By 10:30 a.m. on a winter Thursday, Blue Cab driver Kari Rice has been on the road four hours and driven 130 miles. Last night’s sprinkling of snow has meant more calls than usual, especially in the campus area.
Rice pulls up at an apartment building on South Forest, and a serious-looking young man climbs in. Rice drives him a few blocks to the Michigan Union; as she drops him off, he asks if she can pick him up by “about 12:15.” With more runs already scheduled, Rice can’t. She offers to call her dispatcher to get him another cab, but, looking confused, he refuses.
Rice says that when she started driving for another company almost a year ago, she wondered: “Why the heck are the kids spending money on cabs?” A lot of student customers, she found out, grew up accustomed to cab rides in New York or other big cities or have mothers “who don’t want them to drive.”
Her next pickup is an apartment building on Hill. We wait for five minutes before a young woman, head bent from the cold, emerges. Unlike many cabbies, Rice doesn’t charge for wait time. People get mad, she shrugs, adding, “I’m not a big money-making driver.”
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Rice, thirty, wears vivid green-framed glasses, a safety pin in her ear, and a stud in her nose. The hip look fits her both as a cabbie and as a radio host–she has a Sunday evening show on WCBN playing mostly alternative rock, from Elvis Costello to Architecture in Helsinki.
Rice has an edge, but she also flashes a great smile and responds thoughtfully to questions. Blue Cab dispatcher Jaret Kruszewski describes her as a particularly friendly driver–important in a job that has elements of “both bartender and psychologist.”
A part-time student at Eastern Michigan, Rice has been attached to Ann Arbor since childhood. She went to Abbot Elementary before her family moved to Brighton, then Hartland, where she graduated from high school in 1999. About three years later, she moved back to Ann Arbor, enrolling first at Washtenaw Community College, then Eastern, supporting herself by, among other jobs, cashiering at a gas station and the PTO Thrift Shop before getting behind the wheel last year. While many passengers express surprise, the fifty or so Blue drivers include four women–Rice says that cell phones and GPS systems have made them more willing to take a job that’s only as safe as the next customer. (Ypsilanti-based Blue doesn’t send women–or even sometimes men–to areas it considers risky.)
Rice says she has never felt physically threatened, not even when she drove the night shift for another company. When drunk guys hit on her, she just told them off. But while night driving was more lucrative than the day shift, it got old fast: “You pick people up at their places and take them to the bars. Take them from the bars to a party. Take them from a party to home.” And when it wasn’t boring, night driving could be depressing. She recalls sitting in her cab on Main Street when a guy hailed her, saying he needed to get a girl out of a bar. The young woman “was in tears,” Rice recalls. “She was his ex, and he was trying to make it with some new girl.” She also grew disenchanted with another lucrative time for taxi drivers, football Saturdays because there the problem was that riders wanted her to be something she’s not: a fan. “They’d ask me if I liked football and I’d say ‘not really,’ and they got really disappointed. Some had been drinking, and they would say stuff like [she slurs her voice] “Whatcha doin’ living in this town if you don’t like football?”
But she says she’d rather talk to riders than drive in silence, and she especially enjoys her youngest passengers. Blue has accounts with the public schools to transport children whom the bus system can’t accommodate for reasons such as disabilities or too-long walks to bus stops. One Friday afternoon that circuit takes Rice to Pioneer, Slauson, Logan and Northside. One child with Down syndrome shyly says “hello” to Rice as she climbs into the blue-painted Ford Crown Victoria. “At first she wouldn’t talk at all,” Rice says, pleased, after she delivers the girl to her home. Later, Rice banters with two ten-year-old boys about their weekend plans. “You’re getting your hair cut? You’re getting a fade?” One boy describes with pleasure how he will surprise his father with a gift of fake vomit on his chair. Rice grins.
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It’s another weekday morning in January; the weather is good, and consequently business is slow. Rice broods briefly over being conned a couple of weeks earlier by a “crackhead” she’d been warned about through the cabbie grapevine. Boiled down, the guy’s scheme is to pretend he has to get change from a grandparent before he can pay for the ride. He went into an apartment complex and never came back. It’s small comfort that he stiffed her for just eight bucks.
Rice appears more interested in looking at houses (her dream is to buy in Ann Arbor) than noting the minutiae of road conditions, though she does say she tries to avoid a pothole “that would eat a tire” on Jackson near the Dexter fork. She says the city’s traffic cops seem to be both efficient and everywhere, and she wonders why more people don’t seem to know they’re supposed to stop when a cop car turns on its flashers. Yet, when out-of-towners tell her that “Ann Arbor is full of terrible drivers,” Rice defends locals: “I like to explain to them that this is a town that welcomes people from all over the world and that some people don’t drive well. Period.”
Rice’s spirits lift when an order comes through; soon she’s picking up a chatty fiftyish woman on the west side and driving her to a doctor’s appointment. The conversation loops in circles. The customer, laughingly, describes herself as an “old Ann Arbor hippie.”
Replies Rice, pleased: “My mom’s an old Ann Arbor hippie!” (Her mother, Janet Rice, attended U-M and is now what Rice describes an “orthopedic body worker” in Ypsilanti Township.) “Hey, that’s wonderful!” the passenger replies–and, as she exits, leaves Rice a generous tip.
Rice says she’s “five classes and an internship away” from graduating with a psych major. Her ambition is to work with troubled adolescents. “There’s so much pain,” she says. “They close into themselves.”
Rice can relate. Both she and her older brother experienced prejudice growing up because they’re biracial–her mother is of African American and Native American ancestry, while their father was “white as white can be.” A cable installer, her father died in a freak accident when she was twenty-three. What helped hold her together afterwards, she says, was that “family members reminded me he was so proud of me doing well” in college.
Ann Arbor’s cabbies tend to be strong individualists–and well educated. “At Blue Cab a lot of people have master’s degrees,” she says. One driver, she adds, “told me he was an engineer but he couldn’t stand working with people in the field.” He’s not alone. Rice reflects that a passenger “who’s taken cabs all her life” once told her that “cab drivers are people who don’t ‘play well’ with others.” Rice’s smile suggests she agrees.