This isn’t getting mentioned in the media or even in any bloggers so I figured I better scoop this story for all my fellow TNC drivers so that the public knows and understands a current problem that we all have now that is especially bad in San Francisco.

In September of 2013 The CPUC decided that ridesharing companies such as Sidecar, Lyft & Uber had every right to operate in California. The CPUC call the companies TNC’s for Transportation Network Companies because they use cell phones to communicate ride requests as well as the processing of payments for rides. One of the little things that was sort of buried in the decision was that all TNC’s much work with local airports to establish an agreement for operating at these locations.

As you know I drive for Sidecar and it was always the general rule of thumb that you could drop off, but not pick up passengers at SFO until further agreements could be reached because at the time that was what the airport had written into it’s laws. Any company doing business on the airport premises or off for the purpose of picking up passengers on airport property had to have an agreement in writing with SFO. Nothing was said about dropping off people so that what we went with.

Well, things have changed. SFO has issued a statement to all TNC’s that until they get a permit from them they cannot drop off or pick up passengers on SFO property. I believe LAX has issued the same statement, but not pretty much every airport in California is like this. From my experience with Sidecar I know that they are actively pursuing the permit, but they have run into a few snags from SFO’s list of items TNC’s need to provide in order to get the permit. This isn’t only a Sidecar problem, but something that all TNC’s have a problem with. Some of the requests are based on old technology that doesn’t apply to new technology. Kind of like if the horse trade organization said that all cars needed to have distemper shots so they were healthy. The two don’t necessarily work together. All the TNC’s are trying to work the bugs out, but currently, no one has a permit.

The biggest problem and this is the most important thing that anyone who uses TNC’s for transportation needs to realize that as of right now the airports are off limits. Let me put that is a bit large type so it stands out:

TNC’s cannot drive you or pick you up from the airport.

Please pass this along to all your friends, neighbors, everyone. This has become more of a problem because the airports and especially SFO are starting to crack down. I see reports daily of drivers for many of these TNC’s getting stopped and ticketed for dropping off or picking up passengers at SFO. I’ve heard that it’s happening at other airports in California as well, but SFO is the worse.

Some of the TNC’s are being a bit passive aggressively defiant in that they are telling drivers they will cover the cost of the ticket [which I have heard runs between $220-$600 depending on what they write you up on], but they aren’t telling drivers not to take people to the airport. This makes some of these TNC’s look bad to the CPUC who has given them the right to operate in California. Sidecar has officially told all of it’s drivers to not accept rides to or from SFO and that is easy because riders have to put in their destination when they request a ride. Sidecar is also working on blocking requests to the airport until they can resolve the problem with SFO. Those other TNC’s aren’t doing this.

Why is this a problem for you the rider? The CPUC has given TNC’s a right to operate in California and it was the first state where this was done. All of these companies have started in San Francisco as well so we are the bullseye that everyone is aiming for. Many of you love TNC’s because they’re more pleasant than taxi’s. TNC drivers are held more accountable than taxi drivers to the point that we’re seeing a lot of taxi drivers changing their attitude and coming over to work for TNC’s because they can make more money with less outlay of cash [you do realize that taxi drivers have to pay upfront before the cab even leaves the lot]. In San Francisco and the Bay Area TNC’s have changed the way people get around. TNC’s you can request and they show up within minutes. They don’t demand a tip [thought they appreciate it], you will never hear, machine is broken, cash only and in general the drivers are much more pleasant to ride with. Pricing can even be less expensive than a cab frequently.

If you want to see this all go away then go ahead and book rides to the airport. There will always be drivers who will take the risk that don’t understand that while they might get $35 from that ride to the airport [less than a taxi] in the end they could help bringing TNC’s in San Francisco, California and then spreading out to the rest of the country and world to an end. I happen to like driving for a TNC and I’ve met lots of fun and interesting people and made lots of new friends. I know I’m helping out people who need to get somewhere quickly and it’s giving me a way to make money on a flexible schedule. Please do not ask for trips to the airport because if you do you might find yourself walking home at 2am on a Saturday night or waiting an hour to find a taxi to hail.

Hello everyone!

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything here because I’ve been busy working and doing a few upgrades around my house which has taken up all of time. That’s about to change. As you can see from the picture, I managed to break my ankle yesterday and I’m not out of commission for the next six weeks. I’d only be out of commission for a few days if it was my left foot, but unfortunately I need my right foot to drive so I am temporarily unable to work.

