Woman disputes Vancouver cab company’s policy after ‘terrifying’ taxi driver confrontation

It was supposed to be a night out on the town with friends—but, according to Julie Wazny, what began as a birthday celebration Friday night ended in a terrifying and maddening experience involving several Yellow Cab drivers.

“I noticed that the cab driver at some point took a turn off the normal route that I take home,” Wazny told Global News. “And I asked him why he was taking a different route, and why he was going that way. He got very aggressive with us and I asked him not to talk to me like that, to which he got even more aggressive and pulled over the cab and turned the cab off.”

The incident — which all started with a dispute over the driver’s choice of route from downtown Vancouver to Wazny’s home in Burnaby — escalated quickly. Wazny says the driver stopped his car in East Vancouver, near Clark Drive and East 4th Avenue, and exited the vehicle. Ultimately, at least four other Yellow Cab vehicles and the Vancouver police became involved.

“We were on the phone with police when, out of nowhere, about six other cab drivers showed up and surrounded us,” says Wazny, who provided cellphone footage of the encounter to Global News.

At one point, another Yellow Cab driver is seen approaching the women, apparently taking issue with the fact he was being recorded without his consent.

“We’re scared,” one of the women can be heard saying to the approaching driver.

“There’s a bunch of cabs around us. We’re scared.”

Wazny perceived the presence of the driver’s colleagues as an intimidation tactic — and one that worked. She and her friends called Vancouver police, but as it turns out, so had Yellow Cab’s dispatch operator following a driver’s request to do so.

“Police usually take 15 to 20 minutes to get to any situation,” Yellow Cab general manager Carolyn Bauer said. “So we actually send taxis to help the drivers. They’re lone people out on the road. That’s our policy, to look for protection.”

Bauer says it is Yellow Cab’s standard protocol to send employees to incidents that may warrant police involvement for the protection of its drivers. She denies Wazny’s claim that the presence of its drivers—all of them men, in this case—was intended to intimidate the young women.

Ironically, Bauer says the company’s driver reported feeling unsafe in the presence of Wazny and her friends.

“They were intoxicated,” Bauer said. “They wanted to go a certain route, a certain way. The driver was getting off shift and an argument ensued.”

But Wazny disputes the cab company’s narrative, and its version of events.

“I don’t think that three women versus one man that we’ve hired to take us home would be all that intimidating,” she said.

Police officers arrived on scene, and the issue was ultimately settled with Wazny paying a reduced fare. The husband of one of her friends arrived to drive the women the rest of the way home to Burnaby.

But for Wazny, the money isn’t the issue.

“It was terrifying. It was—the experience leading up to when the cabs got there was terrifying on its own,” she says. “But then, as three women in the middle of the night, just wanting a safe ride home, to be surrounded by other men, and intimidated? It was completely terrifying.”

Wazny says her experience reaffirms her conviction that British Columbia needs to introduce ridesharing, something the province says won’t happen until at least 2019.

As for Yellow Cab, the company is standing by its driver in this case, while apologizing for Wazny’s negative experience.

“I’m sorry for what she had to go through,” Bauer said. “But there are two sides to every story.”