This weekend the City hosted its annual Bay to Breakers run. Bay to Breakers (B2B) is a 7 mile run through the heart of San Francisco. B2B starts from the east (bay) side of the City at the Embarcadero and runs directly west toward the ocean (breakers) side of the City.
B2B cuts through many varied [...]

San Francisco cab drivers face two recent cost pressures: a recent gate fee increase combined with the recent climb in gas prices.
Fortunately, these cost pressures come at a time when aggregate demand for taxis in the City is increasing. More tourists, outdoor City festivals, and frequent conventions bring in more and more cab passengers as [...]

I point your temporary attention to a Flash website produced by UC Berkeley j-school grad students Eric Zassenhaus and Amy Jeffries.
The video clips thumbnailed along the bottom are accurate and colorful paintings of a typical taxi shift. Well worth a view.
But wait, there’s more. The site also features insightful interviews with Heidi Machen, the SF [...]

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 [...]

Mayor Newsom signed a bill last week that increases gate fees for most cab drivers by $5 (effectively a $.50/hr paycut) and increases the gate fee for Compressed Natural Gas and hybrid cab drivers by $13.50 (effectively a $1.35/hr paycut).
I first learned of the gate fee increase when I showed up for work this weekend. [...]

December and January were tough months. Holidays meant many people left the City. There was very little tourism and few, if any, special events that draw large numbers into the City.
This weekend and last weekend produced relatively high earning taxi shifts. Nearly every shift was above my all-time shift take-home mean. These relatively high earning [...]

The Examiner has an update on the saga of supervisor Alioto-Pier’s original proposal to considerably increase gate fees. (A gate fee is the rental price of a taxicab charged to cab drivers.)
A much more reasonable $5 increase (compared to nearly $20) was put forward by supervisor Aaron Peskin. Supervisor Chris Daly opposed any increase, notably [...]

In some ways, blogs are great. They present frequently updated writing with a nice user interface that emphasizes recent postings first. But, most blog interfaces (including this one) bury old postings even if new, interesting and worthy comments are posted. I did my best to address this by adding some of the widgets you now [...]

The Examiner reports Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier recently proposed a significant increase in taxi gate fees charged to cab drivers.
(Quick background: A ‘gate fee’ is the rental fee charged to a taxi driver for a shift. Taxi drivers pay the gate fee, plus gas and dispatcher/cashier tips. The current average gate fee for large companies — [...]