Opinion: Taxi! Taxi!? Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha

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I love the fact that, in most of downtown LA, it is illegal to hail a cab from the street. Illegal!

I don’t know whether the hail-ee is the one breaking the rules, or it’s the hail-er — the cabdriver who can’t resist pulling over to pick up a fare. Either way, it’s the perfect LA joke, and the perfect LAPD bust: ‘Sir, I am citing you for hailing a cab.’

If you live here long enough, you learn that whenever you see cabs on the streets of downtown, you are probably watching a movie shoot. And a movie shoot set in New York.

The city council will be voting Wednesday on a new cab policy that may or may not remedy this. My colleague, Road Sage Steve Hymon, blogs that the city’s report frets over ‘a possibility that during peak hours, key lanes of traffic could be impeded by taxi operations generated by a pilot program.’ Steve translates this as, ‘They’re scared silly of anything that may slow down some bloke in a car.’

Probably, but if that were the priority, the city would have more ‘Tiger Teams’ out there pouncing on cars parked illegally during rush hour, when one stationary Mustang can ruin life for thousands of commuters. A few cabs picking up a few fares? Not so much. [Note to Angelenos — if we do indeed get to hail cabs from curbs, we need to practice our hailing and hopping-into taxi techniques. Elbowing aside others to muscle into a cab will come later, when we get the hang of it and have passed Advance Cabbing.]

Will cabs even be interested in roaming downtown LA for fares, when gas is so expensive?

But mostly I don’t want anything the city council does to interfere with my simple pleasure of watching a visiting, unwitting New Yorker stand at a curb marked ‘taxi zone’ — markings probably stenciled there by a film crew — and keep with one arm futilely, heroically upraised for long, l-o-n-g minutes. It’s a wonderful sight. It almost makes up for us not having the Statue of Liberty in LA Harbor.