Josh Meltzer | The Roanoke Times

A small group waits on the curb outside the Texas Tavern just before 3 a.m. while a taxi slows to seek a fare.

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Sherry, 28, and Joey Tucciarone, 26, settle with Yellow Cab driver Bob Widner after he drove them home about 1:30 a.m. They said they had driven downtown but were trying to be responsible about not driving home after drinking. They hailed the ride in front of the Roanoke City Market Building, where Widner was parked waiting for a customer.

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Yellow Cab driver Bob Widner waits for last call along Jefferson Street. He leases a PT Cruiser to work the peak times when the bars close on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Iffy Hussein (middle, hand on head), a Yellow Cab driver from Pakistan, pays his monthly cab charges to Michael Crohn, the operations manager for Yellow Cab, at the company's headquarters in Roanoke.

It's just after 2 a.m.

Smells of cologne, cigarettes and alcohol mingle on the sidewalk outside Corned Beef & Co.

The band has quieted, last call was called, and displaced drinkers gather on the wet concrete, not quite ready to end the night.

It's been 20 minutes since Kathryn Dent, 24, called a cab. Now, she waits on the corner, anxious about how she will get home to Salem this Sunday morning.

Soon, the streets will empty, and Kathryn and her friend, 23-year-old Lauren King, will be alone.

"Gawd," Dent moans. "Is 345-7711 the only cab company around here?"

That's a common question on crowded weekend nights in downtown Roanoke, when bar owners, bartenders and customers alike say it can be difficult to catch a cab. Some describe waits that range from 30 minutes to two hours or more.

"If you think you need to call a cab, just walk home. ... They don't come," said Shannon Scott, a 26-year-old transplant from Atlanta who admits she's hoofed it home to the Hershberger Road area, once even taking a ride from a stranger along the way.

Other times, she gets behind the wheel herself.

"Every time I drive after I've been drinking," she added, "of course I worry."

Cab drivers and their bosses do not condone drunk driving. At the same time, they acknowledge that catching a cab anywhere in Roanoke after the bars close on Friday and Saturday nights -- their busiest time of the week -- can be a challenge.

"Rest assured, we try to do everything on our part to keep it as fair and dependable as we can," said Michael Crohn, operations manager for Yellow Cab Co., "but there are a lot of factors that keep that from happening."

As downtown bars multiply, Roanoke tries to attract more young professionals to the mix, and police ratchet up DUI enforcement, some wonder when the cab supply is going to catch up with the demand, if ever.

"I think," said Bill Carder of Downtown Roanoke Inc., "it is an issue for everybody."

An unsteady business

Roanoke is about five cabs away from being a one-cab company town.

That's the fleet size of Quality Cab Co., the only competition for Yellow Cab's 40 cars.

Over the years, Yellow Cab's fleet size has fluctuated with the economy. In its heyday of the 1950s and '60s, the company had up to 65 cars. That number plummeted to 25 during the 1980s and has been on a slow rise ever since.

The three other Roanoke cab companies currently listed in Yellow Book could not be reached by phone and appear to be closed down.

Valley Metro buses are not a transportation option for partiers in Roanoke. The last run ends at 8:45 p.m. and, according to general manager Dave Morgan, late-night runs aren't possible unless funding improves.

Brothers Billy and Steve Roberts run Yellow Cab, which their grandfather founded in the 1930s. The Robertses know they almost have a monopoly, but they said they're certainly not living large.

"Every year, we wonder if we are going to be here next year because of the various factors affecting us," said Steve Roberts, the Northeast Roanoke company's vice president. "And usually those situations are beyond our control."

He said it is difficult to insure a cab company. In addition, nobody is applying for jobs as a cabbie right now, perhaps because gas prices are so high and drivers must pay for their fuel. Even if Yellow Cab could afford another five or 10 cars, it would still need someone to drive them.

"I could use probably half again as many drivers if people were interested," he said.

Mostly, the brothers and their drivers blame long wait times on one factor: supply and demand.

Although they don't track call numbers, the owners say their busiest time of the week by far is between 1 and 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings, after the bars close. And they can't expand their fleet to meet that demand, they said, for fear of being overstaffed the rest of the time.

Alfred LaGasse, chief executive officer of the Maryland-based nonprofit Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association, has heard that complaint before.

"You can't build a business around four hours a week," LaGasse said.

