United Cab, a New Orleans stalwart, is losing drivers and passengers. Is the end near?

The United Cab Co. depot in Central City looks exactly as you’d expect.

Inside a red, sheet-metal headquarters building, surrounded by a parking lot, surrounded by barbed wire, Paul Dantoni, a cab driver for 40 years, sat on a wooden bench in a narrow waiting area where plastic signs dotted the walls.

One read: “DO NOT PUT FEET ON WALL”

A second: “DO NOT TOUCH PLANTS”

Maybe there used to be plants, but not anymore.

Dantoni was there, between calls. In the old days, from the 1980s up until Hurricane Katrina, his shifts were crowded with back-to-back fares. He’d drive 12 hours and take 25 riders to their destinations.

“It was remarkable,” said Dantoni. Drivers never “stayed on a cab stand for long.”

There was always a college kid or a tourist eager to get someplace. College kids don’t take cabs anymore, Dantoni said. He now works about five hours a day and picks up five or six passengers. These days his riders are generally “elderly people going to the doctors or the grocery store.”

As if on cue, Dantoni’s phone rang. A regular needed him for a routine run to the bank.

Dantoni is 70. He says he’s still making it, “but barely.”

Falling numbers

Such is the situation at the United Cab, now begrudgingly on the same path as phone booths, road maps and record stores.

United’s taxis, organized in a cooperative, once flourished in New Orleans’ ecosystem, stampeding along Canal Street and stalking the French Quarter in search of fares. But it’s starting to feel like those panda-colored cabs are an endangered species.

United’s general manager Kirtan “Ron” Parmar said that in the early 2000s, 430 to 450 cabs plied the streets. After slipping for years, the number dropped into the dozens during COVID but has rebounded since. On a Monday morning in November, there were 205 cabs in the fleet, though just 164 were in service.

Overall, the number of taxicab permits in the city has plummeted. In 2012, New Orleans had some 1,550 certificates of public necessity and convenience, or CPNCs, which are attached to specific cars. According to City Hall, there are 342 active licenses today and 2,341 drivers.

Like an invasive species

It wasn’t the devastation of Katrina, or the tourism-toppling 2010 oil spill, or the crippling COVID pandemic that jeopardized the 84-year-old cooperative.

As most readers already know, the meteorite that slammed into the traditional taxi business was the advent of the ride-share operators Uber and Lyft.

Those apps have made practically anyone a cab driver, the iPhone has made us all dispatchers, automated credit card payments and digitally suggested tipping makes every rider feel like they have a private account, and Siri has made everyone an expert navigator.

San Francisco-based Uber popped up about a decade ago, and had made it to New Orleans by 2014. From the point of view of the traditional taxi business, it was an invasive species.

Parmar will tell you that since ride share companies are regulated by the state, and old-school cabs are regulated by the city, United is forced to compete with high-tech, national companies that are allowed to play by different rules.

According to United Cab lore, it’s not the first time United drivers have felt like the deck was stacked against them.

The good old days?

Inside the depot is a meeting room where a television blares riotous daytime television talk shows.

Two walls are checkered with framed photographs that highlight the company’s history — parts of it, at least.

In 1938, the same year that Superman appeared and Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, a small group of New Orleans taxi drivers formed United as a cooperative company.

Back then, drivers wore distinctive caps, sometimes ties. They drove big, curvaceous Chevrolets — far more stylish than the boxy Dodge Caravans that are currently de rigueur.

The captions beneath the photos outline the company’s early struggle to compete with the Yellow Cab fleet, the big dog of the Depression era.

At the time, according to the anonymous caption writer, United cabbies were prohibited from lining up in front of hotels, awaiting fares the way Yellow Cab drivers could.

One photo caption, dated 1942, reads: “It would take pages to outline the different types of harassment that the members endured” at the hands of the “Yellow Cab monopoly and also the New Orleans police.”

