nob/Russian Hills are good spots for fare roaming. Radio orders and street hails are frequent. Many other cabbies hunt there as well.

  After 9 or 10am the Hills aren’t as busy. Sure, there are still orders, but other sections of the City start to light-up too, like downtown and even outer neighborhoods like the Richmond and Sunset. But, there’s something alluring to come back to my home neighborhood. It’s comfortable; I can dash in and go pee or get something to drink at home; I know the streets very well; I know where people queue for Muni lines off the beaten path; I know which Muni stops are likely to coagulate with annoyed, waiting passengers; I know where the rich folk are likely to hail; I know where tourists defect from the cable car mid-line stops.

  Perhaps most rewarding, it’s nice to meet my neighbors.

• As usual, I picked up a few lawyers going to or from work. (Work seems to always be the destination or origin for lawyers in my cab.) One lawyer was late for work but needed to pick up her dry cleaning first. She hadn’t been able to pick it up in 3 weeks because of work.

  Both hadn’t yet paid their student loans. This is one of my standard lawyer questions now, “Have you paid off your loans yet?” I’m surprised at the frequency of the answer of “No.” Perhaps those that have paid off their loans no longer identify as being a lawyer?

  One had a strong desire to change from commercial law to being some sort of public defender after paying off loans. The other seemed happy where she was.

• I picked up a lady from a hospital in an outer neighborhood. She was heading back to her apartment downtown.

  After a few minutes of standard opening chat I learned she had lived in the City for many decades and lived through the 1989 earthquake. I hadn’t talked to other passengers about this yet, so I asked her what it was like. To my surprise she had quite a story.

  She had been heading back west toward the City over the Bay Bridge. She felt the quake as she was approaching Yerba Buena Island. Her car swerved and she described the feeling like her tires were melted rubber, or something to that effect. She came to a stop, as did the few other motorists around her. She wasn’t sure whether or not to continue, but figured it’d be safer to get off the bridge than wait for aftershocks to knock it down. She kept heading west and was happy to hit solid ground. She drove through the City back home, noticing the wreckage. Back home people asked her how she got through — they had seen on the news that the Bay Bridge had collapsed. She was stunned — she missed by just a minute that section of collapsed roadway to return home. She was one of the last people to successfully cross the bridge after the quake.

  I know luck is a human construct in a feeble attempt to rationalize chance, but I thought and said, “Gosh, you sure were lucky!”

• Early Monday morning, around 4:30am, I was in my standard ‘Marina early morning radio hunting mode’. Along with a sizable chunk of the rest of the cab fleet, I hunt around for fares on Polk, Union and Fillmore Streets while monitoring and checking-in for radio calls in the area.

  As I was turning from north bound Van Ness to west bound Lombard to position for some deep marina radio calls, I heard a guy yelling for a cab at the hotel on the corner. He was a white guy in his late 30s, with facial hair classifiable as ‘stubble’, wearing a giants cap.

  I could tell from the start he was an odd character, but I had a hard time then (and still do now while writing this) identifying the particulars off his oddness. First off, he was heading to the Tenderloin from his Marina hotel at 4:30am. That’s odd. Well, it’s not really odd, it just means he’s picking up drugs.

  RE: Drug policy. I don’t want to know about it, I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to hear about it. But, if someone heads somewhere to “pick something up from a friend”, I have no real qualms about the object they’re actually up-picking. As long as they don’t take too long I don’t really care what they do. Usually drug runs are good runs — we head quickly to a destination across town, they do some sort of business, then we head right back. It’s a quick $20 or even $30 depending on distance and tipping.

  When we arrived in the Tenderloin he didn’t know exactly where he was going, changing his destination once or twice. (This is always a bad sign.) Finally he found the right corner and he said he had to go pick up a ‘diskette’. Okay, whatever. He runs across the street and around a corner. I see him appear again in a minute as he runs across to the diagonal corner, gets money from an ATM, and then disappears around the corner again.

