Cab passengers of NYC have been ripped off under their noses! They've been taken for a ride of their lives!
I wouldn't wanna take an NYC yellow cab in my life. Would you?
Posted on 03/13/2010 4:39:49 AM PST by myknowledge
In a mind-boggling ripoff that went undetected for years, thousands of city cabbies overcharged nearly 2 million passengers by at least $8.3 million, according to a shocking disclosure yesterday by the Taxi & Limousine Commission.
Officials said 35,558 of the city's 48,300 taxi drivers -- or three-quarters of all the licensees -- were caught overcharging at least once by secretly changing the meter's rate setting.
A staggering 3,000 drivers swindled passengers more than 100 times each. A total of 1.9 million trips were overpriced.
The scale of the thievery over the last 26 months was flabbergasting even to hardened veterans of what is supposed to be a tightly regulated industry.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Cab passengers of NYC have been ripped off under their noses! They've been taken for a ride of their lives!
I wouldn't wanna take an NYC yellow cab in my life. Would you?
The effectiveness of government regulators on display!
...and these are the same people who want to regulate the healthcare industry!!!!!
Way to run a city, Bloombug.
Would this fall under the RICO laws?
Hmmmmmmm....!
I wonder how many of these drivers are not Americans?
I was at a local fair and was sitting near a guy with feathers and braids ( a member of the local casino tribe-the guy looked as Irish as me-but back to my story) and he was bragging to his friends about how it’s about time the Indian tribes put the “screws to the white man” for all that he’s done to “them” over the years.
By letting them gamble their life savings away, spend all kinds of money at the casinos and end up losing everything as a result, was “awesome payback to the white a**holes who screwed us and stole everything from us”...
He laughed as he talked about the power they have to ruin (help ruin) people’s lives by gambling and taking the “white man’s money”...THEN he started talking about how he collects disability and gets everything paid for by the state....etc etc.
I am SURE this mindset is prevalent with the “foreign” taxi drivers as well.
They live to see us (white Americans) FAIL and really hate this country.
It’s as simple as that.
No, but the primary reason the cabs are such poor quality is the low pay associated with them. The drivers work 12 hour days, six or seven days a week. The attitude of the customers is no work of charity, either. The drivers also get cheated by passengers, and there’s really nothing that can be done about it. They get second guessed by the TLC and medallion system is a magnificent example of everything that is wrong with government sponsored monopoly.
You couldn't ask for more uninvolved customers though. Don't people ever check out the rates and pricing methods for taxi service?
I can't remember the last time I took a taxi, but every few years I do look into the cost for a particular ride and the details of how the pricing and meter process work, if I were a regular user, then I would know how the meter works, $20.00 and $30.00 for the same trip would get me involved.
Unexpected?
Taxis, OTH, in cities like NYC are almost mandatory. You either take a taxi or subway or you don't get around. There is a reason many people in NYC don't own cars, and that is because it is a pain in the butt to own one there.
Your analogy(if that is what it is meant to be)between taxis and casinos sucks somewhat.
The first thing I learned about cabbies is that they take a wild route which will up your fee. And that’s the way it is....
Exactly. Is this some kind of surprise?
A different sort of mugging....
With this many involved, these must be fleet and not owner operated cabs. This means that the fleet owners profited from this scam as well as the drivers. Will the city go after the fleet owners also?
In the days before unlimited long distance services it was the phone company that pulled this sort of low level trickery and depended on volume to make it profitable. Every month you would find little a fifty or sixty cent long distance call to a number I didn’t recognize. Most people never noticed it, those who did didn’t bother to investigate it since it was so little. But when they did that to thousands of customers, month after month, the take soon became pretty hefty.
I never saw official proof it was going on, but I sure noticed there was always at least one call on my bill that I was sure we hadn’t made.
I bet the one of them that can speak English will say, “They new to country. Not know setting own fair a problem! How you say, Caveat Emptor?”
This is New York City we're talking about, folks. $8.3 million is about the size of the cost overrun on a single $10 million school renovation contract in NYC.
Same thing with gas pumps that click off a few pennies before the gas flows.
Actually, the reason they can get away with this is that NYC cab fares are low compared to other cities. If you are adding, say, 50 cents to a fare of 7 bucks, most passengers will never notice, because the fare still seems reasonable.
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