With that being said, I’ll have some more time to devote to dipping into my backlog of my take on news and information around San Francisco now as well as some fun things from the past.

I unfortunately missed the new opening of the Boathouse at Stow Lake that I would like to see how that turned out after all the build up and I also have some news about San Francisco’s popular new way to get around using the companies such as Lyft, Uber and Sidecar.

OK, the percocet is kicking in so I need to go rest for a bit, but I’ll have some new articles in a couple of days.

I used to be poor, not homeless poor, but barely getting by and food was a little difficult to come by some days. One day I found some sausage in the freezer and remembered the old British dish that was popular during WWII called Toad In A Hole.

Essentially the dish is sausage cooked in a yorkshire pudding. It’s a quite filling dish and easy to make. I only needed to feed myself so I ended up creating my own riff on the Toad In A Hole which quickly became nicknamed after a certain comedy music video. Later I posted a picture of it on Facebook making a little joke about naming it Theon after the character in Game of Thrones who had a certain part of his body removed. What I didn’t realize was that my FaceBook post got posted to Twitter and then it started to turn into a little meme with the GoT’s fans. It has since started to be referred to by Theon’s surname of Greyjoy.

Now that people are talking about my little meal I put together I realized that after writing my story about my thoughts on $4 Toast that someone might steal this idea from me. So I’ve decided to explain my little riff on this dish before you can see it on menu’s around San Francisco for $25 when it really is one of the most stupidly easy dishes to make. Here’s how it goes…

First you’ll need a good sausage. Don’t use hot dogs. I’ve tried Italian sausage, but the fennel doesn’t seem to taste right. Typically a pork sausage or something with some extra spice like a chicken with garlic sausage. I’ve tried a lot of sausages and some of them that I thought would work don’t so you’ll have to experiment. Now first you’ll have to make your batter.

Batter

I take 1 egg, a half cup of flour and a half cut of milk and beat the hell out of it with a whisk. Add seasoning and here’s where I’ll leave it up to you. You want the batter to be a bit savory, but I’ll let you figure it out. I’ve got my own combination of things I use to give it flavor and I’m not telling. When you’re done put it in the fridge. You can let it set for a few minutes to overnight even so if you’re going to make a lot of them you can plan ahead.

Sausage & Cooking

I used a 5.75″ x 3″ pan which is the perfect size grease up the pan with olive oil or butter and get the sausage good and coated and throw it into a 450° oven for 5 minutes. Pull it out and pour the batter over it and put it back in the oven for 20 minutes. You’re done.

That’s really all there is to it. It looks a bit like a misshapen hot dog, but tastes a lot better and will fed a guy’s hunger easily. The yorkshire pudding fills out the dish so that you don’t need to eat a lot more than you really need. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and even figured out a way that if I owned a restaurant how to throw it together quick enough to serve up to customers without them having to wait a long time. Since the recipe is so simple you can easily adapt it in many different ways.

So if you happen to be in a restaurant in San Francisco in the near future and see a toad in a hole or greyjoy on the menu you’ll know who’s responsible for it. Now pop it your mouth!

When I first heard someone talk about $4 toast in San Francisco I knew we weren’t talking about Wonder Bread. No one would have the cojones that big to try and sell Wonder Bread for $4, but of course San Francisco has plenty of bloggers with the cojones to make you think that. These rich techies are paying $4-$6 for a slice of toast!!!! Well, yes bread is involved and yes it’s toasted, but that’s pretty much where in ends for the most part.

Where it started is up for discussion, but people usually point to Trouble Coffee out in my hood or The Mill as the originators. They start with inch thick slices of wheat bread and slather it with butter and depending can top it with brown sugar and cinnamon, peanut butter and honey or whatever the hell they’re going to think up next. For a big eater it’s a light breakfast or a decent snack, but for the average person it’s pretty much a meal. It’s got a lot more calories and nutrition than a slice of Wonder Bread for sure.

The owner of Trouble Coffee said it was a comfort food for her because she grew up poor. For me, I was a kid in a middle class household that wasn’t hurting for money too bad and guess what my Grandmother used to make for me as a treat? Toast with lots of butter and brown sugar. Grandma would toss it under the broiler for a few seconds to get that serious caramelized effect that chefs like to go for now. It wasn’t a poor man’s pastry, it was actually more expensive than a donut back then probably because of the huge amounts of butter and stuff my Grandmother would toss on top of it. While most of the ingredients came out of boxes or bags this was home made for my Grandmother. I still like it today, I just never thought of slicing the bread an inch thick first.

