 So, we're coming to you from Nowcast Essays Studios on the sixth floor of San Antonio's Central Library, and today we have with us Carol Mendoza-Fisher, who is a community taxicab advocate. Carol, tell me how you come to this conversation. Well, my father owns a small business, and he is 80 now, so he's owned this business since 1979. He was one of the first minorities who were allowed to have a permit to own a cab. So he runs a cab company? Yes, he does. And how many cabs are in his company? How many people? 11. There are 11 people, and we have 16 drivers, sometimes they take turns. He has over the years, he's had about 35 drivers, and a lot of them are still with him, and they're like family, they're very hardworking people, there's many immigrants, but we've gotten to know a lot of them, and they're like, many of them are younger than him, so they're like his sons, he's very paternal with them, he loves them, and he cares a lot about them. And they're people from all different ethnicities? Yes, Somalia, Vietnam, Mexico, we're Salvadoran, and so this was really a great place to achieve a level of economic security, and be able to have college, and community college, and a lot of these folks supply money back home, and to their extended families here in San Antonio, and they pay taxes, and they buy in the local economy, so we really care for them as an extended family. And the business was good enough that you and your siblings went to college? Yes, actually I'm, you know, as of a year ago, the business was good, it was able to sustain our family, and my dad worked, you know, it's always a tough business, so he worked 12 to 14 hour days. Up until a few years ago, then he had to, the cab industry with the introduction of Uber as of a year ago, he's back to working 16 hour days, and he's 80, so this is really hard on him, and all of his drivers. Well, let's talk about the entry of the company's Uber and Lyft that some people refer to as rideshare, as I've pointed out on NowCastSA, that the Associated Press style book, which dictates how we, the terms that we use to describe things, say it's not rideshare because they charge money, so we're not permitted to use that in news articles. We have to refer to it as a transportation network company. You said something the other night about what you consider rideshare. What's rideshare? I consider carpool rideshare. When I take my daughter and my neighbor kids to school every day, and we share the burden of gas, and we also build a relationship that way, that's true rideshare, carpooling. I don't consider paying someone to take me from point A to point B sharing. That implies it's free, and it's not free. Well, this, let's get back to this, a story, it seems to me in San Antonio, this is a story about small businesses. I mean, your dad runs a small business. Is there, how many cab companies are there in San Antonio? There's 28 plus yellow cab. The number of permits is capped, so there's 985 cabs. That's not a lot of cabs. So that was established through a rule process that allows the operating costs and the profits to be legitimate and to be a living wage for all. And so when there's a glut, all of that is cut into, and this process was bought into by the city, by the stakeholders. It was a very genuine process. And so with the glut comes a cost to everyone. Water has introduced a glut, so this creates an artificially bloated system that eats into all these operating costs. And they've taken us back 20 years by charging rates that the cabs were charging 20 years ago. Let's step back to 20 years ago, which is when the city put in a majority of the regulations that cover cab companies right now. And they said, okay, there will be just so many licenses. You have to have a license, and there will be just so many licenses. And those licenses are determined, I think they're in connection to the population, right? So it's X licenses per X thousand people in San Antonio. It capped it so that there would not be a glut on the market, so the people who were in the cabs could actually make a living wage, right? Right, and there wouldn't be chaos, either economic chaos, nor a disruption through people competing for fares, or the customers getting caught in the middle. And this also included negotiations about public safety, where all the cab drivers agreed for public safety, for their own safety, because driving cab is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. So for their own safety and for their customer safeties, for the community safety, they agreed to a lot of regulations. And they agreed that the vehicles would go under safety checks, they agreed to undergo 10-finger print background checks, and those kinds of regulations were things that everybody agreed was a good idea for the whole industry. Correct, right. And Uber is taking us back to the Wild West, where there was no regulations, and it caused a lot of chaos back then, and it will cause a lot of chaos again. Well, one of the regulations is also that on cabs is that they show that they serve the entire community, right? And that regulation, there is no public showing of whether Uber and Lyft serve the entire community. Let's talk about some parts of the community that Uber and Lyft can't serve, the cash economy. Right. So one in five residents at Antone are elderly, and a lot of these people are working poor, they're on fixed incomes, and they don't have a smartphone or a credit card. And many of them are handicapped or disabled, they're ill. And what the cab industry provides is, okay, you have once a week, you have to go to the grocery store, we will come get you, we will take your groceries inside for you. Many of the drivers will not accept a tip from these customers, they will put away their groceries, they've developed a relationship with them. And they understand that sometimes you just have to use compassion, and we see that displayed a lot. And a lot of these elderly folks, they cannot walk six blocks in 105 degree weather to catch the via bus. They cannot acquire a smartphone and an app, and they cannot acquire a credit card that easily, or if at all. And that's where the cab drivers are really important to the community. Because the cab drivers accept cash, and they take a phone call from a phone, even a land line for the people that still have them. And they will be there to pick them up and bring them home. You were talking about folks who have, particularly who have medical appointments. Yes. This is a big area which is being neglected because cab drivers, would they take diversity training, they take sensitivity training, they take ADA training to be able to say, okay, these are the ways I can help the community. And so if there's a person who needs to go to the downtown Nix, my dad has a long time customer who he drives to the Nix downtown. And she's an elderly lady, and so is he, but he calls her no