  About this time a smartly-dressed young black guy comes up to my cab, with iPhone in hand, and asked for a ride. I explained that I was waiting for my passenger to pursue a transaction and then return to his hotel. I’d be happy to take him if I wasn’t taking somebody else. This guy wouldn’t have it. He tried all sorts of persuasive verbal techniques to let me take him, “I’ll drop you $10 right now and we’ll head up. I’ll pay for this guy’s fare. Let me just share a ride with him back to the hotel and you can drop me at my place.” His insistence was impressive and we had a nice ancillary chat about the relative ‘roughness’ of the Tenderloin vs. other economically depressed cities’ ghettos. Our shared thesis: the Tenderloin is rather tame.

  But, upon arrival of the original passenger sparks flew. The passenger got in the cab and the younger guy kept asking to share the ride. I asked the original passenger and he said, “No, let’s head to the hotel.” The original passenger looked very, very uncomfortable. The young guy started insulting the passenger and vice-versa. Perhaps I should have left before that started, but at this point I said, “Goodbye, nice to meet you,” and took off.

  The passenger was irate. “How could you let that guy talk to me like that?”

  He soon calmed down and went on a different track. “Let’s get something to eat. What’s open right now?” I mentioned I’d be happy to drop him off at the 24 hour IHOP down the street from his hotel. No, this wouldn’t work. He specifically needed fast food.

  At this point my passenger’s lack of focus became clear. He wasn’t making rational decisions, especially with regard to my time. He was just spouting off random things he wanted to do. “I need some cigarettes. Can we stop by a 24-hour market?” “I’d even be happy with a Taco Bell. Is there a Taco Bell around here?”

  “How about I just drop you back at your hotel — there are a few gas stations open around there.” This satiated him enough for a few more blocks. At this point I learned another fun fact, he was leaving the country with a quarter of a million dollars in the bank to go see the world. Wow. How’s that for odd?

  Finally we arrived back at the hotel, but, of course, by then his cigarette need resurged. “No, no, let’s go to the gas station down the block. It looks open.”

  I grudgingly accepted — the station was within sight after all. I dropped him off and he wanted me to stay to take him back to his hotel. (Yes, his hotel two blocks away.) I told him I couldn’t keep running around doing errands and expect to make any money. This was a true statement — this run was taking too much time. And pursuing errands with an erratic drug addict is not my idea of a fun time. He was pissed again, “I just don’t get the cab drivers in this city! You can’t just wait a few minutes? I’ll pay you for the metered time!” He paid just the meter, no tip, around $12, and I wished him luck on his trip and offered an apology.

  Looking back on the story of this fare, I realize it’s a bit confusing. I wish I could revise it to make more sense. But, perhaps it’s a good reflection of events — he was a confusing, confusing guy. His actions and requests were individually logical, “I’m hungry, let’s get some fast food,” but collectively irrational, “Let’s head back and forth across the City as each of my needs — food, drugs, nicotine, etc — wins in priority at any given moment, without attention paid to the external world.” I’m not sure if this state was induced by a long history of drug use, drug use at that very moment, or an inherent personality trait. But, I was happy to have him out of my cab.

• As cab driver turnover rate is rather high, I see new drivers often and don’t give it much thought. One new driver, however, happened to engage me in conversation at the cashier window and we started chatting as we headed out of the garage after our shifts.

  I was glad I spoke with him. He had been a cab driver in Chicago many years back and commented that all the cost drivers — gate, gas, and the meter — seemed to have increased proportionally such that earnings are the same as before. But, considering inflation, real earnings are significantly lower. (That is, earning $150 a shift in the 70s was worth a lot more than it is today.)

  He is also a ham radio enthusiast and we spoke at length about the radio dispatch system used by the cab company. As I had guessed, there are 2 separate radio frequencies allocated to the cab company by the FCC — one for the dispatcher and one for the cab drivers checking-in across the City. He explained that they are both frequency modulated (FM) channels around the 150 MHz spectrum. (Remember, your favorite FM radio station is in the same ball park, 88.5 KQED is 88.5 MHz.)

  A neat feature of FM over AM is that the strongest broadcasting FM station will drown out other lower-power FM broadcasts on the same frequency. For some applications, like cabs checking-in for an order, this is desirable behavior. At least one cab will be heard clearly, while others are drowned out. This process is repeated until no cabs are left checking-in. During each check-in, at least one cab will be able to clearly check-in. Competing AM broadcasts bleed such that receivers hear a mix of all broadcasts. While not ideal for the application of cab dispatching, it is well suited for, say, emergency channels where you want to absolutely be able to hear any broadcaster calling for help.

