Council to consider revised taxi ordinance

This week, City Council will consider new rules for cab drivers and the companies that employ them, including requiring cabbies to pass a test covering Houston's layout and city laws that govern the taxi industry. There used to be such a test, the Chronicle reports, but councilmembers voted it out in the 1990s.

"The cab industry has grown so much that many of the drivers are not familiar with Houston, and that's the majority of the complaints we get," Tina Paez, a deputy director of Houston's Finance and Administration Department, said. Houstonist agrees: We rarely take cabs, but a couple of times that we have, we've actually had to give the drivers directions to where we wanted to go. So a test would be welcome, we imagine — hey, it works in London, where for more than 150 years, cabbies have been required to pass a grueling test called The Knowledge. (It takes would-be London drivers an average 34 months to prepare for The Knowledge; we hope nothing like that ends up happening here, or we might find ourselves in a taxi-less city pretty quickly.)

Also on the table: more rigorous, but faster, criminal background checks for drivers. The past seven years of drivers' records are now checked through HPD and the DPS, which can take up to a month; under the new plan, a 10-year check would be done through the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identification System and could be completed in less than a week. The taxi ordinance would also allow for easier customer complaints and administrative hearings; the city would also be able to suspend or revoke cabbies' licenses if necessary, a power it doesn't have now.

It all seems like a good idea to us, but not everyone's happy about it: "Cab drivers aren't out there hurting people. We are just trying to make a living," J.W. Masseh, president of the Association of Taxi Cab Drivers and Owners, said. "The city is passing an ordinance that we consider to be detrimental to the cab drivers."

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Photo: flickr user jmsmytaste