At five o’clock on a Friday afternoon the sidewalk along Madison in front of the main entrance to the Metra station is bustling. Commuters pour out of the doors and start looking for taxis. Waiting is a long line of them, dropping off fares and eagerly picking up new ones.
“If you picked someone up they wrote you a ticket. I asked one aide, ‘Why can’t we pick up fares here?’ He said, ‘There’s too much traffic.’”
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Kasp says the policy causes more traffic problems than it solves, particularly in the afternoon. Two or three traffic aides stand on Madison during the morning rush hour, from 7 to 9:30 AM, directing commuters who want cabs to Clinton and Canal, the north-south streets to the west and east of the station, where cabs are allowed to wait. But there are no traffic aides during the afternoon rush. “It’s a mess,” he says. “You have hundreds of people coming out of the station and rushing over to a cab on Madison, ’cause that’s where the cabs are letting people off. They say, ‘Hey, I need a cab.’ And you’re supposed to tell them, ‘No, go to Canal or Clinton,’ which is a block away. They say, ‘What? Huh? I need a cab.’ Meanwhile, you have cars honking and buses coming.”
Kasp eventually met with 42nd Ward alderman Burt Natarus, who got him a meeting with Don Grabowski, a traffic engineer in the transportation department and the person responsible for removing the cabstand. The two met in Grabowski’s office in March. “Don said there was too much traffic on Madison to have a cabstand,” says Kasp. “I said, ‘It’s five and a half lanes wide, and it’s always had a cabstand.’ He said he wanted to ‘redirect the flow of people.’ I said, ‘Don, there’s a natural flow. People come out of the station and walk to Madison looking for a cab–because that’s where the cabs are.’”
Kasp kept pressing the city, and in August he got another meeting with Natarus. “Burt told me, ‘You’re the only one concerned about this,’” he says. “I said, ‘I’m not–there are 2,000 other drivers who signed the petition.’ Burt says, ‘What if we ask the police not to write tickets for picking up in front of the station?’ I said I could live with that. Burt said, ‘Meeting adjourned.’”
Natarus (who doesn’t remember his joke or the punch line) says the only one still complaining is Kasp. “We spent months and months dealing with this cabdriver,” he says. “This is a traffic hazard. We came up with a compromise. We told the police to be a little more ecumenical. I’m sorry, but that’s the best we can do.”
