From the Chicago Dispatcher
June 2009

By George Lutfallah

Survey Location (part 2 continued)

There is also a likely disproportionate percentage of drivers who work at O'Hare who don't like taking dispatched calls. Several years ago there was a huge uproar in this industry when the city instituted its “One Call a Day” rule which required all affiliated drivers to pick up one dispatched fare from an “underserved” neighborhood for each day worked. For various reasons there are lots of drivers who don't like taking radio/dispatched calls. If drivers aren't working their radios, they have to find alternative ways of finding fares and thus will post up at O'Hare more often than drivers who work their radios. For example, UTCC Chairman, Fayez Khozindar is an independent and doesn't even have a radio. He can be regularly seen posting at O'Hare. I've seen him deadheading back to O'Hare, which can be inefficient. I don't know how often he does this but it might serve you well to ask him.

Then there's the lack-of-ambition factor. O'Hare is the kind of place where you can pull in and turn off your car and relax for a couple of hours. You can read a book or try to stretch out for a nap. You can hang out with your friends and sip coffee or play cards or backgammon. It's a good place for drivers who don't want to hustle for fares. Thus O'Hare will have a disproportionate amount of drivers who aren't as aggressive in terms of making money as the average driver on the street.

Of course not all drivers who work O'Hare are inexperienced, unskilled or lack ambition. Sometimes O'Hare is the smart place to work. Also driving a cab is a tough job and even some of the very best cabdrivers will go to O'Hare to take a break from time to time, but not as a rule in my opinion. Did you happen to study the average wait time, trip time and fare amount out of O’Hare and consider the impact of deadheading? The bottom line is that drivers who predominantly work O'Hare are not maximizing their incomes which would likely skew the results of your study even if the respondents were accurate in their provided figures.

Let me sum this up with a personal example: Before I learned the city and before I became comfortable taking radio calls, you'd find me at O'Hare a lot more often than you would now. I think if you would have included your survey at other locations, you would have discovered that from a lot of drivers. There are veteran drivers who have developed their own clientele over the years whom you'll rarely see at O'Hare.

Having said that, your decision to use O'Hare as your testing grounds, while troublesome, is understandable. O'Hare is a place where it's not uncommon to find approximately 500 cabs at many times during the day so it would be efficient to conduct your study there. However, what is alarming to me is that rather than prudently explain the reason you chose O'Hare and cite the limitations and biases of that approach, you rationalized your methodology. It seems to me that you should have admitted this selection bias in your study but instead you tried to spin it as a virtue.

There's one other factor I'd like to bring up that causes drivers to gravitate to O'Hare and contribute to its overcrowding which can lead to generally less money for drivers who predominantly work O'Hare. It’s the fear factor. Some drivers are afraid to work the neighborhoods, often for good reason. Usually this is because they or a friend have been attacked while driving a cab. Drivers can be almost certain that a passenger coming out of O'Hare isn't carrying a weapon. It's for this same reason that some drivers don't work at night, which leads me to the next problem with your study.