National Football League

Drivers mad over city initiative

Published Jan. 27, 2011 6:04 a.m. ET

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The Steelers and the Packers fought to get to the Super Bowl. Now, taxi drivers in Dallas could make it hard for fans just to get from the airport to the stadium, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The drivers, outraged by a city initiative that sends natural-gas-powered cabs to the front of the queue at Dallas' Love Field airport, are organizing a boycott that would make it more difficult for visitors to get around North Texas for the big game a week from Sunday.

The Association of Taxicab Operators USA, with 700 members in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is threatening to park their cars starting Thursday if the policy is not dropped.

Drivers say they sit for hours at the back of the line. They say the promotion of cabs powered by compressed natural gas is not just about clean air, but an effort to boost Texas' natural-gas industry. Otherwise, they ask, why didn't it include hybrid vehicles?

"We're not going to stop unless we have something in writing," said Al-Fatih Ameen, chairman of the cabbies group. Ameen said the boycott could extend through events surrounding Super Bowl XLV and even the game itself, in which Pittsburgh and Green Bay will clash at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.

Officials do not expect a boycott to be disruptive because they believe it would involve a relatively small number of cabbies, and because Dallas has is left." class="highlightText">an "an excess capacity" of drivers anyway, said Chris Heinbaugh, chief of staff for Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert.

On a typical day, some 3,100 people flying into the region's biggest airport, Dallas-Fort Worth International, opt to rent a car, while 1,838 grab a cab.