Taxi scams are born anew

Technology continues to advance and change our world, human nature does not change. Technological advancement does not mean moral advancement. While we can summon a wealth of information in less than a second, the human race isn’t applying this knowledge in a way that makes our world any more just and fair.

And so it is with our taxicabs. While technology enables us to hail cabs, it has not improved the ethical standards of drivers or riders. I have seen this illustrated across our city in several ways, but most vividly this past week.

It was after 6 p.m. and since I was out of work late I wanted to waste no time in getting home. I was in downtown Manhattan and the traffic looked painfully slow. I positioned myself near a street corner so a car could make a quick exit off of a bumper-to-bumper Broadway. I requested a ride from Lyft.  

I got a call from the first Lyft driver.

“Hi this is your driver from Lyft, can I confirm where you are?”

“Yes. I am at Broadway and Worth Street. I’m a bit before Worth Street so you can make a left and get out of this terrible traffic.”

“And can I confirm where you are going?”

“Flushing, Queens,” I said truthfully.

A few seconds after our call ended. I saw that the driver had canceled my ride and the mobile app was searching for a new driver for me.

I also realized how I had made a terrible mistake. One of the features that is supposed to make ride hailing services better than hailing cabs on the street is that the application does not tell the driver where you are going until they confirm on their device that you are in their vehicle. This stops them from cherry picking rides the way yellow cab drivers do, asking passengers where they are going before they get in the cab, so they can avoid taking fares to destinations they don’t like.

Ride hailing drivers subvert this system in two ways: they will pull over and confirm on their device that you are in the cab when you are not, and then canceling the ride before you get to them. And, like they did with me, they call you and ask where you are going and then cancel the ride if they don’t like what you tell them.

The second Lyft driver called a few minutes later, doing the same thing. I didn’t tell them, but it didn’t help anyway.

“Can you confirm where you are going?”

“I’m on Broadway and Worth. I’ll see you soon. Are you nearby?”

“Yes. I am at Broadway and White Street. I will be there soon. … Can you confirm where you are going?”

“That’s a great question. I’ll confirm when I see you. And I’ll see you soon,” I said with the friendliest confidence I could muster.

My phone soon indicated that this driver had canceled as well, and now I had to start the request for a driver all over again. And guess what? The price for a ride was now about $20 more than when I was first looking for a ride. This made me livid but I was too tired to get worked up about it, and besides, I would have been mistaken for a crazy person, shouting at my smartphone in the middle of Broadway as downtown traffic slowly crawled by.

The third driver arrived and completed the trip. With all the shady driver shenanigans, I probably saved no time in getting home and would have been better off taking a subway or express bus.

A friend who is a yellow cab driver broke down the one issue he may have with taking fares to the outer boroughs: if it’s towards the end of his shift, he faces late fees if he brings his cab back to the garage late. That’s the only time he picks and chooses his fares, and he recommends reporting those drivers that won’t take customers where they want to go. My friend is exceptionally good at what he does, and even lets passengers know when they can get somewhere faster using public transit. I had one Lyft driver tell me that in Maryland recently, and I much appreciated it.

In a few short years, the drivers at ride-share services like Uber and Lyft have perfected many of the repugnant practices that sent riders away from yellow cabs to begin with. Ride-hailing service drivers are known to cancel rides in time to take advantage of surge pricing times. No-show cab drivers can still saddle would-be riders with $5 cancelation charges which are difficult (though not impossible) to fight through the companies’ Web sites. And yellow cab drivers are left in the lurch, many of them deeply in debt with loans for medallions that they may never be able to pay back, a situation regulators ignored.

At the same time, ride sharing services are in greater demand, since our public transit system is so rotten to the core the subways lines can be delayed even by an overflowing toilet.

As with yellow cabs, remain vigilant when you are taking one of the raid hailing services. What looks like a minor inconvenience could be another scam.

Congestion pricing will not fix our subways

New York is a city of many firsts. It was the first capital city of the United States; it had the first hot dog, first American public brewery, ATM, mobile phone call, and children’s museum.

It also promises to be the first American city to institute congestion pricing on cars driving into its busiest areas. Although these fees are not expected to take effect until 2021, it could cost motorists up to $10 to drive into Manhattan below 60^th Street according to a plan expected to be passed April 1 as part of the New York State budget.

It could mean as much as $14 for a car and more than $20 for a truck going into Manhattan. That’s likely going to be on top of heavy tolls already paid to take the bridges and tunnels needed to get into Manhattan in the first place. Cities such as London and Stockholm have instituted congestion pricing and it’s considered a success there, but those cities have more viable public transportation.

New York City has one of the most comprehensive public transit systems in the country, and that’s more of a statement on how sorry the U.S.’s transit system is than a compliment to New York.  

