I believe this sentence is in present tense. However, the listed translated English and Russian sentences are in past tense. To fix this, I suggest that this sentence be changed to "我當時等緊的士" which more accurately translates into past tense.

Welcome to Tatoeba, anaga27, and thank you for checking our sentences. However, I disagree with your suggestion here.

It doesn't make sense to ascribe "present tense" to a Cantonese sentence, since there are no tenses in Cantonese. The time of an event is either inferred from context or stated explicitly. There are many sentences that could refer to past, present or future events if you don't know the context, and that's okay.

Your suggested change would make the time explicit, but is it necessary? If you told a story about something that happened to you yesterday, you'd probably use past tense in every sentence. But if you did the same thing in Cantonese, adding 當時 to every sentence would be rather weird, right?

So I don't think this sentence needs to be changed. But feel free to also add an English translation using present tense. On Tatoeba, there's no limit to the number of translations a sentence can have.

Hello! Thank you for your quick reply!
The sentence includes 緊, which after a verb makes the verb ongoing, or as I put it in my first comment, "present tense". I apologise for my lack of reasoning.
I think the sentence could instead be replaced with "我等的士" if 當時 is too explicit.

緊 is called a "progressive aspect marker" in linguistic jargon, which means that it makes the verb ongoing, as you say. However, this "progressive aspect" is very different from "present tense." Aspect is a grammatical category that doesn't determine a point in time for an action (like tense) but it's extent, e.g. whether it is completed, ongoing, repeated, etc. Aspect and tense can vary independently, so you can also talk about actions that will be completed in the future or that were ongoing in the past.

There are also aspects in English grammar. For example (wait/waited) and (am waiting/was waiting) are both (present tense/past tense) pairs, but "waiting" additionally carries the progressive/continuous aspects. (There's no difference between progressive and continuous aspects in English, so the terms are often used interchangeably, but Cantonese does make the distinction. The Cantonese continuous aspect marker is 住.)

The present progressive is very common in English (e.g. you're more likely to say "I am waiting for a taxi." than "I wait for a taxi.") which is probably why you're associating 緊 with the present tense, but it can equally well be used for actions that were ongoing in the past, i.e. those situations where you would use the past progressive in English, such as in "I was waiting for a taxi."