Rolling Traveler

Picture the scene: it is after 11 pm in downtown San Francisco. My friend Geoff and I have just come out of the cinema, we both have to be up early the next day, and neither of us wants to face the stink of the Civic Center Muni Metro station elevators, so we decide to share a cab back to the Inner Sunset where we both live. We walk up to the nearby line of taxi cabs and head to the first in line, a station wagon whose driver is reading a newspaper.

“Evening,” I say, smiling. “We’d like to go to the Inner Sunset, 9th and Irving.”

He looks up, with the start of the smile on his face, but it quickly fades. He points at the wheelchair and scowls: “I can’t take that. You’ll have to call a cab from dispatch.” He then returns to his newspaper, discussion over.

“Excuse me?” Geoff, already tense because of an altercation with a noisy and inconsiderate fellow viewer, stepped up, spoiling for a fight. “Did you say you won’t take my friend’s wheelchair?”

The driver, clearly used to angry passengers, just gave us a bored look, and said: “If you’ll travel with him and lift it in and out of the trunk, I’ll take you. My insurance doesn’t cover me to lift wheelchairs.”

Not even manual wheelchairs that weigh less than 20 lbs?

I wish I could say this was an isolated example, but almost every time I went to take a cab in the Bay Area, I had some issue. If it wasn’t taking over an hour to show up (which is why we didn’t try calling a cab from dispatch that evening), it was claiming that I hadn’t told the dispatch about the wheelchair and giving that as a reason not to take me. If it wasn’t ignoring my attempts to flag them down (to the extent that I actually took to hiding and having someone else flag the cab for me), it was taking me for such a ride that it blew my budget for the evening. In all my travels, from the mountains in the south of Poland to downtown Austin, Texas, I have never encountered such a poor cab service as in San Francisco.

Perhaps it is my own fault for having such high expectations.

I had gotten used to cabs as a back-up while living in Poland. There were times when I needed a car, whether because there was too much snow on the ground or because I needed to be somewhere faster than regular public transport could take me, and a cab had always fit the bill. I’d continued the habit through all my travels. In every city I’d visited, I’d been able to get into a cab at the stand, or call a cab and, barring any major traffic jams, have it arrive in 15 minutes max. No dispatcher had ever failed to tell the driver that I had a wheelchair, and no driver had ever refused to deal with the chair.

I guess every winning streak has to end somewhere.

The frustration with San Francisco taxi cabs isn’t exclusively from wheelchair users. Everyone I knew there said the same things about the response time (anywhere from 30 minutes to never), the coverage (no cabs in neighborhoods other than downtown, the Castro and the popular part of the Mission), and the variations in price (with my personal best being $26 for a journey that had been $11 a month previously). To make matters worse, this is not just one company at fault: there are a few taxi cab companies in San Francisco, and I tried them all. The fact that driver after driver refused to take the wheelchair unless someone else would fold and lift it just completed the appalling picture.

Why can’t San Francisco model its taxi cab service after another city’s, one that works? London, Berlin, Cologne, Barcelona, Krakow, Austin, Tampa… all these cities have cab services that cover the city and do their job without limitations on who they’ll carry. Sadly, it is clear that the way things are brings in enough revenue for the various companies to survive and continue to deny this great city the service it deserves.

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