  Thanks, driver, for the cool info.

• I crested Taylor Street at California looking for fares Tuesday morning. I saw empty cab after empty cab heading outbound (west) on California toward the neighborhoods where fares are likely. Had those cabs not been there, I would have headed outbound on California at this point as well. But, I crawled northward on Taylor past California and saw a potential jackpot — a guy crossing the street after leaving his Nob Hill apartment with airport-bound luggage.

  Had I just started driving a cab I would have naively left him since he wasn’t doing a traditional “hail.” But, I could tell he needed a cab: he wasn’t waiting for the 1-California on Clay to take the BART, he wasn’t waiting for another cab at his house, he was walking with a purpose toward California Street where he would surely find a cab. So I pulled next to him, made eye contact, and scored a $45 fare to SFO.

  Of course, by no means does this learned skill make cab driving a lucrative profession. But, it sure does help on a slow Tuesday morning.

• I picked up a van call at a Fisherman’s Wharf hotel. A Filipino family was waiting for me as I pulled up. They were heading to Mill Valley in the North Bay.

  This was a great trip. I love out of town trips. Not only do they pay well, but it’s a pleasure to see other parts of the Bay Area, especially beautiful drives like the SF to Mill Valley drive.

  I learned the family was emigrating from the Philippines to Canada. They were very excited at the move except for the cold Canadian weather. They tipped me well and I had a beautiful drive on a beautiful day. Thanks, family.

• I picked up a group of reporters at a low cost hotel in ‘TenderSOMA’ where the Tenderloin’s trademark seedy feel extends below Market Street, especially west of 5th Street. I took them to the BAVC where they were meeting with other documentary filmmakers and reporters.

  One of the guys in the front worked for Frontline World which sparked an interesting discussion. I had met another Frontline World employee at a journalism meetup I attended to promote a website I’m developing. This led to a long discussion about the website I’m making and my motivations for making it: namely, the failure of local media to evolve with media consumption habits of persons under the age of 30.

  At a certain point we realized we were having an excessively cliche “San Francisco” moment: a part-time cab driver and ‘startup’ wannabe having a chat with visiting reporters about the failure of local media to evolve at the same pace as technology. And, to pour salt in the wounds, we both mentioned we’ll blog about it afterward. Ouch. It’s like something out of an Onion headline: “Blogging cab driver blogs about blogging passengers.”

• A few staff members at the cab company mentioned they heard about my blog. Hi, fellow cab company staff members and/or drivers.

My earnings floor — the lowest take-home pay I can expect — is increasing from the record lows of the winter. In other words, it’s rare this time of year to see a shift that doesn’t net me at least $100. In the winter I had sub $100 shifts much more often.

The ceiling seems to hover around $250, with occasional exceptions like Bay to Breakers Sunday — the most recent high outlier on the chart.

Unfortunately, earnings don’t ‘feel’ as high as they did last summer. Indeed, recent earnings seem clustered around $150, compared to a large cluster around $200 last summer. Two obvious reasons: gate fee increase and fuel cost increases, both costs are borne directly by cab drivers. Other potential reasons: tourist activity has yet to reach peak, major SF events and street fairs happen later in summer, I work less lucrative shifts than last summer.

For fun, here is a chart of gas prices over the past year. The red line is San Francisco, the blue is USA average.

My take-home shift average still hovers around $170.10* since I started driving July 2007. My median take-home pay (the middle amount of all shifts worked) is $176.

When I started last summer it was at the peak of the high earnings season. Plus, I worked the rather lucrative Saturday and Sunday day shifts (when compared to lower earning Monday and Tuesday shifts I added). I thought these seasonal and day of the week changes would give an artificially inflated view of my earnings, so I also computed take-home average for 2008 only, which starts at the low-point of the season and includes the lower earning Monday and Tuesdays.