Carder, executive director of Downtown Roanoke Inc., said he's heard it can be hard to get a cab on the weekends, but he doesn't think taxi companies can put more cars on the road to suit a temporary need.

"It's like building a church just for Easter Sunday," he said.

Todd Lancaster, who owns Awful Arthur's in downtown Roanoke, said catching a cab in Roanoke has been, from his experience, "hell."

Lancaster wonders if it's a matter of planning. He compared it to running a restaurant, saying if he has 15 servers on staff, he will put them all on the schedule during a busy shift but never schedule them all during slow times.

"I guess Yellow Cab is looking at it like they need to expand their fleet," he said. "I don't know if it's an expansion of their fleet so much as an application of the resources they do have."

But cab drivers in Roanoke are independent contractors who pick their own hours. If they don't want to work on Friday night, there's nothing the company can do. For that reason, there may be anywhere from 20 to 35 cars on the streets on a given weekend night.

Twenty years ago, Steve Roberts said, the cabbies were employees of the company. That's no longer viable because of the cost of workers' compensation and other benefits.

Yellow Cab drivers pay a flat lease fee to take out the car, which is owned and maintained by the cab company. At Yellow Cab, that costs $300 to $425 per week, depending on whether a cabbie leases alone or partners with another driver.

Any money the drivers make on top of the lease amount and fuel costs goes in their pockets. A Roanoke taxi driver can take home up to $150 on a good weekend night, but they have to know how to work the system.

Yellow Cab driver Ric Wade calls it being "in the flow."

Getting in the flow means picking up a fare in one spot, dropping off in another part of town and then picking up the next passenger as close to that drop-off point as possible. That limits the amount of "dead time" when Wade is burning up gasoline with nobody in the cab.

"My money is in the pick up, drop off, pick up, drop off," he said. "My money is in the flow."

The waiting game

Back on the rain-slicked street outside Corned Beef, Dent and King have yet to see the cab they called from the bar.

It's 2:11 a.m. Ten minutes have passed since they both made repeat calls to Yellow Cab.

"Someone probably got the cab we originally called for," Dent concludes.

They are cold and tipsy and debate walking to the all-night Texas Tavern for chili and Cheesy Westerns.

But there's a reason Dent and King would rather wait: They know drunk driving can be dangerous and costly.

The risks were thrust into the spotlight in February when a chain-reaction crash on U.S. 419 in Roanoke County killed a construction worker. The two motorists involved had left a downtown bar. They have been convicted of drunk driving and are charged with involuntary manslaughter.

But stories like that aren't enough to keep some drinkers out of the driver's seat. In 2007, 926 people were arrested and charged with DUI in Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem, including motorists charged by state police. For the past five years, the number has hovered between 600 and 950 a year. The large majority of those arrests occurred between midnight and 3 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Roanoke police Capt. Curtis Davis said he thinks people deserve to go downtown and have a good time. He even knows it can be hard to get a cab ride home on busy nights. But, he said, none of that excuses drunk driving.

"You can't get behind the wheel intoxicated under any circumstance," Davis said. "If you call a cab and you've got to wait an hour, as far as I'm concerned, you're the one who got intoxicated. You bought that hour."

As of 2:11 a.m., Dent and King had bought about 30 minutes, which Yellow Cab President Billy Roberts says is the longest a customer should have to wait. Some say they've waited much longer.

Take Brett Jacobsen and Dylan Clapp, a pair of Northern Virginia 20-somethings who were in town working with the Salem Avalanche on opening weekend. Their night started with dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings at Valley View Mall, where they called a cab to take them downtown.

The car arrived so fast, they didn't have time to down the round of drinks the dispatcher told them to order to bide the time.

But at 2 a.m., standing with his fists in his jeans pockets and scanning the street outside Corned Beef, Clapp, 24, was still waiting for the cab they called an hour earlier.

"Now we're stuck," he said.

"It's Friday night," added Jacobsen, 25. "There should be a fleet of cabs outside this joint."

A week later, Roanoke friends Dave Csokasy, 28, and Dave Dejnozka, 25, waited about an hour and 15 minutes after calling for a cab after the bars closed. They eventually hailed a taxi on the street.

"There were more police officers standing outside the bars than there were cabs," Csokasy said. "That seems like a problem to me."

It's a problem that Will Farmer, chairman of NewVaConnects, has experienced personally. His group is trying to bring more 20- and 30-something professionals to town, and he said he thinks the late-night cab shortage has the potential to be a deterrent.

