During an informal meeting with the Dickinson city administrator, three taxi owners and one shuttle bus driver asked for stricter regulations to be put on their companies.
“We are asking you to restrict us,” Megan Patrick, owner of E-CAB in Dickinson, said. “This is very rare where businesses come to the city and ask for this sort of thing.”
The state of North Dakota only requires public transit owners to register their business, but does not issue any sort of special licensing.
It is left up to the state’s municipalities to place further restriction on cab drivers.
Dickinson currently requires each vehicle to be licensed and insured as a taxicab, but does not routinely complete background checks on drivers.
But public transit owners say, despite the current ordinance, there are many unlicensed drivers in the city.
The group agreed to devise an ordinance and suggested a committee, made up of an owner from each of the seven cab companies in the area, be formed in order to discuss issues that arise.
Patrick said because the taxi and public transit industry is currently unregulated in Dickinson, “more and more people are being put at risk” when they get into a cab.
Owners, who also double as drivers, shared instances where lenient rules have become problematic.
Patrick recalled an instance she knows about where a cab driver entered a bar and drank while waiting for customers. The person later got behind the wheel and transported people to their destinations.
Others cab owners said they know drivers who are registered sex offenders. They agreed this becomes an issue when people are taking cabs after a night of drinking.
“These are people who are intoxicated, people who are vulnerable,” Nels Johnson, another cab owner in the area, said. “We need to trust these drivers.”
The four public transit drivers said the city should regulate who is able to operate these vehicles, putting in place some type of licensing obligations for drivers.
They said the issue extends further than safety, too.
In many instances, drivers are price gouging customers.
At the meeting, Patrick claimed she knows of a circumstance where a customer was charged $200 for a 7-mile ride.
“Some drivers are taking advantage of customers,” she said.
Not only is it affecting her business because of a decline in trust, but she said she really likes Dickinson and doesn’t want to see community members being taken advantage of.
“The people in this community are great,” Patrick said after the meeting. “It’s such a cool place and I don’t want to rip these people off.”
So while additional regulations would most likely be more expensive for her company, she says it will be worth the fees.
A way to regulate high cab fares is to enact a meter ordinance, and have the city set a base-mile fare which companies cannot exceed.
“I hate the idea of someone else setting a price for my company,” Patrick said. “But I think the city should.”
And while she is advocating for restrictions now, she hasn’t always felt this way.
“I have made a complete 180 degree turn,” Patrick said.
While living and working as a taxi driver in Anchorage, Alaska, she said she fought against the city’s strict regulations on public transit drivers, arguing officials were overextending their authority and making it difficult for companies to stay afloat.
But after she moved to Dickinson three years ago and opened her business, she now understands why these measures exist in nearly every large city across the country.
“It is a public safety issue,” she said. “A lot of what is happening right now is like the wild west. I like Dickinson the way it is, but I want to make sure there are preventative safeguards so this does not escalate out of control.”
Dickinson administrator Shawn Kessel said city officials were anticipating unlicensed cab driving to become an issue and have already started to devise an ordinance to address the problem.
“We went through and highlighted things that were good in other North Dakota cities,” Kessel said.
Ordinances in cities like Bismarck, Minot and Williston are just a few city members scanned over to extract areas which have worked well in those cities. Once they had pulled out the strong points, they created a new ordinance, which Kessel said is currently sitting on the Dickinson City Commission’s desk.
But in addition to the document, he asked the four members present at the meeting to put their heads together to devise a new ordinance, which pulls from various places around the country.
Taxi owners said they were willing to create such a document.
“We are the boots in the field, so to speak,” Taxi owner Michael Skurupey said.
He said the group knows what works and what doesn’t from years of experience and can devise a well-written document.
Patrick said this will be a piece of proactive law-making, so the city is not simply reacting to situations as they occur.
She believes it will only take the group a few days to correctly word the ordinance and expects the process to move fairly quickly.
While there are many issues with the way public transit in the city currently works, Patrick said public transit plays a vital role in the community.
“If we were all to go away, your DUI rate would skyrocket. It wouldn’t be a good thing.”
Abby Kessler is a reporter at The Dickinson Press. Contact her at 701-456-1208.
