HIGH-TECH TAXIS

THE WORKPLACE Dallas has never been a great taxi town. But in an effort to put cabs and customers together faster, Yellow Cab Company spent $1.4 million last winter outfitting each of its cabs with a computer terminal linked with the main Yellow computer via two-way radio. The drivers’ reaction? Almost a third of them quit shortly after the computers were installed.

Wounded, Yellow merged in October with Yellow Checker Cab. based in Fort Worth, hoping that the larger fleet would bring in enough money to pay the bills.

So far it’s working, says KARL KUHLMAN, president of Yellow. “We have 320 cabs operating now.” he says, enough to pay for the computer equipment. And Kuhlman says that many of the drivers who quit are coming back. “A lot of those guys,” he says, “just didn’t want to take the time to learn how to operate a computer. Now they’ve found out they can make considerably more money” using the computer. He adds that his foreign drivers, especially Asians and Iranians, were generally more eager to learn the new system than were his American-born drivers.

TERRY STANTON, a Yellow driver who likes the new system, says it wasn’t just technophobia that led to the cabbies’ exodus. “A lot of guys,” he says, “totally relied on fare-jumping.” That means cabbies would listen in to the radio-dispatched calls to other cabs and rush to pick up the customer before the assigned cab got there. “With the computer, you get one call to one car, so there’s no way to cheat the system.”

Kuhlman, who says his drivers make between $150 and $225 a day, is more than happy with the computers and the merger-and he says passengers should feel the same way. Yellow’s average response time, he says, has been slashed from as long as 25 minutes to just nine or ten minutes now. “That’s faster than the police can get to you sometimes.” he says. “No other cab company in town can beat that.”