Taxi Driver Online

Committee agrees to sale of taxi plates for wheelchair-accessible cabs


OTTAWA — The City of Ottawa is on the verge of giving six-figure windfalls to more than 100 cab drivers by changing the terms of their city-issued taxi plates.

City council’s community-services committee, which regulates the taxi industry, voted 5-1 Thursday to allow cabbies who got plates from the city since 2007 to sell them, even though the terms attached to those plates (for wheelchair-accessible cabs) included a provision that they could never be passed on. The going rate for a taxi plate on the secondary market is more than $300,000, councillors heard.

City officials consulted “stakeholders” in the taxi business — drivers, dispatching companies and the owners of taxi plates — but didn’t think it was worth consulting the public because people are rarely interested in the taxi business, explained Susan Jones, the city’s general manager of emergency services. (That includes the bylaw department, which oversees taxi regulations.)

The vote came despite warnings from Councillor Diane Deans, who led the city’s taxi-reform efforts in the early 2000s, that it’s a “regressive” step.

The changes are part of a package of reforms city council is to vote on in April. They include provisions requiring accessible cabs to serve customers in rural Ottawa for a minimum fare of $30, allowing cabbies to drive older cars and reducing the number of annual inspections of newer ones.

“We want a lot more, but it will be a good step forward,” said Amrik Singh, the president of the union representing Ottawa taxi drivers. The changes are aimed at improving service for people who need accessible taxis and also giving drivers a bit of a break as they contend with declines in an industry that depends heavily on federal business.

“In the last few years, our business has gone down way, way, way too much,” Singh said, and it’ll probably go down further after the next federal budget is released. “There is no shortage of taxis in Ottawa. There is a shortage of fares … What we need is people using taxis.”

By far the most contentious thing the committee considered, though, is the change to the rules for plates. These physical pieces of metal carry with them the right to drive a cab, and the city limits their number in an effort to see that every cabbie can make a passable living and afford to keep a vehicle in shape. The city has 1,173 issued now, and most of them can be traded on a secondary market — bought and sold, rented, leased, left to someone in a will. About half of them are held by people who don’t drive cabs themselves, the committee heard.

(Jones conceded that nobody would set up a taxi system this way today, but it’s the way almost every city did it in the early 1970s and that’s the system Ottawa has.)

Furthermore, the city has a dozen plates for accessible cabs it was willing to issue, but taxi drivers at the top of the waiting list for new plates turned them down, Jones reported. Officials did not offer them to any of the other 400 cabbies on the city’s list, however, and some of those cabbies attended the meeting to demand that happen.

“Clearly, we have put a lot of time, effort and money into this matter but we have not seen our promised plates,” said Ahmad Hreiche, who said he’d been driving a taxi for 20 years, signed up for the waiting list and took all the necessary training and would be delighted to drive his own accessible cab if the city would let him.

The meeting attracted several councillors who don’t sit on the committee, such as Deans, who could join the debate but not cast votes.

In 2002, when she chaired the community-services committee, the fact that many people who drove cabs had to pay rent to someone else for the privilege was seen as a problem, sucking money out of the taxi industry for no benefit to drivers or passengers. As a partial solution, councillors then decided to start issuing dozens of plates but only for wheelchair-accessible cabs — which was meant to solve the additional problem that Ottawa had almost no accessible cabs on the road at the time. In a further reform in 2007, councillors decided to make new plates untradeable: once the holder was done with a plate issued then, it had to be returned to the city. And to strengthen the connection between the plateholder and service to the public, he or she had to be the taxi’s primary driver.

“I think the public would be quite interested in hearing that regressive steps were being proposed” that would take us back to where we were, Deans said of the new changes. The lone voting dissenter on the committee, Somerset Councillor Diane Holmes, tried to delay the vote for a month to allow public consultations to be held but every other committee member voted against it. College Councillor Rick Chiarelli said he might change his mind if he heard from a lot of people before the council vote April 11.

Since 2002, the street value of a plate has shot up from about $100,000. Before amalgamation, when plates were tied to particular municipalities, some plates were worth as little as $30,000.

But now it’s a matter of “basic fairness,” says the current committee chair, Bay Councillor Mark Taylor, to put all plateholders to work under the same rules. If council approves, the only distinction between plates for accessible cabs and “regular” plates is that the holder of an accessible-taxi plate will have to drive a cab for five years after acquiring it. After that, he or she can trade it like any other plate.

Part of the goal, said Taylor, is to let drivers of accessible cabs build up value in their businesses that’ll be worth something later, when the time comes to retire, though no other licence issued by the city works that way. “Taxi drivers who want to, after years and years of driving, want to be able to sell their plates and, you know, that is their retirement fund,” he said.

He also said it’s not any of the city’s business what the plates sell for as long as the public gets excellent service. “Since 2007 to now, the service implications between the transferable and the non-transferable group, there’s no difference,” Taylor said.

After the meeting, he praised Deans’s work on taxis in previous years. But times have changed, he said: “Ms. Deans, the committee of the day and certainly councils past lived through what was a much more acrimonious time with the taxi industry, with some of the drivers, some of the unions. So it certainly helps to form a mindset when you’re operating in a certain environment, how you have to behave and what you have to do. That’s not our situation today.”

Once the vote was done, taxi drivers in the audience applauded.


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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
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FFS I'd be applauding too

And why not, what is the difference between a shop, a barrow and a cab, they all sell a product, they all can be bought once the owner decides he's had enough, the only difference I see is jealous eyes who begrudge that someone may make a profit from something they got free, which is very unlikely these days as most HC plate holders have parted with folding for them, if they were free issue they wouldn't be worth bothering with and then there would be a lack of cabs and then ppl would be moaning about that, or even if there were enough there would be too many to provide a safe service, when it's quiet the right foot gets heavy and the car gets ignored when it needs attention.


There is plenty of evidence to show what used to be a fleet of 2 yr old 20k mile smart cabs is now 6 yr old 120k wrecks.