I guessed the 2008 year-to-date (YTD) average and median take-home would be significantly less, but I was surprised at the outcome. 2008 YTD average is $168.54 and 2008 YTD median is $170. Both figures are surprisingly close to my all-time average.

*I do not subtract money spent on food during my shifts. This is important so that my variable food spending (which can range from $0 to $20 during a shift) doesn’t affect the outcome and so that I don’t have an odd monetary incentive to not eat (in order to inflate my take-home pay statistics). But, the reality for most drivers is that ‘food costs’ are a real expense, subtracted from take-home cash pay. So, any other cab drivers reading this, be sure to add back in your food costs to compare your earnings to mine.

DPT officers get a bad rap. Everyone seems to despise them, yet they are a crucial element necessary to help all of us to effectively share our City streets.

Here are a few of the ways they make our lives better:

• Parking meter enforcement: You think it’s hard enough to find parking now? Without meter enforcement you would never be able find a place to park in the City’s high demand commercial corridors.
• Neighborhood permit enforcement: If you work out of town, where do you park your car after work? In your neighborhood. Without neighborhood permitting you would never find a space. Enforcement is key.
• Transit revenue: Have you ever taken a bus in the City? A great deal of revenue for our public transit system comes from DPT parking fines. This is good.
• Curbed wheels: It’s not just a joke to squeeze money from you, parked cars without curbed wheels can and do injure people.
• Sidewalk blocking: Nobody wants to live in a city where anyone can park their car anywhere they please. Blocking sidewalks is rude to most pedestrians and a major challenge for the mobility impaired.

Frankly, most complaints about DPT tickets include silly disclaimers, such as, “I just double parked for just a second… I didn’t feed the meter, but I was just going in for a coffee… I know there was street cleaning, but…” We receive significantly below market cost parking on our City streets. The least people can do is follow simple rules to share our limited parking resources.

So, dear reader, please shake the hand of the next DPT officer you see and say, “Thank you.”

It was another slow weekend in San Francisco. During my shifts

• I witnessed a non-trivial collision. A Toyota pickup truck was traveling behind me south on South Van Ness. As we approached the 16th Street intersection he passed me on the left and returned to my lane immediately before entering the intersection. The light had just turned green for our southbound traffic. Meanwhile, a Ford SUV crept west into the intersection on 16th Street, presumably not having seen the red traffic signal or slowing after realizing he was running a red light.

  The Ford SUV clipped the rear of the Toyota pickup truck. The Toyota’s tires lost all traction as it launched into an out of control 360 spin, coming to rest against a parked car across the intersection on South Van Ness.

  While my traffic signal intuition knew that the signal was about to turn, or had already turned, green, I couldn’t trust that intuition as a witness. But, the instant the vehicles came into contact I looked up and confirmed we had a green light. That is what I told the Toyota driver’s insurance company, and, later this week, his lawyer.

  After the accident I questioned myself, “Should I wait around and be a witness?” I hadn’t made very much money that day and needed to keep going on the road to earn a reasonable take-home pay for the day. The Toyota driver was smart. He knew a cab driver would be a reliable witness should a conflict arise regarding fault. He ran up to my cab and got my phone number. I said, “I’ll be happy to recount what happened, but I really can’t wait around here. I have to keep moving.” I kept moving.

  Random thoughts:

  • If the Toyota hadn’t passed me, I could have been the first vehicle in the intersection.
  • What if the Ford SUV had been a tenth of a second earlier and hit the driver door instead of the rear of the truck?
  • If I didn’t volunteer to be a witness, it would have been easy to find me again since my vehicle has a phone number in large white letters painted all over AND a unique taxi ID number.
  • If the same thing happened to me, I would depend on witnesses to prove I wasn’t primarily at fault.
  • Driving slowly prevented me from being a participant in this accident.
• When a passenger mentions San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom it’s usually not in a positive light. I think a great deal of this negativity derives simply because he is the personification of a stressed municipal entity that has an extremely wide range of duties, arguably insufficient funding, and arguably no ability to make itself more efficient due to the inherent structure of local government.

  So, it was with surprise that passengers in my cab spoke at such length and voracity about the positives of a Newsom program to offer basic housing, health care, mental health care, life guidance, career counseling and general support to homeless residents of San Francisco.

