Bethel has been referred to as the taxi capital of the nation. People take cabs to work, students take cabs to school. The airport is a frequent destination. And since Bethel is a hub community, people from around the region take cabs when in town. Cabs are integral to Bethel’s economic engine. But on the night of Sunday, March 27, cabs in Bethel stopped driving. Over 34 hours later, they returned to the road. Here’s why the shutdown happened, according to a senior Kusko Cab driver.
The trouble started six months ago. A cab would be driving down the road when suddenly a small rock would hit it, sometimes striking a window. These rocks were being thrown. The attacks weren’t causing much damage, and weren’t overly frequent. But then it started snowing and the days grew shorter. From the cover of darkness, chunks of ice and rock began being hurled at the cabs.
“It started happening almost every day or every other day,” Musa Saliu said, a Kusko Cab driver for nearly 25 years. Kusko Cab is one of two taxi companies in Bethel.
“The first time it happens, it’s just kind of shocking. You could almost lose control and go in a ditch,” Saliu said.
Drivers began keeping an eye out, almost expecting to get hit. The attacks were mostly happening in the same location: on Ridgecrest Drive between Brown’s Slough and the Bethel Native Corporation complex; one of Bethel’s main corridors.
When they could, drivers began snapping pictures of who was throwing the objects. Saliu described them as a group of teenage boys, about four of them. In recent weeks, the attacks escalated. Last week, an attack busted a cab driver’s passenger window.
“Luckily he did not have any passengers at the time, so no one got hurt,” Saliu said.
That same night, another cab was hit. Cab drivers are independent contractors, so they are responsible for paying for their own insurance, maintenance, and repairs. The estimate to fix the broken passenger window was $4,128.91.
Saliu’s cab was also hit last week.
“I had a young lady in my cab with her infant in her lap, and they hit my cab. They hit the passenger window on her side. Her infant started crying, and luckily the window didn’t burst into pieces. Luckily, she didn’t get hurt. But honestly, we started feeling like it just wasn’t safe for us anymore,” Saliu said.
Then on Sunday, March 27 around 7 p.m., an object collided with a cab’s windshield, cracking it. The incident happened in a residential area on Ptarmigan Street, outside of the usual hit area. Saliu said that Kusko Cab drivers started talking over the cab system’s VHF radio, saying that they didn’t feel safe driving anymore.
Three of the drivers, including Saliu and the driver whose windshield had just cracked, went to the police station. There, they found drivers from Bethel’s other cab company, Alaska Cab, with the same complaints.
The drivers from the two companies talked and came to a shared decision: “Everyone just agreed to say, ‘We’re going home. It’s not safe to drive,’” Saliu said.
Saliu posted a message to Facebook announcing that cabs would not be operating in Bethel and apologizing for the inconvenience. He posted a picture of what looks like three teenagers holding snowballs in their hands and asked for help identifying them. People began responding with possible names.
The next day, March 28, Saliu met with four teenagers and their parents.
“They were very cooperative. They said, ‘We don’t believe that it is our kids doing this, but if it’s our kids, then we’re very sorry for what happened.' There was only one parent who threw a fit about it, and she was trying to accuse me, and she was trying to make it sound like it was my fault,” Saliu said.
None of the teenagers admitted to throwing anything at the cabs, but Saliu left the meetings feeling like it was safe to return to the road. He told the other drivers. The cabs began driving again at 5 a.m. on March 29, about 34 hours after shutting down.
“We’ll see how things go from here on out,” Saliu said. “I have faith in the community. I have faith in our drivers and in the company that we will not shut down again, that this problem will go away. But it remains to be seen.”