But, he said, there's no simple solution.

"It has a stigma: 'You can't get a ride,' " he said. "As downtown grows and becomes a hub, it could become a major issue for people coming from bigger towns ... to come to a town like this."

The cabbies' dilemma

Shortly before 11 p.m. on a Friday in April, Yellow Cab driver Bob Widner pulled his yellow PT Cruiser into the Towers Shopping Center, ready to pick up a customer at Awful Arthur's.

He radioed his location to the dispatcher, who tried reaching the customer first on his cellphone, then on the bar's land line.

Loud music pulsed from the bar. Widner -- a small man with a white Santa beard and a newsboy cap -- waited in the driver's seat and watched the clock on the dash. He's required to give each passenger three minutes.

They're chasing the fare at this point, Widner concluded. That's not how it's supposed to be.

"We can't get 'em to answer," the dispatcher informed Widner.

"Thank you for trying," he said, preparing to leave. "Clear."

That's part of a cabbie's nightly ritual -- arriving to pick up a customer only to be stood up. Some no-shows simply don't wait, or wander away from the pick-up location. Sometimes it's because they grabbed the first cab that showed up, whether it was intended for them or not.

"They all say 'I called you,' " said fellow driver Wade. "I've had people beat on the car to get in it, and demand to get in it. I've had two groups get in at the same time."

If they wanted to, Wade and Widner could choose not to take those calls, instead dealing only with regulars, or "specials," as they're called in the business. Many Yellow Cab drivers have a roster of specials who call them directly on their cellphones.

On weekend nights, some drivers do not take trips from dispatch. Wade, for example, has most of his clientele set up. He works each day from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m., and a large chunk of his shift is spent carting early risers to work and taking them home at night.

Overall, the Roberts brothers and their drivers say their goal is making money, so they have no reason to let a call go unanswered.

Widner, for instance, often begins his day at noon and keeps driving his cab until the bars close.

"We usually work out of a sense of obligation that people need to get home," Widner said. "At least I do."

Options available

Until Roanoke gets more cabs, weekend partiers who can't catch a taxi and don't want to risk someone's life -- or their driving record -- need to find other options.

Cab drivers say bar-hoppers can increase their odds of catching a taxi by leaving downtown before last call.

Otherwise, Billy Roberts said Yellow Cab has vans in its fleet, and customers should never assume they are reserved in advance. Teaming up with friends can make the cost of a van ride more affordable.

Meanwhile, the company tries nudging more cabbies out during late-night hours by offering "midnight specials" -- $15 off a lease when drivers take cars out after midnight.

In addition, David Robinson, founder of Blacksburg's Hooptie Ride, hopes to eventually bring his transportation service to Roanoke. The business loads late-night passengers into vans for $3 per head. He plans to start running one van in Radford this summer. After that, he said, Salem and Roanoke would be natural expansion areas.

Like Yellow Cab, Hooptie Ride runs seven days a week. Even if there's just three to six calls on a slow night, Robinson feels serving that small number is valuable if it keeps more accidents from happening.

Meanwhile, Chris Konschak, executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving's Virginia and Washington, D.C., programs, believes people who complain about taxi cab service just do not want to be responsible for their own consumption of alcohol.

If they can't plan ahead, he said, they must be mature about their predicament.

"Even if there are no cabs available, they need to call a friend or find a hotel that they can stay in or just wait it out," Konschak said.

The wait ends

The streets are empty now, and for Dent and King, the situation looks bleak.

A third call to Yellow Cab puts King on hold.

"They said they were on the way," King says.

"Arrrgh," Dent moans between hiccups.

Suddenly, there's a bright spot. A cab crawls toward them on Campbell Avenue.

"Hey," they shout, throwing up their hands.

The cab swishes past, already full.

Another cab follows, empty this time.

"Yesss!" both women hiss.

The car stops and the grateful duo piles inside.

"Thank youuuu," King tells the driver.

Some 35 minutes after their wait began -- not bad for a weekend night -- the pair are on the way home.

The bars are dark. Downtown is quiet.

Minutes later, a cab waits at the light at Jefferson and Campbell.

The car is empty.

Another empty cab drives through the light.

Then another.

lindsey.nair@roanoke.com 981-3343

erinn.hutkin@roanoke.com 981-3138