Taxi Drivers: Vancouver's Road Warriors
Taxi drivers are the stock characters – the crazies, the confidants – of countless movies and TV shows. Sometimes, most notably in the 1976 eponymous film by Martin Scorsese, they even get a starring role. Almost never is a cabbie’s day boring – and never has their work environment been more challenging than it is today.
After pulling up in his cream-coloured Prius in Vancouver, Amrik Mahil apologizes for arriving late. The Black Top cab driver, whose day began at four in the morning, had landed a plum fare to Surrey that he couldn’t turn down. “I’m having a good day,” the lanky, studious-looking 53-year-old says with a beleaguered smile as I get in, “after a long time.”
We turn onto a thrumming section of Broadway, between Oak and Cambie. It’s a little after 1 p.m. on a sunny weekday and people are streaming back from lunch into the area’s office and medical buildings. Mahil, however, only has eyes for the occupational hazards along the street.
“You see that car there?” he says, nodding toward a cab dropping off a passenger at a bus stop. “That would be a ticket. If the bylaw officer were here, she’d take his taxi number and the ticket would come in the mail. The other day, I got a ticket for picking up a lady in her 90s who flagged me at the bus stop. What do you do? Tell them to walk a block away?” He then points out three cabs waiting at the Holiday Inn: “Who knows how long they’ve been hanging around there.”
As Mahil’s cab heads to Vancouver’s east side and then downtown, the problems mount: not enough space for cabs to wait near Main and Broadway, cabs lined up outside the train station, the bottlenecked traffic on the Dunsmuir Viaduct, a lack of right turns coming off the viaduct, the overflow of taxis lined up outside various downtown hotels, the paucity of spots to legally pick up fares in the West End.
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