Taxi drivers overcharge customers
From data collected by the Taxi and Limousine Commission revealed that the cabbies overcharged the customers with as much as $8.3 million during the past two years.
The normal tariff for taxis in New York is 40 cents for one fifth of a mile inside the city limits and 80 cents elsewhere. Almost 74 percent of the licensed drivers illegally charged the higher rate inside the city limits itself at least once, while more than 6 percent of the drivers did that more than 100 times.
Global positioning system were installed in all taxis in 2007 by TLC. There were protest amongst the drivers for the same and the installation was completed. The data now has been collected from the global positioning systems. The TLC plans to install systems to alert riders whenever there is a switch in rate illegally. We are examining the possibility of installing a system which would switch to higher rate automatically when then taxi moves out of city limits , avoiding need to manual switch says a TLC official.