My Grandmother would toss lots of stuff on bread that she’d toast. She used to broil cheese on bread and that was her version of a grilled cheese sandwich. I took a cue from her and toast bread then rub garlic on it and toss some chopped up tomatoes or other vegetables and call it lazy man’s bruschetta. Unfortunately for most people in San Francisco today lazy tends to be the norm. Finding a friend who is a foodie that can cook is kind of rare nowadays. Most of what people are spending their money on food wise has been prepared by someone else. Yes I cook so of course I’m going to not understand why other people don’t, but we’re talking about toast here. You can go to a bakery like Boudin and buy a loaf and ask them to cut it thick for you. You take it home, toast it, toss a bunch of stuff on top [if you're slick you'll put it under the broiler...] and you’re done.

The only reason there is $4 thick toast is that people don’t bother to do it for themselves. For the people who started selling it I think it’s a good idea. If you’ve never made it or bought it, it is something special. I had a poor period and a friend of mine gave me a 10lb bag of flour and a jar of yeast. That reminded me I knew how to make bread and I never felt hungry and I was able to do some pretty incredible things with it because when you’re hungry your mind sees everything as something you can turn into food [at least if you're a guy like me.]

Incidentally, the $4 toast, after doing a little search didn’t start in San Francisco. It started in Japan as a breakfast item too. It has scrambled egg on top and is sprinkled with chives and is sold as tamago toast for the equivalent cost of…$4

Looks pretty good and I’ll have to give that a try one of these days now.

I think some of you might believe that I enjoy railing on Supervisor Eric Mar. I don’t think it’s because of what he believes in so much as how he says it. His current project which passed was getting electronic cigarettes or e-cigarettes banned everywhere that smoking is banned. I don’t have much of a problem with this because most people don’t have a good understanding of how an e-cigarette works or why people like them.

I have been a smoker for a long time. I’ll even go so far as to admit that it’s been the biggest addiction that’s been hard to break for me. I remember the good old days [I think I was still a teenager] when you could buy cigarettes anywhere even a pharmacy and you could pretty much smoke anywhere. Movie theaters, grocery stores, restaurants, night clubs, hospitals probably had a smoking room right next to the delivery room. Then people became aware that it was bad for you and San Francisco in all it’s draconian-ness banned smoking from well, pretty much everywhere except public streets. I remember hating that at the time, but I came to accept it and it helped me to cut back a little bit.

One day, I like many others decided to try an e-cigarette that was a disposable that the shop that sold my cigarettes was also selling. Since I drive for a living it might be nice if my car didn’t smell like smoke and it might get me a few more tips. From that first day I was hooked. That one disposable lasted me two days and I went from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day to one fifth or four cigarettes a day. I went all out and got a non-disposable e-cigarette that was a little bit bigger and joined the small, but growing clan of vapers as they like to refer to themselves. This is where the problems start.

People into e-cigarettes don’t always seem to realize that what they’re doing while healthier [I'll get into that in a second] than smoking still looks a lot like smoking to anyone else. Even smokers. Some of those people feel like they should be able to vape in church, schools, pretty much anywhere that you currently can’t because, it’s not smoking. Well, while that’s true the rest of world at the moment still thinks it’s smoking. It looks like, but what it is is a vapor created by heating a combination of vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol and food grade flavoring that also usually contains nicotine [you can get liquids for the electronic cigarettes that contain no nicotine]. Vegetable glycerin is just what it sounds like. It comes from vegetables and is used in food as a thickener. Propylene glycol sounds kind of scary, but is a sugar alcohol that was used in hospitals to disinfect the air. Hospitals stopped using it when they started to get bigger and the cost of the PG started to get too high, but many veterinarians still use it. It’s safe unless you’ve got an allergy to it, but then again the same holds true of water. While doctors don’t want to come out and say it’s harmless, or safe they will at least admit that e-cigarettes are much better than smoking a cigarette.

