Eugene weekly., April 26, 2012, Page 12, Image 12

NIGHT MOVES
Driving people from here to there on the graveyard shift
BY RICK LEVIN
I
f you can envision a city as a living organism, with its heart beating outward from the epicenter of
downtown, and if you can picture the crosshatching of streets as comprising a kind of circulatory system
pumping the blood of commerce, then you might consider taxi cabs to be the white blood cells of urban
life. The analogy is clunky but not completely infelicitous: Cabs do serve a particular purpose and, like
white blood cells, they can be launched against certain malignancies. Most notably, taxis are an easy cure
for the routinely terminal affl iction of driving drunk.
To give a feel for those vampire cab rides I could mention the cute platinum-blond stripper out on
Highway 99 who smiled, turned and, poking her preternaturally compact ass toward the windshield, gave
us a brief lap dance … or tell you about the prim, pretty grade-school teacher hollering from the back seat,
“I teach our youth and I touch myself and I sing about it and people love it!” ... or the diminutive woman
in a short skirt reaching a fi nger around the passenger seat and dosing me behind the ears with pheromone
enhancer ... describe the sour amalgamated uncirculated odor that emanates from fi ve mouth-breathers
with a collective blood-alcohol content deuce the legal limit ...
The guys at Go Taxi, a relatively new, independent cab fl eet out of Eugene, were kind enough to let Eugene Weekly ride along
on a few graveyard shifts over the past month, Friday and Saturday nights, just to see what we could see. The idea was to get a
different, perhaps enlightening, possibly appalling perspective on unreconstructed Eugene culture, as seen through the windows
of a cruising cab, and as heard in the boozy banter of patrons opting to do the right thing and steer clear of the steering wheel.
Bless them, I say, every last one.
A city without taxis is not really a city. Look to Brooklyn, Boston, Mexico City: You can’t swing a cat without hitting
a cab. Even in Eugene, a comparatively small city, taxis abound — especially on weekend nights, when the hordes of
impaired, temporarily insane and nearly naked tourists of the Barmuda Triangle cluster up and rub together like limpets,
sending out sex fl ares or telegraphing the mustered-up mustard of fi ght-club machismo.
Into the weird wee hours of weekend Eugene I rode along in Go Taxi’s Honda Odyssey van, twice with DJ Penselin and
once with Adam Korinek, and we picked up a lot of people you could classify as something less than sober. So, seriously, if
right about now you’re starting to recollect in bits and pieces that particularly entertaining talk we had late Friday, just know
that whatever stupid drunken shit rolled out of your mouth during the cab ride couldn’t hold a candle to the overwhelming
respect you deserve for having the common sense to stay off the wheel. Embarrassment and hangovers are temporary, but
death is forever.
12 APRIL 26, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
Out of the Darkness
Go Taxi driver Adam Korinek has a privileged
perspective on the taxi industry. Along with Mike Spurling,
Korinek co-founded Go Taxi some three and a half years
back. The decision to bust out a competitive independent
cab operation in the midst of a whopping recession seems
to have been borne of equal parts wisdom and frustration.
When it comes to the sticky science of economics,
necessity becomes a contested ideal, but it nonetheless
remains a spur to invention.
“Mike and I didn’t just start a taxi company on a whim,”
Korinek explains. “I wanted to work in a fair business.
We started in the worst economy of my lifetime. Gas was
skyrocketing, customers had very little to spend and many
people lost their entire career. How can we ever have any
economic recovery if no one can fi nd fair work?
“It seems like most companies want to take unfair
advantage of everyone they can, employees and customers
alike,” he continues. “Running a fair business is its own
reward, and the best thing we can do to fi ght back.”
Spurling seems to share this desire to revamp the
traditional model of taxi driving. “I began driving cab
around nine years ago and slowly worked my way through
just about every position that existed at several different
taxi operations,” he says. “Through the years I observed
that the general attitude toward our industry in this area
was very negative.”
It was during those years that Spurling began working
for the second largest cab company in Eugene. Then,
when another company bought out Spurling’s employer,
he suddenly found himself working for the biggest taxi
service. Spurling became general manager, a position from
which he believed he could start improving the public’s
negative perception of taxis.
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