Do Passengers Think Cabbies Cheat Them? Well, Are Cabs Yellow?
The price of what should be a short and fairly standard trip is like the price of a volatile stock. It is never the same and frequently varies by several dollars. Mr. Carrizzo, 46, a director at a bank, said he recently complained to a cabby that the taxi’s meter was surely broken, getting in reply only a verbal shrug. “He said, ‘I’ll check it out,’ ” Mr. Carrizzo recalled. So it was with some sense of satisfaction that Mr. Carrizzo learned that his suspicion that he was being cheated had apparently been validated. On Friday, the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said that thousands of taxi drivers had routinely been gouging riders. The offending drivers were setting their meters on the out-of-city rate of 80 cents per fifth of a mile, twice the rate they were allowed to charge for rides within the five boroughs. The higher rate was inappropriately charged at least once by more than 35,000 of the city’s taxi drivers, officials said, and more than 100 times by each of about 3,000 dri