A 1946 photo recalls the moment that United Cab representatives marched to City Hall to protect their rights to the city’s curbs. And a 1949 photo caption announced that, finally, United Cabs were free “to offer the same service to the city as Yellow Cabs.”

The caption writer credited the election of mayor Chep Morrison in 1946 for the end of the tyranny of Yellow Cab.

Two years later, United Cabs adopted the most avant-garde mobile technology of the era.

Radio days

A short stroll from the red sheet-metal United headquarters building lies the nerve center of the operation, the beige-colored, sheet-metal radio room, where United’s 79-year-old president Will Fourcade sits in the captain’s seat.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, United rose to dominance. Restaurants, hospitals, law firms and other businesses all had accounts with the company.

There were public controversies, including a federal consent decree that finally forced them to hire women and minorities, and a series of scandals in the early 2000s alleging illegal dealing around licenses and brake tags. But on the streets of New Orleans, they reigned supreme.

In 2010, the New Orleans Carriage Cab Co. attempted to challenge United’s dominance by employing upgraded GPS technology. But loyalty to United remained ardent. At the time, Brad Hollingsworth of Clancy's restaurant told The Times-Picayune that he used United exclusively and couldn’t think of any way they could improve.

Fourcade said that in United’s heyday, four telephone operators sat at a cluster of desks, receiving calls from customers. They were separated by glass partitions, presumably to suppress noise.

The operators passed notes through wooden slots to two dispatchers at their own glazed desks who broadcast pickup instructions to the drivers.

Anyone old enough to have traveled by taxis in the radio era will never forget the crackling patter of the dispatcher, who seemed to be the ruler of time, distance, geography and the foibles of human nature.

“This used to be a bustling place,” Fourcade said. “The phones would never stop ringing.”

The glass partitions and wooden slots and linoleum floors tiles and Formica countertops are all still there inside the radio room, but the rapid-fire patter is gone. An app has replaced much of that.

Dispatchers still communicate with the cabs by radio to clarify pickup locations, missed connections and such. But it’s not like it used to be.

“Now, it’s a ghost town,” Fourcade said.

On one wall, death notices of former drivers are Scotch taped to the wood paneling.

The Faithful

Not everyone has abandoned United for ride sharing.

Nurse Mona McMahon, who said she’s ridden United Cabs for at least four decades, said she favors the old-fashioned taxi model, because she feels the drivers are more dedicated.

“They’re not a pro fleet,” she said of the ride-share cars. “I’m comfortable with a car that looks like a cab.”

McMahon, 72, said she’s not adverse to apps. But she prefers a ride from a venerable taxi company. “I can play Candy Crush, if I want,” she said. But, “I need a reliable cab service.”

Rashad, a 27-year-old United driver who declined to share his last name, said that he’d been inspired to join the company by his mother, who was a United driver for several years.

“I love it,” he said. “I’m a people person.”

Asked if he thought there would still be a United Cab in ten years, Rashad said he wasn’t sure.

Some people, older people in particular, “still trust the old ways,” he said. And, who knows, maybe they’ll pass that trust in older technology to younger generations.

“Every year someone is getting older, someone is turning 75, someone is turning 81,” Rashad said. “A lot of older people don’t know how to use the apps. People are never going to get younger.”

If the ride-share companies raise their rates too much, he speculated, it may “ensure that United survives.”

Dantoni said he feels a bit jilted by what’s happened to the old-school cab industry.

“I think it’s wrong,” he said. “People have been using us forever. Now they forgot us.”

Asked if he believes there will be a United Cab company ten years hence, Dantoni said that “we’ll probably still survive.” After the abysmal coronavirus disruption, Dantoni said, it feels to him like things are picking up “kinda, sorta.”

Fourcade paused after being asked if he thought the company would survive another decade.

“I would hope so,” he said, “But I don’t think so.”

“We’re fighting a losing battle,” he said.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of cabdriver Paul Dantoni.