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Tipsy Taxi: ASU alumni's company gets partiers home cheaply, safely
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Appalachian State seniors laugh as they search for money to pay their Tipsy Taxi driver. From left, they are: Ali Prince, Jenna Lackey and Whitney Givens.
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Published: May 2, 2008
BOONE - BOONE - BOONE -- It's a chilly Saturday just before midnight, and Jacob Young points his dark blue mini-van toward his next job.
Emo plays on the iPod skating around on the dashboard. On the floor, a box with a stack of magnets, beer koozies and trash bags shifts when the van takes turns.
Young pulls up to an apartment building and takes out his cell phone. "Hey, it's the Tipsy Taxi."
In a few minutes, five college students pile into the car. The girls are wearing sequins and high boots. "Good music!" one of the guys bellows. All of them are ready for their Saturday.
The group is headed to the Klondike Cafe, a popular bar on Blowing Rock Road across from Appalachian State University's campus. Instead of driving themselves, they've called a taxi.
There's no doubt that the taxi-cab business picks up after last call. But all those pub crawlers, bar flies and college-town partiers? They are Tipsy Taxi's target audience.
It's a company that advertises by handing out beer koozies and magnets with its decidedly to-the-point name spelled out with margarita glasses standing in for the "T"s in the logo. Those trash bags? Those are so drivers are prepared for queasy customers.
The brainchild of three friends and ASU alumni -- J.P. Carlin, Wes Turner and Jordan Childs -- it's safe to say that Tipsy Taxi is one of the rare cab companies that promotes partying.
That is, as long as they do the driving.
Tipsy Taxi was inspired by a safe-ride service offered by the partners' fraternity, Delta Chi. "Beeper" (because the drivers probably used to carry them before cell phones) provided brothers rides to bars, parties and home from a sober brother or a pledge serving as a designated driver.
"It was great, because any time you were out you have a chance to get home safely or get to the next bar," Turner said. "And you didn't have to pay for a $20 taxi ride."
Three other cab companies are currently permitted to operate in Boone, but some students and Carlin and Turner say that they aren't reliable.
The partners thought they could do better by making a "Beeper" for all of Boone and hiring students to be the designated drivers. They also wanted to start a business together, Carlin said.
So the friends bought a used van and received a taxi permit from Boone's police department. They were ready to start Tipsy Taxi by the fall of 2006. They advertised by handing out piles of magnets to bar owners. They've now added another van, but unlike a standard taxi company, Tipsy Taxi only runs three nights a week -- the weekend party-night trio of Thursday, Friday and Saturday -- and during such special events as football games. Rides run from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.
The rides started out at $3 a person when the cab company opened for business in 2006. They're now up to $5 a person for a trip within Boone. The maximum in-town rate is $20 a ride, so the more people who ride, the cheaper for each person (the record is 19, according to the company's Web site).
To Young, a sophomore from Hendersonville who has been driving for Tipsy Taxi since last fall, customer service is about loud rock music as much as it is about getting someone somewhere fast. He uses his iPod to take music requests. He notices a trend.
"Apparently everyone likes AC/DC when they're drunk. Guns n' Roses' ‘Welcome to the Jungle,' they love that, too," Young said.
He worked on Halloween last year, driving in a Rastafarian cap with dreadlocks, playing reggae music and handing candy out of a Halloween bucket -- until it went missing. Young thinks a rider stole it.
It takes focus to navigate Boone's shortcuts and twisty mountain roads as wide as a sidewalk, often with a backseat full of twenty-somethings who definitely should not be driving. Young has dealt with obnoxious drunk people, crying drunk people, and at least one drunk person who lost his wallet.
"When they get drunk, they get really loud," Young said. "So I just try to ignore it and drive."
Though Tipsy Taxi wants gregarious, social drivers -- they are driving around in a van with loud music and green light glowing from under the floorboard -- the company is serious about the drivers' backgrounds. All the drivers are required to have a background check with Boone's police department.
Turner said that the company checks out potential employees' grade-point average, too (he prefers to hire students, although the customers don't have to be). Drivers have to have relatively clean driving records with no major violations such as DWIs.
Bill Post, Boone's police chief, said that there are too many variables involved with DWI statistics to tell if a student-oriented taxi service alone has cut down on drunken drivers. There were 35 DWI arrests from January to March 2006, 44 within those four months in 2007 and 39 for that period in 2008, according to Boone police records. "When you're looking at numbers that small … it's hard to quantify. I think generally having taxi services would be a deterrent," Post said.
Tipsy Taxi's business is complicated by the fact that none of the owners lives in Boone. Turner and Carlin live in Atlanta and Charlotte (they graduated in 2004 and 2005). They both have day jobs -- Carlin is a salesman for the Yellow Pages, and Turner is an accountant. Childs isn't active with the company because he's busy with graduate school in Richmond.
"We take our hiring business seriously since it's a cash business and we're not there," Turner said.
On a recent Saturday night, Young and another driver, Joel Valente, speculated that business is sluggish because there was a basketball game earlier that day.
Or because it's not cold enough.
Or because it's just a slow night.
Turner said that Tipsy Taxi gets 25 to 35 riders on an average night, but tonight, the calls were not coming in.
Between about 11:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., Young got two calls and seven riders. He spent the rest of the time waiting in the van for his cell phone to ring or driving the van down empty streets, colored orange by street lights and blinking stop lights. "Usually people are spilling out on a weekend night," Young said. "It's not a good sign that people aren't standing outside."
One rider was Krystie Thomas, an ASU student who rode Tipsy Taxi to the Klondike. She said she uses the cab service about once a week.
"They're the most reliable," she said from the back seat as the minivan pulled up to the bar. "The only ones we can call and someone comes reliably."
"It's fun when you know you can go out and have a few beers and not worry about it," her friend Melissa Marion added.
Carlin said that Tipsy Taxi makes a modest profit, but not much. He said he and Turner pay themselves about $60 a month though Carlin has "visions of grandeur" for the business to grow, but they don't see it replacing their day jobs.
For now, the taxi company is more philanthropy than anything else. Carlin likes knowing that students he still knows in Boone have a way to make it home.
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
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