  These passengers had called DeSoto to request a van cab. I answered the call after returning from an airport run. They were moving from a weekly hotel in the Mission to a weekly hotel on Nob Hill, a few blocks from my apartment.

  Upon my arrival, they cheered in joy that a van cab showed up so quickly. As I’ve mentioned a few times before on the blog, it’s tough to get vans to take moving orders because the loading/unloading time is labor intensive and often not metered. A lot of time and effort output for perhaps not enough return. Perversely, or wisely, I enjoy the short burst of labor motivated by a need to maximize speed on van moving calls. It makes the blood flow faster than it otherwise would while I stagnate in the driver’s seat.

  We loaded up their stuff which mostly consisted of clothing in black plastic trash bags but also included some classic American necessities like an old wood paneled CRT TV.

  The most direct route dictated Franklin, a 3-lane timed signal boulevard which normally flows very well after the morning rush. Unfortunately, that day it didn’t flow so well so we had quite a bit of time to chat in the coagulated traffic.

  The passengers appeared to be a couple, but of course you never know for sure. The lady was black, in her 30s or 40s, sported an oversized t-shirt and wore a bluetooth telephone headset in one ear. The guy looked a bit older, perhaps in his 40s or 50s. He looked at ease with the world.

  They both had travelled a great deal, especially around the American south where they were both born. The lady’s favorite American city was Seattle, the guy preferred Atlanta.

  Not long ago they were both homeless on the streets of San Francisco. They spoke at great length about the City program they were working with. They have 3 months of subsidized rent while they get back on their feet. The City pays for many other needs — they even pay for their taxi fare via City issued taxi scrips! They have mandatory counseling appointments with City social workers. They have mandatory mental health sessions. They have mandatory career counseling. After 3 months the subsidies begin to decrease.

  I was surprised at their positive reaction to the mandatory nature of the meetings and counseling sessions. Many of their peers complained that there were too many hoops to jump through to qualify for the free rent aid. But, my passengers were adamant that showing up on time for a career counseling session is a simple thing to do and is a necessary step to practice personal responsibility.

  A choice paraphrased quote from the lady, “I’m past the age of 30. To not have a place of my own is embarrassing. I’m glad to have this chance to get back on my feet.”

  I was impressed by their extremely positive reaction to the program. I was impressed by the program. I hope it helps them on their way.

  Mayor Newsom and the City, good job.

• I picked up a few Academy of Art students from their Nob Hill apartment answering a van call. They had a great deal of video equipment from lights and camera equipment to tripods and sandbags.

  They were undergraduates in the Academy’s film production program. They were unanimously disappointed with the program. They felt the classes were stretched out. They felt the cost of the degree was not commensurate with the gained knowledge. But, they all agreed that the Academy would give them a significant advantage finding a job. Arguably, like many MBA programs, perhaps the greatest return from an Academy degree is the built-in connections to recruiters. Those connections are very valuable.

  But, do you need to waste 4 years on a degree to get those connections? What if you could just pay the same amount of money and get those connections immediately? I guess the recruiters need to buy into the illusion that the school teaches something magical such that there is a reason to recruit directly from the school instead of pulling from the general public.

• Sunday the cashier/driver operations manager gave me a nice car — a late model Dodge Durango. It was a guilty pleasure to drive. It had amazing acceleration, its brakes were surprisingly responsive given the mass of the vehicle, the interior was luxurious without being ostentatious, and the sound system was above average. Driving any vehicle model painted with taxi coloring always gives the driver automatic priority, but this vehicle commanded additional priority. It was easy to push my way into lanes.

  The visibility was a bit disappointing. Compared to the Dodge Caravan taxis, the Durango felt like a tank. I rode higher but the windows were shorter and felt like small slits compared to the tall front glass of the Caravan.

  The cargo space was adequate but appeared a bit smaller than the Caravan. It could seat 7 passengers in addition to the driver, but the the nice midwestern family test-case was undeniably smushed as I took them from their downtown hotel to the Fish Wharf.

