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GPS Log Analysis Uncovers Millions In NYC Taxi Overcharges
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission is using GPS data collected in every cab to review millions of trips in New York City over the past 26 months and has discovered a huge number in which out-of-city rates, twice the rate charged for rides in the five boroughs, were improperly charged. The drivers' scheme, the commission says, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip when drivers flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million. Cab drivers are supposed to charge the higher rate only when they cross the border between New York City and Nassau or Westchester. 'We have not seen anything quite this pervasive,' said Matthew W. Daus, the taxi and limousine commissioner. 'It's very disturbing.' The taxi industry vigorously challenged the city's findings, saying it was unimaginable that such a pervasive problem could be the result of deliberate fraud. The commission says that 75% out of the city's 48,000 drivers had applied the higher rate at least once. Officials hope to roll out a short-term fix in two or three weeks in which an alert will appear on the backseat monitor when a cabbie activates the out-of-town rate."
Bah forget about bankers we need to bail out the cab driver industry.
Require the use of GPS to automatically set the advertised rates at the correct points. Don't let the drivers flick the switch themselves.
Take me to the cleaners, and hurry!
In other words, the problem isn't defrauding customers, it's getting caught.
"we have you on tape shoplifting a candy bar at the store but you've been trustworthy before so it doesn't match up."
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The government controls how many Medallions are in circulation, they put in an artificial ceiling. I predict the same thing happening when the government start managing health care.
You mean reasonably priced services easily available to everyone?
At least 9 out of 10 taxi drivers in NYC do not know enough about the city's streets or the city's traffic patterns to know when it is appropriate to make a judgement call to deviate from the GPS-selected route.
That is one huge unsupported assertion. You can provide a link to something in london that anyone can google, but you can't provide any backing support for such a massively outlandish claim?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Taxi drivers are people. People make mistakes. One mistake per two hundred trips does not seem unreasonable, especially considering that the frequency of incidents per driver probably follows a power-law distribution and the median number of mistakes per driver is likely much lower. Another way of looking at it is that 25% of drivers didn't make a single mistake in more than two years of driving.
Which isn't to say that these were all honest mistakes. However, I don't see this as the massive systematic fraud the article seems to be suggestion. A 0.5% chance of being overcharged just doesn't seem like something to get excited about (even if I lived in New York, which I don't).
In Washington, DC, taxicabs used to charge via a "zone" system - it didn't matter how far you went (necessarily) - the city was divided into multiple "zones", and the rate was charged based on how many zones you had to travel through to get to your destination.
People (particularly tourists) complained about this system because it didn't make complete sense and a tourist, or even just someone not familiar with the zone map, wasn't going to be able to look at the map and see where the zone boundaries were. As an example, if I was in a hurry, I could take a taxi from my home, to work. The total was 3 zones (with a minimum, of course, of 1). However, if I walked 1 block south from home, hailed a taxi, and had it drop me off 1 block north of work, it would be 1 zone. That would save a good percentage of the cab fare.
However, a tourist getting in the car would have no idea - furthermore, if a tourist was being dropped off, say, right near a border, if the cabbie says "Hey, traffic is bad here, mind if I drop you off across the street?" most people would say "OK", figuring that in most cities, that's probably nothing, or maybe an extra quarter or so. In DC, it could be an extra $2.
A little over a year ago DC switched to a metered taxi system, as mandated by Congress. Prior to the switchover, taxi drivers in DC went on strike, saying they'd lose significant money in a switch, despite the fact that the rates were set such that the average metered trip would actually net more for the driver than the old zone system would - but only under the assumption (which the people setting the rates were using) that the zone system was being used fairly and customers were not being diverted, sometimes only short distances, in order to add zones (sometimes, near zone borders, moving a few blocks could be two extra zones!).
You'd get a constant circle:
Taxi Driver Committee Representative: "We'll lose tons of money switching to meters!"
Taxicab Commission: "But under this new system, a driver would actually be getting more money on an average trip than before, unless they were routinely cheating customers in a way the new system would prevent. Look, we'll open the books to you, examine the whole thing."
Taxi Driver Committee Representative: "Ah. I see. We, of course, have never cheated anyone. But notwithstanding that, we'll lose tons of money!"
The change took place anyway, and the world hasn't ended, although the data does seem to reflect that cabdrivers are making less than before, yet somehow the data also shows that they're making more per trip than before. How? Because before they were manipulating the system to charge more.
I doubt this is any different. Most people in the cab in NYC aren't going to notice if the fare is $X or $X+4, unless they're a native. Just like I could tell my cabdriver in DC "No, drop me off here" whenever they tried to move an extra block near a zone boundary, a native might catch it. But someone unfamiliar? No. Thus, I'm going to side with the GPS on this one.