Taxi Doggerel---Swallowed Whole By Taxi

If anyone isn't getting the message concerning the taxi "death-style" or  "imitating life while you are dying" I give everyone an alternative venue, the doggerel poem that isn't meant to be serious yet is, sugarcoated medicine for those not adverse to poetical style gone amok, feathers flying from the mallard duck, where meaning is whimsical  so any and all comprehension is just "good luck!"

                                              Swallowed Whole By Taxi

                           
                                      It's a python squeeze if you don't please

                                             going down the gullet

                                      and certainly you can't breath as you

                                                        inhale

                                               the toxic living hell

                             that is seven days a week living eating sleeping cab

                                        residing in a volatile experimental lab-

                                                  oratory minus all glory

                                                        and now worse

                                            not even making any money

                                                      Uber and Lyft

                                           those damn busy bees laughing

                                      living a life of passenger milk and honey

                                                  and no it ain't funny

                                       residing in the stomach of a cold, cold snake

                                                  digesting all us cabbies

                                                        bit by bit

                                                      bite by bite

                                                   that serpent's smile

                                                    a shining top-light

                                  this hungry reptile happy we've stopped struggling
                   
                                                    giving up the fight

                                                 fading fading fading

                                                      into the night

                                                      permanently

                                                       out of mind

                                                       out of slight.                                                       

                                       
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If you can understand it, it's all true, it's no fun, taxi on the run, and the City of Seattle, those regulatory jesters, wanting to weight us down further as we sink, sink deeper into taxi nothingness

where hope is loss, where fatigue and misery is boss, and the Bureaucratic Devil says buy that cab, go into debt and work, work till you want to die, then embrace that death and be happy for now you can rest even if your family can't.

More Plainly Speaking

Okay, minus the poetic fun and games is the unmistakable reality that during certain seasons, months and hours driving and owning a cab in Seattle and King County is not sustainable, it just isn't, and pretending otherwise is pure foolishness and little else.  To add fifty-five more cabs to an already meager work environment is nonsensical.  Yes, almost any lease driver will say they want to own a cab but the question arises do they truly understand what they are requesting?  I say they don't, and while respecting the desire to be free of an association or a single owner, few recognize the inherent bondage that comes with owning a small business.  Yes, Spring and especially Summer will bring millions of visitors to Seattle and the State of Washington, allowing for easier and more profitable days but now, in late February business remains as bare as the frozen branches shaking in the frigid wind.  Yes, just like the this month's early cherry blossoms, business does occasionally bloom but certainly not festooning everyone's pocketbooks, flowering the taxi day.

Standing around last night at Pier 69 waiting for the Victoria Clipper,  I gave a quick tutorial to how we got to where we have, this in response to a statement that the new medallions were inevitable because a ruling had been made and must be followed.  In response I said "that isn't at all true!" recounting how the Seattle City Council first proudly capped Uber and Lyft at 250 cars each but then, upon Mayor Murray's intervention, quickly threw out their law thus providing the reality we now all suffer under.  14,000 plus Uber and Lyft operators later, our City plates are now worth perhaps $10,000, down from a pre-Uber high of $250,000.

As I told my audience of two, the City has done, and will do whatever they want.  If they want to stop the release of the new medallions, they will, plain and simple.  As I keep saying, isn't it time for commonsense governance?  The answer is obvious, isn't it?