  The worst attribute was gas mileage. I spent $56 on gas, a new record during a shift. Dodge Intrepid sedans fuel up between $30 and $40 followed by the Caravans at $40 to $50. $56 is ridiculous, especially considering I drove lightly on the accelerator with a highly conscious aim to conserve gasoline. If I had driven like a ‘normal’ acceleration-heavy cab driver I would have paid between $60 and $70.

  This is an excellent example of a non-aligned incentive between cab companies and drivers. As cab companies do not pay the cost of gas, there is no motivation to purchase fuel efficient vehicles. What’s more, our company has a close relationship testing vehicles for Chrysler, so it gets these odd gas-guzzlers at a cheap, cheap rate. Unfortunately, it is the cab drivers that bear the downside of these ‘deals’ the cab company gets on rolling stock.

• I am losing my inhibition to try out my extremely limited Spanish on Mexican passengers. I know basic useful terms, like ‘right’, ‘left’, and ‘at the corner?’ in addition to numbers up to 20 which helps out when confirming numbered streets.

  Despite the ‘laughable’ nature of my attempt to speak basic Spanish with these customers, it seems to accomplish two positives:

  • I can now absolutely confirm a destination and route in a language other than English. Many Spanish speaking passengers will incorrectly interchange the English words for right and left, or make the surprisingly common error between, for example, 7th and 17th Streets.
  • This shows a respect and openness to other cultures on my part that is always very pleasantly received.

  I’ll keep stumbling along.

I am so fond of ragging on San Francisco’s poorly managed Municipal Railway that I often overlook Muni’s remarkable, world-class achievements. (Yes, they really do have some remarkable, world-class achievements.) This post is a first attempt at fixing my glaring oversight.

Muni’s extensive trolleybus system is a modern treasure. Muni claims to hold the largest trolley-bus fleet in the US and Canada. Trolleybusses are efficient, consume little fuel, recharge via regenerative braking, require little maintenance, are quiet, and produce zero localized pollution.

• Electric motors are more efficient than diesel motors, especially climbing steep grades.
• Trolleybusses offer ZERO local emissions. Diesel fuel engines on the other hand, the most common local locomotive for municipal transit busses nationwide, produce a fine particulate matter byproduct that may be a health risk.
• Trolleybusses are not tied to any particular energy generation source. The local transit agency can purchase power from private generators, government-owned generators, create their own local power plant, use solely green power, etc.
  • San Francisco Muni’s trolley busses are powered exclusively by the City controlled Hetch Hetchy Reservoir O’Shaughnessy Dam. (Source)

Keep up the good work, Muni. Maybe the 38-Geary, the highest ridership bus line east of the Mississippi, can convert to a trolleybus when it hatches from its BRT cocoon.

Links

• Trolleybus Wikipedia entry
• SFMTA/Muni trolleybus information page
• This crazy electric bus page has more than you could ever want to know about electric busses.
• Check out this YouTube video of Chinese super-capacitor bus that charges at each stop instead of requiring trolley power lines all along route.

I drove 3 shifts in the past 3 days. One of them starts early at 5 am, the other two are graveyard shifts starting at 1 am. Each lasts 11 hours.

During my shifts

• I picked up two young, professional nice guys downtown on Market Street. They wanted to go out to the Golden Gate Bridge. I politely warned them that it might be a bit pricey, $15 or so, but they didn’t seem to mind.

  One of them held dual American and Japanese citizenship, the other was a Japanese national. They both worked for a Japanese company in the City doing IT work.

  We had a long chat about Nova, a former “big four” private English teaching school in Japan. My one visit to Japan was to visit a girlfriend who at the time worked for Nova in a suburb of Tokyo.

  My passengers summed up the drama of Nova — in short Nova used sleazy tactics forcing students to pay for gigantic class packages with steep cancellation fees. The Japanese government stepped in and stopped this sleaze, but, of course, as a result Nova didn’t earn enough revenue to cover costs. Instead of warning their employees, customers and other stakeholders, Nova kept operating business as usual until they simply ran out of money, unable to pay employee wages.

  Nova’s English teaching employees were American or from Commonwealth countries. Their Japanese was often limited, some spoke next to none. This vulnerable immigrant population was left with up to 2 months unpaid wages and eviction notices from their company owned housing with little or no resources to find alternate employment or housing. The Nova Wikipedia entry nicely summarizes this debacle.

