(San Francisco – Casey Miner, KALW News) Starting this summer, San Francisco’s taxis will be among the most expensive in the nation – but officials are hoping they’ll also be the most used. The MTA, which has overseen city taxis since 2009, voted Tuesday to raise rates by 10 cents per fifth of a mile — or per minute. The board also wants to raise the drop fee, or the rate meters display when passengers first enter the cab, but they won’t take up that issue until later this summer.

It’s the first in a series of steps the city hopes will make more efficient use of the city’s 1500 licensed cabs. Higher rates mean a steadier cash flow for cabbies, who aren’t always inclined to risk picking up passengers in far-flung neighborhoods. But the increase is only part of an ongoing campaign to integrate taxis more fully into city life.

After the vote, several drivers said that while the fare increase was a good start – they haven’t had a raise in nearly a decade – they still felt there was a long way to go. Particularly contentious has been the issue of credit card transactions (cabbies pay a 5% card processing fee), and electronic waybills (detailed records of all taxi trips). Those last two issues will be addressed at additional “taxi town halls” coming up this summer.

The city’s liaison to the cab drivers is director of taxi services Christiane Hayashi. I caught up with her to ask about what’s in store for SF’s cabs.

How would you describe the taxi situation in San Francisco right now?

If you want to boil it right down to the simplest equation, it is that the taxi passengers need to connect with the taxi drivers. In Los Angeles they did a study, their taxis are empty 40% of the time. If we could get taxis to be empty less of the time, more people would be getting taxi service, and the taxi drivers would be getting more. The challenge is to make sure we’re using this resource as efficiently as possible. Here, the taxi industry is within a larger transportation agency. It’s one of our modes of transportation: we have pedestrian mode, bike mode, transit mode, auto mode, taxi mode. It’s within the mission of this agency to use taxi transportation mode more efficiently so passengers are able to actually find taxis. And that’s going to benefit the taxi drivers because it’s going to increase their income.

Why is it so hard to find a taxi?

Passengers and drivers have effectively trained each other in a way that ensures that they will not meet. The customers tend to call more than one taxi knowing that no likely is likely to show up. They call every phone number in the book and they’ll take the first taxi that arrives. Well, that means that every other taxi that responds finds the customer’s not there. Well, if the taxi driver doesn’t respond, the customer is trained to call all these companies, or whatever they can do to get a cab. Our mission is to make sure they connect and that it’s a profitable ride.

What are some strategies the city is considering to solve this problem?

There’s a smartphone app spreading throughout San Francisco called Cabulous, where you can find a taxi on your smartphone and have a direct communication with the driver, not through dispatch system, but just, you see a driver close by, hail them electronically, and then see them approach on your smartphone. So we’d like to explore those options because they don’t interfere with telephone dispatch, they’re just another way to communicate with a taxi.

Will this work for people who don’t have smartphones?

You could put an iPad in a Safeway grocery store where someone leaving the store could hail a cab from there. You could have the receptionist at a clinic hailing a cab from the internet site instead of trying to call through the dispatcher. You can reach people at the grocery store, the library, coming out of a doctor’s appointment. And I think that has a lot of potential to increase service.

Let’s talk about raising prices. Isn’t that a way not to get people to use cabs?

The fact is that it’s been eight years since the price of taxis has been adjusted. Everybody knows that the cost of everything else has gone up, and in particular the taxi drivers responsible for their own fuel costs. We all know how much that’s gone up since 2003. I think it’s time that there was a modest increase to adjust for increased costs of doing business. We deliberately tried to stay within a moderate increase so passengers wouldn’t feel it as much. Driving a taxi is a difficult job, and there are a lot of drivers who do it very, very well in San Francisco. And they deserve a raise.

How many people actually use cabs in San Francisco?

We don’t have data on that. We need to talk about electronic record keeping for the taxi industry so we have some data about this mode of transportation, how many miles are traveled, how many passengers use it, and be able to use that data to improve service. We need to move to an electronic system so we do have those trip statistics, but drivers are feeling that there are privacy and data security issues there. So we need to make sure those issues are addressed.

What are your hopes for SF’s taxis in the future?

I think as the price of gas increases, as parking costs increase, residents will see, or hopefully see taxis as a way of having door to door, convenient transportation, without having to take car out of the garage. One of my missions is to get folks with the option of using their own vehicle, who will tend to use their vehicle instead of getting on a bus – they’re time-sensitive, but they’re not necessarily cost-sensitive. So we’d like to see them leave the car in garage and take a taxi instead, so there’s less congestion, less competition for parking, less pollution, more business for taxi. But in order to do that weed to make the taxi response reliable.

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