Hey, taxi — the Port Authority is hailing you.
The bi-state agency, which will help christen the new Red Hook cruise
ship terminal with the arrival of the Queen Mary 2 on April 15, is looking
for a car-service company that can handle the hundreds of disembarking
passengers at the Brooklyn home port.
The new terminal will welcome 38 of the gargantuan crafts this year. And
according to the agency’s “request for proposals,” roughly
35 percent of each boat’s 2,500-3,000 velour-suited passengers will
need a cab when they disembark — enough buffet-fed tourists to swamp
virtually all Brooklyn livery services combined.
The winning cab company must also have “a dedicated, experienced,
on-site uniformed dispatch service [and] a dedicated management staff”
— another requirement that many Brooklyn cab customers say does not
exist in the borough.
“There is not a single company in the city, let alone Brooklyn, that
could do what [the Port Authority is] asking,” said Alex Mulerman,
the comptroller at Apex Limousines, which is the closest black-car company
to the ship terminal.
Apex has 150 cars at its disposal.
Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman said the agency would most likely
settle on two or three companies to handle the traffic jointly.
“We’ve never done anything like this before,” he said.
At the Port Authority-run airports, for example, yellow cabs pick up multitudes
of passengers.
The agency will host a tour of the facility, which is still being built,
on Wednesday, March 15, at 10 am. Bids will be due a week later.
All proposals must take into account the Port Authority’s “cut”:
$2 per car or $250 per ship, whichever is greater.
