Fast Eddie's spin

Fast Eddie remembers the gate at the airport that was operated by quarters.  That gate was before my time.  The idea was, you needed to give the airport $0.50, every time you took passengers out of the cab stand; the gate took quarters, and you needed to plug the little box with 2 quarters to raise the gate.

There were problems with this system.  The one I always hear, or heard about, was that the coin box on that thing wasn't big enough and it would get jammed.  He also mentioned, who got the money?  Who cares.  The passenger is ultimately going to pay it.  No matter how you slice it, or describe it, the Dane County Airport was attempting to control or regulate the cab business on it's property.  Which is OK, the goal is good service for the passengers, right?

The airport also has concerns about security.  They don't want to be the subject of a front page article in the New York Times, describing something bad that happened there.  Unfortunately, in the modern world, we have weirdo's who do bad things.  But I ask myself, what makes the airport any different than anyplace else where a lot of people are congregated in a small area.  Not much difference.  And do I want to be protected, for my own good?  I haven't liked being protected since my earliest recollection of it at 4 or 5 years of age.  Do other people feel the same?  I think most do.  But I was going to discuss the Albany, New York airport for a few blog entries, wasn't I?

They've chosen to deal with a single cab company, and the complaints I've read about recently tell me the cab drivers at that company draw complaints that are hard to dismiss as fiction.  Are those drivers any different than the drivers here?  I doubt it.  Are they different than the drivers at the other area cab companies?  I doubt it.  Is the current system in Albany working?  Doesn't sound like it.  What do you do when the system doesn't work?  Usually, you try something else.