News from Cabs, What Are You Trying To Do Exactly?
One of the first people to respond to my post regarding this project to the Yahoo taxi group was
Yi Tang. Mr. Tang is the director of the Chicago Professional Taxicab Drivers’ Association (CPTDA), is originally from China, and has been a Chicago cabbie for twenty years. He didn’t just e-mail me back, he called, left a message and wanted to schedule a time to actually talk! When I called him back a few hours later, we spoke for about 45 minutes about his thoughts and some of the challenges with this project. What he really liked about the project is that it’s a “creating a community that is based on first hand information.”
The rest of this post are notes taken during our phone conversation:
The Challenges
- The difficult part is to get drivers involved, it’s not like a police officer or teacher’s union. We are independent, from all parts of the world and don’t think of ourselves as one unit.
- The occupation doesn’t have a standard, but is heavily regulated. For example in Chicago the city is trying to ban the use of cellphones by cab drivers. San Francisco is in the lead of regulation. Every city is different, for example SF has created a taxi commission and they have a monthly publication on the airline industry.
The Need This Project Addresses:
- Local Data Creation: Taxi drivers can not create very local crime data based on witness accounts or reporting what happens to them. This is vital for creating policy changes to increase the safety of cab drivers. Also, it provides accessible and timely crime data to drivers about what areas are safe or unsafe for working. According to Yang, the cabbies are the last people to hear about crimes on other cabbies. They need the information to be able to be safe and to navigate the justice system and to reduce the number of crimes. A lot of incidents can be avoided and can minimize the level of injury. “Accidents happen, everyone will die sooner or later, but you want to avoid certain accidents if you can.”
- Creates Understanding of the Taxi Industry and Its Risks: Many people don’t understand how many times cabbies are robbed, held at gunpoint, and murdered and this tool would help people to understand the risks. “What kind of a risk does a cab go through compared to a teacher or police officer? It’s pretty high! We need to give people a clear picture of the crimes that cab drivers deal with.”
- People Will Listen to Cabbies More: “Whatever you hear from a cab driver is a noise and people don’t listen to what we’re dealing for.”
Ideally this project would:
- Have a cab driver be able to report a crime committed on them or that they witness to an online database.
- That data could be plotted on a map and alerts would go out to cabbies when areas are high risk. We don’t need to deal with the problem of agencies working and cooperating to deal with those crimes because we’re bringing the data. The problem of no uniform standard regulation pops up again.
To make the news dispatch service then you need to:
- Get some cab drivers who are willing to try this out.
- Provide an incentive for them to post.
- Make it easy for them to post.
- Provide some utility or some service that helps them be safer.
Text A Taxi As An Incentive for Posting Also Has Challenges:
- Most cabs have a digital dispatch system cruising around the street. “As an individual cab driver I am all over the place. A dispatcher has a GPS zoning system that goes on a first come, first serve basis otherwise it goes to a limousine service and I’m not going across town when someone texts me.”
- You have to get the agencies to work with each other so that perhaps the texts will go through dispatch centers.
Resources
Mr. Tang recommended a few places for us to get some public money for safety research for policymakers to understand the taxi industry:
- National Institute for Occupational Safety – looking at violence with cabbies
- Tang works with the International Association of Crime Analysts. They want to generate the data to create a crime patten.
Studies to Read
- NIOSH and IATR, and you may find more valuable information to follow up.
- Dr. Cammie Chaumont Menndez is the lead researcher, and she has a web blog too under the topic of occupational violence.
- CDC study on Taxi Violence
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:52 am
[...] some cabbies who had emailed me. Check out the posts, particularly the one of my conversation with Yi Tang who’s been a cabbie for 20 years in [...]