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By Nicholas Heap

Back around 2002, I rode a bike a good eight kilometres along a busy route to get to my office. Back then I found it heartening to see a single hybrid car. Often as not, that hybrid would be a taxi. That Vancouver had hybrid taxis at all was thanks to the actions of one person — Andrew Grant.

Andrew was a huge enthusiast for the new gasoline-electric hybrids that Toyota brought to North America in 1999. As soon as they were available, he bought a Prius for use as a cab. Andrew Grant's Yellow Cab #15 appears to have been the world's first hybrid taxi.

Ten years later, it's obvious that fuel-efficient hybrids are well-suited for use as taxis: Although they cost more than comparable conventional vehicles, they are also far more fuel-efficient.

Because cabs rack up high annual mileage, reduced operating costs quickly make up for the higher initial cost. In the Vancouver area, most cabs are used 24 hours a day and travel upwards of 120,000 kilometres a year.

Hybrids are well-suited to the stop-and-go city driving conditions that cabbies face most of the time. Hybrids use regenerative braking to charge the batteries of the electric drive system when they slow down, partially "recycling" the energy used by the gas engine to propel the car.

Because the regenerative braking system takes care of most of the vehicle's deceleration, the brake pads last many times longer than those on a conventional vehicle, meaning that the time and expense of brake jobs are largely eliminated. Less vehicle down-time is particularly valued by cabbies.

Because the Prius has such a distinctive design, these taxis effectively advertise themselves as providing a distinct, and higher-value "green" service. From the start, a significant number of customers calling Yellow Cabs specified that they wanted to ride in a hybrid taxi.

The cabbies who worked alongside Andrew soon became aware of these considerable advantages, and within a couple of years, the most adventurous of his colleagues were buying hybrids of their own. Before long, owner-operators at other taxi firms in Vancouver were also using hybrids. Aware of the recent innovation in Vancouver, Jatinder Parhar bought a Prius for use as a taxi in Victoria, B.C. as early as July 2001 — the first to export the idea to another city.

By 2004, the province had begun to track the quickly growing numbers of hybrids and hybrid taxis. Andrew and Jatinder's example had already led to 15 hybrid taxis each in Greater Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. By 2006, there were 165 hybrid taxis in B.C., with 85 in the Greater Vancouver area. Hybrid taxis already made up almost 20 per cent of the total taxi fleet on Vancouver Island. One year later, the number of hybrid taxis in B.C. had more had doubled to 365. As of the end of 2009, there were almost 800 hybrid taxis in B.C., making up one third of the total taxi fleet in Greater Vancouver north of the Fraser River, and more than half of all taxis on Vancouver Island. (Those of you who like looking at numbers can find additional data on hybrids and hybrid taxis in B.C. below.)

Over the years, the B.C. government put several incentives in place to encourage more use of hybrids in taxi fleets. It co-funded a website that publicized the hybrid taxis, offered a sizable rebate on hybrid purchases, and recently implemented a policy requiring new taxis for regular fleets to be hybrids. It's important to note, however, that these incentives endorsed and supported a hybrid taxi phenomenon that was already underway.

But the idea of hybrid cabs didn't spread without effort. Each new city required its own champions to demonstrate this already-proven idea in a local context, and in many cities years passed before these emerged. Pioneers brought the first hybrid taxis to Winnipeg in 2005, to Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton in 2006, and to Ottawa, Regina and Saskatoon in 2007. "But as late as April 2010, after a decade of conspicuous success elsewhere, only four of Montreal's 4,500 taxis were hybrids."

It's not as though there is some unique barrier to adopting hybrid cars; it's true for just about any sort of noticeable change to the social norm. It's difficult to be the first one in your one community to make a more sustainable choice, even when that choice has been shown to work elsewhere.

And yet, as the hybrid taxi example makes clear, the power of social norms works both ways. When pioneering individuals normalize a more sustainable choice and create a new social norm, the effect of those first few examples becomes extraordinarily influential over time, as it propagates through an ever-increasing number who adopt the new behaviour.

Nowadays, my commute is a lot shorter, and I ride mainly along side streets. I'm enough of a climate nerd that I still notice the hybrids — but now I see as many as 20 in 11 kilometres. And yes, a lot of them are taxis.

But really, I need to be looking at other green innovations, and I should be looking farther afield. While my own town may have been home to a pioneer in one facet of sustainability, there's a whole world of better ideas that have yet to be pioneered where I live. The same is likely true of your own community. Maybe we too can cause an effect.

BC vehicle registration regions, extrapolated from data provided by the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. Not an official map.

Credit: DSF Creative Services staff




Source: Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, June 2010.

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