Where does Eric Mar come into this? Well he is the one that got the law passed banning e-cigarettes anywhere other forms of smoking are banned. That’s not too big a deal in my book. His original arguments are what got to me. One of the things with the liquids used by e-cigarettes is that they can be flavored to be pretty much anything you want. I’m vaping some coconut mango right now and have root beer, Jamacian rum, Kentucky Bourbon in addition to my Dominican and Havana tobacco flavors. There are lots of candy flavors available and some of the few shops in San Francisco actually only stock the berry and candy flavored liquids. The problem was that kids also like candy so if they’re making a candy flavored nicotine liquid they must be marketing it to kids. Never mind the fact that adults like candy as well or that people get carded much more frequently than when Eric Mar or I were in High School. While there is a group of vapers who are into the candy flavors only and can’t understand why someone would want a tobacco flavor these are the 20 something crowd, not little kids. Eric was quoted as saying the line he frequently uses of, we have to think of the kids. Well, yes we do, but we also should then ban cars and alcohol and knives and bikes and anything else that might hurt a child because there’s a lot of stuff out there. When I was a kid and it was easier to get cigarettes I think I can count on one hand the number of kids I saw with a cigarette. High School was a bit different, but that was the late 70′s and it was still kind of cool and rebellious back then, but the word kids denotes young children not teenagers. He’s since taken a step back from that since getting people to get behind him on the ban wasn’t really that hard. I honestly don’t think it was a bad idea and I do believe it has at least gotten a few more people to look at the alternative to the dangers of smoking. For many of us it’s been a good way to get tobacco and the thousands of harmful chemicals out of our bodies for a couple of chemicals that don’t cause cancer and help us move away from our addiction.

Oh, if you’re wondering I just passed two months without cigarettes.

Geez, it’s been awhile hasn’t it? I’ve been kind of busy and haven’t had a chance to post anything lately, but I just wanted to let you know that I’ve got a few things that I’m working on that I’m going to get started on tonight and hopefully will be able to post them soon, that is if I can keep my daughter from interrupting me every five minutes to drop something in my coffee instead of her just walking up to me and saying hello.

There’s quite a few interesting things I’ve run across lately that aren’t making a lot of attention in the news so I thought I’d share them with you. Some of them have taken some time to gather more information on so that I had all the information first and I think I’ve got that part down so I’ll be writing tonight and through the week to get some of this out of my head and into your eyes.

Oh yeah, here’s recent pic of me so you don’t have to look at me eight years ago anymore.

I’ve been reading a lot lately of the war between taxi drivers and those who drive for TNC’s [that's the new name for ride sharing companies such as Sidecar, Uber & Lyft]. Actually, it’s not so much a war between the two as it is taxi drivers voicing their anger to just about anyone in the media who will listen. This is were is starts to get interesting.

The reality of the situation is that the cabbies should be looking at the system they’re operating in and quite a few have started. Approximately one third of all taxi drivers have stopped leasing cabs and started using their own cars with TNC’s, mostly Uber, because they are well known and offer the chance for them to make more money through Uber’s surge pricing. It’s not the TNC’s that are a problem, it’s the cab companies that have to charge the drivers so much in order for them to drive the cabs.

One taxi company owner was quoted asking the question, what’s to keep me from buying a bunch of cars and running my own ride share company? Well, to be honest, nothing. There are actually several that are doing so right now. The owner wouldn’t have to purchase the exorbitant taxi medallions [$250k/car], and they wouldn’t have to provide comprehensive insurance to the drivers as they do now, but they could rent the cars out to drivers who don’t own a car and collect on what they make paying a small percentage to the driver. Cab company owners like this idea.

For the drivers, they wouldn’t have to sit down and take a 7 hour class and test [yes, it's not a very comprehensive test and they are allowed to consult notes] and they can get started quicker with no outlay of cash from their pocket. To get serious for a moment, what cabbies are taught in the training school is minimal at best and they usually take the test right after the class so what they do after they’ve passed don’t necessarily apply to what they just learned. The cab company owners don’t like that idea.

So in the end you’ve got the cab company owners pushing the drivers telling them how bad all the TNC’s are, when in reality it’s the system that the cab drivers have to work under that is the problem. When the TNC’s started as Ride Share companies there was a lot of anger at these new drivers, but now that many cabbies are moving over to the TNC’s they might be yelling at a fellow driver that’s just decided to switch teams in an effort to make more money.

I haven’t had a cabbie yell at me in months lately and a few have actually talked to me about how they could get into the business. One thing that sets apart cabbies from TNC drivers that I think a lot of cabbies learn quickly is that they’re driving their own car and they can’t treat it like a car they’re renting for a shift. Everything is now on them to keep the car looking nice and they have to make sure the brakes are working and the shocks are in good shape, not the company owners. That’s a new way of thinking for a lot of cabbies, but if it makes them more careful drivers when they’re out on the road then everyone wins in the end.