By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Michael Mulugeta, father of twin 16-year-old daughters, has been a District cabbie since 1993. He was a chemist in his native Ethiopia, he said. Now, 10 to 12 hours a day, he navigates the streets of the nation's capital in his white Lincoln Continental, taxi No. 2117, hustling to stay on the plus side of some unforgiving arithmetic.
"Gross, I make about $650 or something," Mulugeta said. That's in a week. "Then you got your gas, your insurance. You got maintenance. After your expenses, probably you net about $400, $450, something like that."
Cabbie economics: math as brutal as it is simple, which helps explain the trepidation many D.C. taxi drivers feel these days as they line up at garages to have meters installed. The city's 70-year-old system of fares based on geographic zones is ending, by order of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), and no one knows for sure what the change in rates will mean for the cabdrivers' tight profit margins.
Just shelling out $400 for a meter, more than a week's take-home income for some drivers, will badly dent their budgets, cabbies said.
"Painful, very painful," said Mulugeta, 47, of Alexandria.
This was Friday afternoon outside the Ace Auto shop in the 2000 block of Fifth Street NE, a weedy, dead-end industrial strip home to several taxi garages. Like other drivers, who came and went all day, Mulugeta was there to have a meter put in his cab. As he waited for the work to be done, he stood on the cracked and patched pavement with his hands in his pockets, shrouded in dust from the asphalt plant across the road.
"Costing me money," he said more than once, meaning the downtime. It takes 45 minutes or so to install a meter and check its calibration with a test drive. But he had to wait his turn.
Abdul Hassen waited, too. And James Person. And Mehary Abe. And two men sipping coffee who said their first names are Getachew and Gebremehin. They waited with a half-dozen other drivers, their cabs crowded in line at odd angles in front of the garage, a brick blockhouse painted sky blue.
A heavy door of black iron bars that might have come from Alcatraz secures the garage's cramped office. Plywood covers the only window.
"Ace Auto Ent -- " says the rusted sign above the entrance. In the shade, flanked by a broken bicycle and a dented trash can filled with food wrappers and old car parts, Getachew and Gebremehin relaxed on an oil-stained bench seat from a van, chatting over the din of dump trucks rumbling in and out of the plant.
The two conferred for a moment in their native Amharic and seemed convinced that something bad would happen if they let their last names appear in print.
Ace Auto, garage of Jet Cab, one of five licensed meter installers in the city -- a little corner of the D.C. cabbie world.
"I don't like to come here," Mulugeta said. "We got to."
Fed up with hearing gripes about the flat-rate zone system from riders who find it confusing and fear they are being overcharged by unscrupulous drivers, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) added a provision to D.C. legislation last year that led Fenty to order the switch to meters. The city said it will issue warnings to drivers without meters starting Thursday and will impose $1,000 fines beginning June 1.
Most of the District's roughly 7,000 cabbies put off getting meters while a coalition of drivers sought to overturn Fenty's order with a lawsuit, an effort that failed in D.C. Superior Court last week. Now meter installers are bracing for a last-minute rush, even as the coalition takes its case to the D.C. Court of Appeals.
Yitbarek Syume, who owns Jet Cab, had four installers working Friday while others were being trained. The four put in 135 meters last week, said Syume, who plans to have 15 installers at the shop this week. "If people are coming, we will continue to be here until after midnight," he said.
Killing time at the garage, drivers spoke anxiously about the transition, describing how fragile their finances are, how narrowly they get by week to week.
"I wish the District, since they're forcing this on us, would give us some kind of help paying for these things," Person said. He meant the Pulsar 2030R meters that Syume installs, one of three models approved by the city. "Anything we make, we have to take care of our operations, our expenses and whatnot. How are you supposed to save up $400 for a meter?"
Person, 68, who lives with his wife in Mitchellville, said his Mercury Grand Marquis burns about $45 in gas during a six-hour workday. There's also insurance, about $130 a month. He said he considers it a good week if he finishes with a $500 profit, before taxes.
"To be honest, I've always been in favor of meters," said Person, who went on to describe yet another delicate variable in his hyper-competitive livelihood.
"Say a guy's coming down Connecticut Avenue, and I'm trailing him, and I'm empty, and he's got a fare," Person said. "Then someone's hand goes in the air who's going the same way that his first fare's going. He'll pick up that fare, too. And I'm without a job. Now with the meter, he has to pass up that job. It's my job."
Cabbie economics: The reason hailing a taxi in the District is so easy is the huge supply -- 13 cabs for every 1,000 residents, dwarfing the ratios in other big cities. Only New York has more cabs (13,000, or 1.6 per thousand people). And except for New York, Chicago (6,700) and Houston (2,200), no city has even a third as many taxis as Washington.
It's cutthroat out there.
"Yes, of course!" said Hassen, 50, of Northeast Washington, who has two daughters in college. His Chevy Malibu was in the garage, and he kept peering into the dimness of the grimy repair bay, grumbling. "Look, I'm not working now, see?" He bristled, throwing up his hands. "I have to come and put the meter! So I'm wasting my time."
His weekly math: 40 hours on the road, $180 for fuel, $35 for insurance, maybe $250 clear in his pocket when the 40 hours are up, he said. Good thing his wife also works (in a bank) because gas isn't his only big-ticket item. There's maintenance as well.
"Ah, if the car is broken," Hassen groused and threw up his hands again. "They just fixed my car. Two days ago they fixed it, $500. Alignment of the front end."
The basic D.C. meter fare also worries drivers -- $3 for the first one-sixth of a mile and 25 cents for one-sixth of a mile thereafter.
That's $4.25 for the first mile and $1.50 for each subsequent mile, which means a two-mile ride in the District will cost more than in Baltimore ($3.60/$2) but less than in Boston ($4.35/$2.40), New York ($4.50/$2) and Philadelphia (soon to be $4.77/$2.30). Here, as elsewhere, the rate goes up if a taxi is stuck in traffic.
A two-mile trip across one zone border -- say, from Union Station to Nationals Park -- costs $8.80 now.
"One mile, $1.50! In this city?" Mulugeta scoffed. "You can't even make your basic income all day long. You can work 15 hours and don't make what you make now with the zones. You'll be happy if you make what you make now, half of it. Honest to God."
After Hassen got his Chevy back, the installer, Zeraine Beyene, went to work on Mulugeta's Lincoln. For most of the day at Ace Auto, the only part of Beyene that's clearly visible are his feet sticking out of the driver's side of someone's cab as he contorts himself under the dash, splicing thread-like wires from a Pulsar 2030R into the taxi's electrical system.
He rolled onto his back on the front floor of the Lincoln and strained to explain.
"The meter has five wires, okay? The red one goes to the fuse box. The black one goes to ground. Here we have the white one that goes to the speed meter."
You mean odometer?
"Odometer, yes, sorry. Okay, sorry, no, yellow one goes to the odometer. The white goes to the top light on the roof, okay? The taxi light. When the meter is running, the light goes off. When there is no customer, the light goes on."
He knows where the green one goes, too. He was finished with the Lincoln inside of an hour and took it for a test spin. Mulugeta was waiting in the street, smiling, when Beyene pulled up and got out, adjusting his soiled ball cap.
"Okay," said the installer, an unlighted Marlboro dangling from his lips.
"Okay," said Mulugeta, climbing behind the wheel.
Cabbie economics.
"Going back to work, boss," he said. "What else can I do?"
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