Alexandria officials are considering requiring the city’s taxi drivers to be polite — not just to their passengers but at all times to city officials and people on the street.
The proposed rule change is so broad that cabbies say it effectively regulates their personal behavior even when they’re not driving someone around. The rule change would put Alexandria far ahead of virtually every other local government in the Washington area that regulate taxi services within their jurisdictions. And government regulation of politeness, cabbies said, goes too far.
“I’m responsible with the passengers,” said Union Cab driver Surafel Woldemarian. “If I’m rude with the customers, they can complain, and there should be due process.”
But, he added, “If you insult me for being a cab driver, why can’t I be rude?”
The Alexandria City Council will hold a public hearing on the new rule Saturday and could vote on it then.
The city’s existing rules require cab drivers to be courteous to passengers. The new rule, inspired by a single incident in April 2009 in which a resident complained about an argument he had with a cabbie, would require taxi drivers to be polite to any “city official or member of the public.”
Deputy City Attorney Chris Spera acknowledged that driver disagreements are common, and that city police already investigate citizen complaints to determine whether the cabbies violated city laws.
“Some level of that is normal human interaction,” Spera said, “but some of it escalates to the point where it’s not right.”
There haven’t been any similar complaints about cabbies since that original complaint, Spera said.
“If it was a persistent problem, we would have come back and done something,” said Spera. “But it was one incident. This type of driver discipline is not that big of a problem.”
Given the lack of similar complaints, Alexandria Yellow Cab owner Jim Yates questioned the need to expand the scope of the courtesy rules in the first place.
Montgomery County in Maryland is the only other locality that regulates taxi driver behavior by law, threatening to revoke licenses for “reasons of moral turpitude” or repeated abusive behavior.
Alexandria Mayor William Euille told city officials to rewrite the proposed rule change to address some of his concerns, including the possibility that the rule could be discriminatory because it applies only to taxi drivers and not other city or public transportation officials.
“It’s one thing to ensure that our taxi industry is providing quality service, but it’s another thing to overmicromanage the industry as a whole,” Euille said. “It’s a very uneasy to path to go down. … I want to ensure that there’s some real concrete rationale for moving forward with this.”
