LOS ANGELES — Try hailing a cab in this car-centric town and you’re likely to be left standing on a curb, waving your arm like a fool in a cloud of exhaust.
For years, Los Angeles, unlike most other big cities, discouraged taxi drivers from picking up passengers on busy streets, often ticketing them for tying up traffic.
Now the city has begun easing those restrictions, but cabbies have been slow to change their ways.
For many taxi drivers, high gas prices made it too costly to cruise for fares. Then the sputtering economy drove down business and made it too difficult to find customers.
The feeble response to the experimental Hail-A-Taxi program has imperiled an effort to reduce traffic in the nation’s most congested city and renewed a vexing question in the land where the car is king: Are Angelenos too attached to their own four wheels?
Abraham Denoz, who has driven cabs in the city for 10 years, trolls for fares on weekends when people are going out but said it is a waste of gas to drive around waiting for someone to flag him down on weekdays.
“It’s like gambling,” he said.
The pilot program was supposed to be a win-win when it was launched last summer. The theory was that if people could easily catch cabs, they would take public transportation to get to downtown L.A. or Hollywood or leave cars in a parking lot once they arrived and rely on cabs for short hops.
But with few taxis trolling city streets, some residents don’t consider them an option for getting around.
“I would love to take a cab rather than drive, but there are not enough of them circulating,” said Robert Vargas, an artist who lives in a pedestrian-heavy part of downtown.
“Even though the law was changed, I don’t think the cabbies are in tune with what’s going on here,” Vargas said.
