Yellow Cab

Labor unions representing police, blue collar and clerical workers in the city have ratified three-year pacts, Annapolis Mayor Alfred A. Hopkins announced yesterday.The length of the contracts for the three unions is a departure from the traditional one-year agreements and should result in reduced legal costs for the city, Mr. Hopkins said."We feel these agreements represent a new step forward in labor stability on behalf of our true employers, the citizens and taxpayers of the City of Annapolis," the mayor said in a written statement.

Elizabeth Buie once drove a yellow cab but now it's painted black and it seldom leaves from the front of her home. After 37 years of hunting fares, the East Baltimore great-grandmother has called it quits.For Ms. Buie, there are no more six-day work-weeks cruising the streets, no more early mornings sitting in a cold car and no more haunting stares from odd passengers."I'm just going to do what I want to do from now on," said the 76-year-old Baltimore native who began driving a city cab in 1956 as a way to help her family financially and just never decided to stop.

This is how bad taxicab service has gotten in this city:Last month, James Gashel of the National Federation of the Blind, was scheduled to meet with members of the Taxicab Owners Association to talk about the problem of poor cab service.So, the president of one of the city's largest cab companies sent one of his taxis to pick Gashel up."The cab was 15 minutes late," said Gashel with a sad chuckle. "In fact, as we were heading out, we got a radio call from the dispatcher because [the president]

The country was slipping into the Depression in April 1930, the same month a young graduate of Western High School answered a help-wanted ad."Jobs were hard to come by in 1930," says Frieda Greiver, 84, who spent 44 years as bookkeeper at the Sun Cab Co., a Baltimore institution that is to be taken over by its longtime rival, Yellow Cab ."I went for the job and found there was a room full of women waiting to be interviewed. I walked into an office ahead of all the others and I walked out with the job, at $17.50 a week, a lot of money for a girl who had very little work experience," says Greiver, who possesses total recall of her career in Sun Cab's front office.

Baltimore taxi rates will increase by 19 percent if the state Public Service Commission accepts a settlement presented today to a PSC hearing examiner.The settlement among the taxi companies, PSC staff and the People's Counsel, which represents rate payers before the PSC, would allow cabs to charge $1 a mile. The current rate is 80 cents a mile. The initial charge, or "drop" fee, will remain at $1.40, but it will be for the first tenth of a mile rather than the first eighth. The cost for keeping a cab waiting will increase from 20 cents a minute to 25 cents a minute, said PSC spokesman Frank B. Fulton.

Connex, one of Europe's largest passenger transport companies, confirmed yesterday that it acquired Yellow Transportation Inc. of Baltimore. There had been speculation for days that Yellow would sell to Connex, though company officials declined to comment on the reports. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and executives from both companies declined to comment until Monday. In a letter to the Maryland Public Service Commission, however, Mark L. Joseph, president and chief executive officer of Yellow, said that "little will change other than an acceleration of our growing ability to serve the community better.

At high noon yesterday, in the middle of downtown traffic, more than 35 Baltimore City taxi drivers conducted a unique horn symphony -- using their cabs for instruments.In a 30-minute "Hail to the Taxis" motorcade that began at Camden Yards and circled around to Harborplace, the taxi drivers blasted in unison the horns of their ticker tape-decorated cabs.Drivers from city cab companies -- including ABC, Arrow, Diamond, Independent, Royal and Yellow -- took part in the first-ever Baltimore City Taxi Appreciation Day declared by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke.

I DEPEND on cabs. I am legally blind. According to Sharon Maneki, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland, there are over 3,000 blind people in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Also, the federation has its national headquarters here. Blind people can tell you horror stories about canceled appointments, missed trains and planes and hours spent waiting for taxis that never arrive.But we are not alone. Anyone in Baltimore who regularly uses taxis will tell you that cab service here is terrible.

They know fatal shootings can happen in their line of work, but the third time in a month was more than some hardened city taxicab drivers could take."

In her new book, Got My Mind Set on Freedom: Maryland's Story of Black-White Activism 1663-2000, Barbara Mills writes that employment opportunities for African-Americans were greatly expanded in 1951 when the Yellow Cab Co. of Baltimore began integrating its taxi drivers. With other local cab companies following suit, an estimated 260 jobs were created for blacks who took their place behind the wheel with their white counterparts. "I could see no sound reason why the people in Baltimore should be deprived of the services of many taxicabs when qualified men and women of color were available and seeking honorable and gainful employment," said Robert Freedman, president of Yellow Cab, when he was presented an award from the Hollander Foundation that year.