A handful of white-and-green Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (STITA) taxis spent a half-hour circling City Hall this morning in the rain to protest what they call a citywide shortage of taxi cabs—a supposed shortage that commenced today, when a rival cab company, Yellow Cab, took over STITA's 20-year contract to service the airport.

"We're asking for 166 city licenses to be granted temporarily to help the consumers within the city of Seattle," says Jesse Buttar, a spokesman for STITA. Buttar says that as Yellow Cab diverts 210 cabs in its fleet to the airport, "the city is going to have a shortfall of cabs. Customers will see longer wait lines."

But Denise Movius, Director of Revenue and Consumer Protection for the city's Department of Executive Administration, says that won't happen. Furthermore, the city has no plans to issue more permanent licenses. "If we suddenly dump 166 new cabs downtown it could devastate the economy for taxis already down there," she says of STITA's request.

Clearly, altruistic concern for shop-weary pedestrians isn't the real issue here—STITA is out big business by losing its airport contract. But that doesn't completely invalidate the company's underlying point: the system is a mess. In fact, the city is in the midst of assembling a panel to tackle licensing complaints by cab groups like STITA and figure out how to regionally streamline needlessly cumbersome cab rules (for example, city-licensed cabs are required to have cameras and GPS while county cabs are not).

"Clearly, there's some industry angst," says Movius, "our goal is to figure out how to get the county and city closer in alignment."

You cannot wait to read more taxi cab drama after the jump.

To fully understand this specific fight, you have to dig deeper into hairy, heaving underbelly of the county's taxi cab service. In brief, cab companies are contracted to service specific areas in the county. For years, STITA serviced the airport and Yellow Cab serviced Seattle, meaning that STITA could drop jet-lagged customers off downtown but couldn't pick customers up and Yellow Cab could drive customers to the airport but then had to truck it back to Seattle without new fare.

After Yellow Cab was awarded the airport taxi contract, Movius says Seattle officials took a look at the city's 667 licensed cabs—nearly 400 of which are Yellow Cabs—and their response times for picking up customers to see if the loss of cabs would impact services (a good response time is around five minutes). They concluded more cabs weren't necessary because the Yellow Cab fleet is now mostly comprised of dual-licensed cabs, which can service both the city of Seattle and the airport. And now that Yellow Cab is servicing both the city and the airport, "they're more efficient at filling cabs," explains Movius.

Movius admits that efficiency and timeliness aren't necessarily tied at the ankle, If cab response times in the city start to lag considerably, the city could issue up to 35 new licenses in a lottery process that wouldn't favor STITA drivers. But issuing temporary licenses is out of the question: "The city doesn't even have the authority to do that," she says.