• The Golden Gate Bridge is far from prime ‘pickup’ points. Most of the time after dropping at the Bridge I’ll head back on Doyle Drive, an expressway of sorts, until I get back to civilization. This time, I decided to loop through the slower, scenic route via the Presidio to Crissy Field and then the Marina Green. Although these aren’t normally good ‘cruising’ streets for cabs, sometimes it pays off to take this slower route. On a nice, sunny day there are many walkers, bikers, runners and tourists along the road. Since most cabs don’t come by very often, a stranded tourist or tired hiker can be very glad indeed to see a vacant taxi.
• My scenic route back from the Golden Gate Bridge paid off well.

  An older French lady hailed my cab. She had walked all the way across the Bridge and was in the process of walking back but the journey was proving a bit too much. I was amazed she had made it so far.

  Her English wasn’t great, a trait that seems common among the older French, while the younger Frenchies seem to have English injected in their bloodstream at an early age.

  I lived in France the summer of 2000 on a sort of exchange program while I was in high school. I lived with a host family, the matriarch of which was a retired nurse who spent her free time as an elected official on the local town board of governors. She and her husband were gracious hosts, offering as much love and care as could my own family. So, when I found out this lady in my cab was a French nurse, my warm memories of that summer in France came flooding back and I naturally projected a lot of these same feelings toward her. This helped lower my guard of embarrassment that usually surrounds my self-critical attempts at speaking French as my grammar and accent have disintegrated faster than I could have ever imagined.

  We had a great conversation, some in English and some in French as our skills in each other’s language were roughly matched. I rattled on at length about the City, we chatted at length about the shared climate of Bretagne where I stayed and the San Francisco Bay Area, and talked a bit about where she lives in Nice.

  I really enjoyed my time with her. Thanks, French lady. You really made my day.

• I keep asking myself what makes me continue to drive a taxi. This is the longest I’ve ever held a job. The answer is, in part, the freedom. I choose how much and which days I wish to drive (although not the hours).

  But a deeper answer is probably closer to this: each time someone gets in my cab a god of some sorts throws cosmic dice. Will it be a man, a woman, an American, a drunk, a druggie, a murderer, a mother, a father, friends, lovers, a gabby student, a mute commuter, a gracious tipper, an elderly grandmother, or even a friend of mine? Will they head down the street, across town, through rush-hour traffic, to the neighborhood bar, to SFO, OAK, or even Cupertino? Perhaps it’s the same core addiction faced by gamblers, but deeper and more insidious, as it’s a gamble for personal connections and not simply the fare.

• I had more than the recent usual number of international young tourists in my cab. While nothing more than unsupported conjecture, it appears that the low value of the dollar is really drawing people to come visit the USA. The young travelers spoke at length about the amount of shopping they have planned in the City during their stay.
• After dropping one of my three fares to Pier 33, I picked up a father and son who were waiting for a cab. They were heading to a hotel downtown. They were planning to move to the City. The mother of the family was being transferred to the City from Iowa. We talked about about my midwest roots (always a winner, by the way) and my transition to San Francisco life. They were bristled by the high cost of real estate. Their expectations for Iowan quality of life won’t be directly translated to the same level in San Francisco. They seemed to have smelled their first whiff of this already in their short stay. Good luck, Iowans.

I am a recently single guy and just realized how hard it seems to be to meet new people (men or women) in the City. One craigslist post summed it up well, “Ever notice how people (downtown anyway) just walk right past each other, no eye contact? Creepy.”

I heard a great Perspective on KQED on a closely related topic: why do we crave proximity but not intimacy with those around us?

It seems like after college there is no regular, required ‘mixing’ environment. University offered 5-7 new classes each semester, a forced shared living environment, and communal extracurricular activities.

Of course, there’s always the workplace, but that’s often ineffective. Coworkers are in varying stages of life connected only by an employer, not a shared desire to meet others.

Bars are okay, but alcohol gets in the way of real interactions. In the City, Zeitgeist is a good bar for meeting people, especially when it’s busy and you’re forced to sit next to strangers.

KQED Perspective: Proximity Without Intimacy

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