by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Few Montrealers are unfamiliar with the pathetic wheeze of a car that refuses to start on a cold day. The impotent groan of a dead battery - an essential feature of our musical winter soundscape - has traditionally been countered by a plentiful supply of roving taxi drivers with charger cables at the ready. But a new Montreal bylaw banned the practice of paying for emergency boosts by non-mechanics and has left stranded motorists as well as taxi drivers frustrated, as the two parties are no longer permitted to hook up together for cash.

The man behind the bylaw has sheepishly realized the dangers of meddling with the organic relationship between our city's stranded motorists and our mercenary cab drivers. "We wanted to solve a problem but we created another," says Claude Dauphin, the borough mayor of Lachine who rules the city's transportation commission. "If you're stuck at the corner of the street and you call for a tow truck, you can wait five hours because on a cold day like we've had, everybody needs a towtruck at the same time. In real life you can see a taxi driving by and ask for a boost."

Under the towing rules passed last June, trucks need a yellow siren, employees must wear red jackets and non-tow-trucks were banned from giving boosts to others in exchange for money. "So with this bylaw, if I have cables in my car and help somebody in the street, that's okay. But it's when you charge (money) to boost someone that the problem begins. We passed this bylaw because a lot of people were calling themselves specialists in towing without any credentials. I think we passed the rules in good faith," says Dauphin.

The cabbies' mouthpiece, Farès Bou Malhab, who became the prez of the Quebec Association of Taxi Drivers after a dozen years driving a hack, says, "The drivers aren't happy with the rule. The Taxi Bureau advised all taxis to stop giving boosts under pain of fines. Nobody had consulted us beforehand about this issue. As soon as we found out about it, we took steps with the city and they seemed to understand the problem."

The ban couldn't come at a worse time, as this winter saw a record number of cars disabled by the cold. On January 14 alone, CAA Quebec received an all-time record 10,816 requests for roadside emergency services in the province - three-quarters of which involved dead batteries, according to CAA rep Claire Roy, who says that delays could be anywhere from 10 minutes to five hours. CAA has 775,000 members, which represents about one-fifth of the 3.5-million cars and light trucks on the roads of the province.

Montreal's 9,500 taxi drivers also need every extra cent they can earn, as the pressure to earn money has become fiercer. Owners of taxi licences have been known to sell them for up to $200,000, according to Dauphin.

The city lifted the ban on charge-for-charge boosts last week for at least another year, as Dauphin will sit down with representatives of the towing and taxi industries to try to hammer out a new arrangement convenient to all.