The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

The managers of the Lynden Pindling International Airport could do well to heed an old saying about minding your own business: “Cockroach have no business in a fowl fight”.

The tone-deaf management team has decided that they will adjudicate the rowdy fight between taxi drivers jostling for fares from arriving tourists.

To be sure a native combruction is not the type of welcome we should present our tourists. But the fix ought to be led by a consortium comprised of the actual taxi-cab regulators in the Ministry of Transport, the leaders in the taxi-cab union and the Ministry of Tourism who together should take on the powerful taxi cab drivers.

The latest salvo from the airport is a half-baked scheme to charge taxi and limo drivers a fee of a dollar or two for the privilege of picking-up passengers within the precincts of the arrivals hall. This drives up the cost of doing business for the taxi drivers and they will naturally pass that cost on to their customers, as well they should.

Taxis are a heavily regulated business around the world, albeit here at home slackness has led to a number of inefficiencies while the quality of both the drivers and their vehicles has deteriorated.

A few decades ago the taxi business was controlled by individual owner-operators who took pride in their work shuttling tourists from the airport to their hotels and around the island. We all muttered under our breath as we sat in a slow procession of cars trailing an immaculately maintained Cadillac taking its own time showing off points of interest to visitors.

The taxi drivers were not flummoxed by the blaring horns of the frustrated motorists behind them. These men, like the late Vernon Bullard, and lady drivers like Doris Toote were the pride of our taxi service.

But all of that changed over the years as unemployment in other jobs drove many into the taxi business as a stop-gap or last-resort measure. Some of them were ill-equipped for the task and unskilled in the protocol of hospitality not to mention being tone deaf to the admonition to cleanliness.

Both political parties contributed to this decay by their slackness in doling out taxi plates to their faithful, many of whom had no intention whatsoever of sitting behind the wheel of a cab.

These self-anointed taxi dons deployed fleets of taxis, exacting a heavy fee from cash-strapped drivers for the use of the cars and/or the taxi plate. Drivers were forced to make daily fixed payments to these dons just for the privilege of driving a taxi.

The law of equilibrium soon made it obvious that we had a surplus of drivers. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that large tour companies and some hotels deploy huge fleets of buses and assorted luxury vehicles to pick-up their arriving guests, bypassing the taxi scrum. Taxi drivers are left to fight over the remaining crumbs leading to the occasional skirmish that NAD foolishly wants to adjudicate.

Public safety must always be foremost in the minds of taxi regulators but the time has come to implement an orderly system to control who gets to pick-up fares at the airport. Like any dwindling commodity, access to the airport needs to be rationed. And NAD should not have a dog in this race. They seem to spend all of their time looking for someone or something to tax.

Their insatiable appetite for money is caused by the fact that our overall tourism business languishes in a state of decline. Years ago, we could count on no less than five jumbo jets from the US alone on the ground at any time – B747s from Pan Am and TWA, L-1011s and A300s from Eastern Airlines, DC-10s from Western Airlines – collectively over 2,000 seats.

All of these companies have been swept into the dust-bin of airline history and now we have to beg and scrape to get their successors to fly a couple of small jets here. Now, the average we can expect to deplane is 1,000 passengers. Meanwhile, as Nassau airport struggles for business, airports in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica explode with arriving passengers.

NAD was forced to build the airport on borrowed money. These loans were justified on bogus passenger arrival numbers. The opposite happened and what NAD needs now is a plan to increase the number of visitors using the airport and stop finding ways to repay their loans on the backs of airlines, vendors, passengers, car park patrons and now taxi drivers.

Kick the can over to the Ministry of Transport, to the Road Traffic Department and to the police and let them keep the peace in the taxi queue. For starters, a holding pen and a computerized (to remove any human bias) impenetrable call-up system could go a long way in solving some of the problems.

Segregate the taxi collection area from the pre-arranged tour operators section with preference given to freelance taxis, as is the case in most international airports.

Then institute a use-it-or-lose-it regulation to stop the proliferation of taxi-plate landlords. Cull the taxi fleet by demanding a more rigorous road test for taxis. Let’s encourage the use of electric and hybrid taxi cars while we are at it.

A dress code would go a long way in exuding professionalism, something the late boss of Majestic Tours Bill Saunders was a stickler for.

Since NAD’s managers seemingly missed the class on supply and demand, maybe they can try Economics 101 – the lower you price something, the more you sell.

It’s a safe bet NAD’s bankers and bond-holders will sleep better at night knowing that they have a plan to get 500,000 more passengers through the terminal rather than this harebrained scheme to squeeze thruppence from taxi drivers.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

October 24, 2017.