It was four years ago when
I first mentioned that my part-time winter job was driving a taxi here in
Pensacola. I had bought a nice, low-mileage Ford Freestar and turned
it into a cab. I thought it would be fun and interesting. I
promised plenty of cab-driving stories; I've delivered almost none.
Turns out it's not quite the Big Adventure I'd predicted.
To be fair, Pensacola,
Florida is not New York City. There is virtually no “street”
business – nobody hails a cruising taxi. It's almost all done by
radio-dispatch. Yellow Taxi and Lucky Cab handle all of the
“civilian” work. And by that I mean they take the people who use
taxis to go to Walmart and such...people who for some reason cannot or do not
have cars. Sadly, this usually involves carrying those at the, ahem,
lower economic strata of society. Call me a racist, but I don't like
working in the ghetto where cabs are looked at as “rolling ATM's.”
A few years back, a woman
I know named Mary, driving for Yellow was robbed at gunpoint. The
man and woman took her money and then stuffed her in the trunk. According to Mary, the woman
robber kept imploring her man to, “Shoot her! Just shoot her!”
Fortunately, the man did not. Mary was rescued, and the couple was
caught thanks to the fact that Yellow had just recently installed
rear-facing dash-cams in all of their cabs.
Two other drivers I know have been savagely beaten and robbed. They both still drive taxis. Miss Patty simply doesn't take civilian calls anymore. But Mike does, inexplicably. The beating he took affected his brain. Some of the drivers cruelly call him "Mike Myers" after the crazy kid in those "Halloween" movies. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm sure he carries a gun now in his cab. I would.
If you don't want to work
the streets, that leaves only the airport and the Navy Base.
The airport is okay – at
least you can be fairly sure of two things: 1) Every passenger has
money – hey, they flew in here, didn't they? And 2) They probably
don't have a weapon on them. Airport passengers are fun. They're
either coming home from a trip, or in the middle of a trip. So they
all have a “trip story.” And it never takes much
prodding to get them to tell it to you.
Trouble is, Uber has taken
just about all of the airport business. So it's almost not worth
working the airport anymore. Almost. There are still a surprising
number of people who do not want to use Uber. (Uber has taken virtually all of our night-time weekend downtown business too. Just as well, for I do not like hauling drunks.)
Our other source of fares
is the Navy Base: NAS Pensacola. Specifically the Naval Air
Technical Training Center (NATTC). This is where sailors and Marines
come right after boot camp for their advanced training before heading
out into the fleet. There are about 4,000 “kids” on base. (They
seem so very young to me.) They are not able to have cars because
they're not here very long and don't know where their next duty
station will be – and it could be Japan!
The kids have school all
week. Once they're done they want nothing more than to be off the
base, which they call “Prison-cola.” And so starting on Friday
afternoon there is a non-stop rush of kids. We take them out to eat,
to the mall, the movie theater, to downtown and, when it's warm the
beach. It's very predictable. The rush lasts until Sunday night.
For various reasons, the Navy doesn't let Uber on the base. So we
taxis basically have a guaranteed, captive market.
Some of the kids become regulars while they're stationed here. They know that I'll take care of them, giving them a good, safe ride and making sure they get back to base. Plus we all give our regulars a pretty good discount which brings the fare down to just about what Uber charges (since they cannot give a military discount).
The great thing about
carrying the Navy and Marines around is that: They are all
unfailingly polite and respectful (and usually sober); they all have money to pay the
fare; they're all happy and in a good mood; they're full of
enthusiasm and a conquer-the-world attitude; and they all smell good.
These are things that cannot always be said about civilian
passengers, unfortunately. The only downside, if you could call it
that is that they're pretty much just teenagers and haven't really
learned how to tip.
At first I leased a cab,
but it's hard to make money when the vehicle costs you $1500 a month
plus gas (about $500/month). You really do have to work seven days a
week to make any money at all. And at this stage of life ol' Bob ain't
about to work that much. So I bought my own cab. Now my fixed-costs
are a lot less.
And I work when I want, which is generally three or four days per week. I
almost never stay out late. Most days I'm home and in bed by eleven
p.m. Uber likes to think that they invented this, “drive when you
want; make your own schedule” deal, but it's that way for
independent cab drivers all over the country, and has been forever.
As now an owner/operator,
I run under the umbrella of a cab company with about fifteen taxis.
For a monthly fee, I put their name on the side of my van, and they
feed me dispatch trips (only military, however; I do not accept calls
to non-military, off-the-base addresses). The advantage here is that
if I cannot cover one of my own personal trips, there are other cabs
in my company that I can send. The passengers usually never have to
wait more than five minutes or so for a taxi. Other drivers give me
trips as well.
My friend Terry lives
right down near the Navy Base. Driving the taxi is his full-time
gig, so he "works" a little more than I do. During the week, when it's
quiet Terry doesn't mind sitting on the base all day for a $30 trip
to the mall or the airport. I don't mind wasting time at the
airport. (Deal breaker: The airport has a bathroom; the base does
not.) We compare our monthly revenue, and surprisingly it's very
close. We're not getting rich from this job, but it's a fun way to
keep busy now that we no longer work full-time in our former careers.
I know that driving a cab
isn't the most glamorous thing an old, broken-down helicopter pilot
can do. In reality, I couldn't...wouldn't! do
this job in any other city in the country. I don't know how I ever
lucked-out and moved here to Pensacola, but I'm damn glad I did!