la señora, you know, and he's very respectful of her. And he drives her down there. He picks her up. He drives her down there. He goes, he parks his car on his own dime. He takes her up six floors. He checks her in because her side is not that good. And he waits for her. He goes and has coffee. He waits around for her, you know, two hours later. He will go upstairs, take the elevator, walk her back down, and take her home. And, you know, this is something that Uber drivers, they're very much in a hurry. They cannot, because they're rated, they cannot do these things because it's prohibitive for them to receive ratings when they're waiting on another fare and these people rate them. And so cab drivers really serve this niche. And San Antonio has 25% poverty, so this niche is not going away. The issues that we have with poverty are best served by the cab industry. Well, let's talk about fares, okay? This was also something that began in the 90s when the city of San Antonio said to cabs, you were allowed to charge up to X amount per mile. But you also are not allowed to charge less than this amount in that band, right? And that was to, for two different reasons, right? One was to prevent, say, a tourist getting into a cab at the airport and being told halfway to downtown, oh, that'll be 75 bucks, right? That's right. That's right. So airport fees are regulated very carefully. But talk about why there was a, you can't charge less than this. Cabs have a lot of operating costs, so to maintain a cab that's been on the road for three years, sometimes a transmission can go out from one day to the next because they have a lot of mileage put on them. And so the operating costs were taking, they were taking into consideration when these are put, these rates were put in. And so what Uber does is they've taken us back 20 years to a rate that's not sustainable for their drivers. They're exploding their drivers by making them apply that rate. They're trying to win the marketplace by destroying the rate system. And the city is being complicit in allowing this and taking us all that to economic insecurity. We have drivers who currently can't meet operating costs. So they're sleeping in their cabs or they're taking naps in their cabs where they nap for an hour and then they're back on. They're spending 24 hours a day in their cabs just to make the same that they were making a year ago. And in fact, less because these rates are not sustainable and they're being artificially kept low by Uber subsidizing where they're actually instituting predatory pricing through what they do is they'll charge up to 10 times the normal fare. Sometimes even in a situation of calamities, they're not invested in the community. If we had a flood today and all we had was Uber as a transit option, they could say we're going to institute surge pricing and people who don't have the money or if you just forget your credit card, what if you lost your purse and the flood, you're not going to get driven unless you have a personal relationship that you would be relying on their compassion but the company is not invested in the community. So let's go back to the bottom threshold. So the bottom threshold is there because of the operating costs and also to ensure that the driver can make a living wage. Yes. I mean that was a big part of it. So what you're saying is that if Uber is charging way under those rates that it not only it makes it difficult for those drivers to pay their operating costs but it also makes it difficult for them to get a living wage and by the same token when they depress prices that much and although those Uber cabs and Lyft cabs out in the marketplace, then it makes it very difficult for the folks who are charging legally what the city says you should charge to make a living. Yes, and the city has deregulated for Uber and so all of these protections that were here for the consumer and for the drivers, they're gone. And they've been destroyed even though the cabs still have to adhere to this old system. So so there are the implications of this for for for cab drivers and the implications of this for customers. Yes, there's a there's a shared cost to the community that's not being spoken about that is hidden. And right now, of course, with the introduction being fairly new to the marketplace and the negotiations of the contract being talked about right now at City Council, Uber is on its best behavior. And so it's not going to introduce surge pricing while the negotiations. But soon thereafter, what in city after city, their pattern is to introduce surge, what they call surge pricing. It's a really a predatory practice of gouging customers when they most need transit options and it's a bad public policy. OK, and right now, although cabs are regulated on the bottom that they can charge in the top that they can charge, the city is has not regulated and has not put in any attempt to regulate how little Uber can charge Uber and lift can charge or how much they can charge. And and obviously they refer to it as surge pricing. There are some people who have compared that with price gouging, which which is is not legal in other circumstances. Right, correct. It's it's like a hardware store who would charge you for flood supplies for emergency supplies, who would, you know, institute this policy of when there's a hurricane coming, let's go ahead and charge everybody 10 times more for all of the supplies that they need to protect their families. And to be clear, that is absolutely against the law in Texas, so to do anything like that. So let's get back to you said there are hearings right now going on. We're up for a review process after a trial period of some some regulations on Uber and left and some there have been some public hearings. So somebody who's watching now, what can they do? What can they do right now? And and as this hearing process is underway, but also what can they do in the future? Well, I would I would say please to think very deeply and make thoughtful choices in choosing transportation options because whether or not the dialogue exposes all of the problematic areas in choosing transportation, there's a high cost to be paid to sacrifice small business in San Antonio, people who are invested in the community, destroying their livelihoods and destroying a lot of working class options for this city. Please choose thoughtfully because it doesn't just affect you. It's just for a really cheap ride. It has a lot of trickle down, very negative effects on our community. And we're local. We're here. We've been here serving the community and we want to get better. We want to do better for the customer. But we also are are are suffering. And so we just ask that please make responsible choices and form yourself on on all of the aspects of this new technology. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you. I really appreciate your being here.