The politicians that are advocating for congestion pricing are doing so because they don’t want to do the hard work it would take to fully fund the M.T.A. It means possibly raising taxes and definitely raising fares. It means significantly reformingconstruction policies to reduce exorbitant costs. Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who despise one another, agree 100% that this is a good idea, which is as good a reason as any to oppose it.

People are turning more to cars because public transit is so unreliable and unpleasant. I once worked with a man who had health issues and had to go to the Bronx every other day from work in order to have kidney dialysis done. He took a cab there because he couldn’t be late and his health issues meant he couldn’t be wedged into a subway car with a few hundred of his closes friends. He was able to get some of his cab fare subsidized, but that’s money that could have been spent elsewhere if we had a reliable transit system, and it’s on the backs of people like my former coworker that this new tax is going to be balanced.

I would rather not spend about three times the regular fare to get to work, but I know I need to be on time to work and not on the cattle car that passes for the 7 train these days, so I splurge for an express bus. It’s still a lot less than a cab but more expensive than a regular subway or bus fare.

Congestion pricing is going to cost the people who can afford it the least: cab drivers or people who have their spouses or friends drive them to work or who are carpooling like good citizens. There will be a significant portion of people who will avoid paying it using the sameschemes that work with the now toll-booth-free tolls and red light cameras.

We will fight this out in the press and in the courts until congestion pricing becomes the law of the land or not. But all that will be time wasted building the political capital, civic will, and thoughtful plans needed to truly fix our transit system.

Parking in New York: A New Path to Anger and Disgust

When I moved back to New York City years ago, one of the greatest benefits was that I didn’t need a car.

My luck with cars has been terrible. My first car, a 1987 Plymouth Horizon, broke down constantly. I was a broke college student who couldn’t afford a new head gasket when my car put itself out of its misery via self immolation.

I bought my second vehicle from a shirtless man in the back woods of Georgia who was drunk at two in the afternoon and called his son “Molson” even though that wasn’t his name. My giant 1977 Plymouth Voyager van was mustard yellow with a big white strip. If you viewed it at the right angle you could still make out the lettering from the church that used to own it. It didn’t perform much better than my old Horizon. Its drive shaft fell off on Interstate 285 in Atlanta once.

My 15-year car-free life came to an end a few years ago when the wife and I bought a used truck. I don’t live in Manhattan anymore and Eastern Queens is not as much of an automotive purgatory as Manhattan. And being involved in music means I have to haul large speaker cabinets, guitars and drunk musicians throughout and beyond the five boroughs.

But the conveniences of city car ownership are paid for with the wages of anger and aggravation.

The roads are full of bad drivers and New York City is rife with people who not only drive terribly but feel entitled to do so. I’ve seen people in Inwood triple park rather than walk an extra 20 feet to a supermarket. I’ve seen cab drivers wait until they have a red light to drive across an intersection.

And parking in New York City is a misery that never goes away unless you are somehow incredibly wealthy. The city’s parking laws are a Byzantine morass of prohibitions that are consistently poorly-signed. A liberal interpretation of a sign can get you a fat ticket or worse, towed. I have not had the experience of paying vehicular ransom at a city impound lot, but every account I have heard from survivors indicates it is a Kafkaesque nightmare that can make someone hate our city for life.

My wife has lived in the co-op apartment we share for more than twelve years and was on a waiting list for a parking space for five years.

We thought our parking troubles were mostly over. We have a regular space. But the perpetual douchery of New York City driving revealed itself again just this past weekend.

My wife had taken our baby girls to visit relatives in Nassau County and returned home from three hours of tied-up traffic on the Long Island Expressway. to find someone had parked in our spot.

Normally the travails of someone with a reserved parking spot would fall firmly in the confines of “First World Problems.” But when you’ve waited five years for that spot and you’re a barely middle-class family with no margin for parking tickets or private garages and someone rudely parks their Mercedes Benz in your spot, violence is justified.

If someone had left a note on the car with their contact info and let us call them to move the car, it would have been no problem. We would have been annoyed but impressed by their willingness to be decent upon notice. Because of the late hour and our building management’s inability to get a towing company right, we were stuck without legal parking for the night.

Normally this would be license to get creative with vandalism. If this car had a sunroof, my dream of justifiable shitting through a sunroof of a snotty dickhead’s car would have finally been realized. I would have loved to stick bananas in the tailpipe, pissed all over the door handles and leave a steaming log of justice on the windshield. It would have given me joy to superglue some tasteless gay porn all over the windows and scratched giant curse words into the expensive paint job.

But since our space is reserved, the authorities would have us as their prime suspects easily. There was little we could do but leave a tersely-worded note stating that they were parked illegally and we had been forced to call the towing service (which was true, even though the towing service was out of business).

So justice has not been served. If you see a dark-colored Mercedes Benz S550 with New York license plate FTX-2898, please vandalize the shit out of it. Thank you.

I Can’t Drive 25

For most of my time in New York, I did without a car. After being poor and having cars break down on me at record pace, I was glad to be done with the world of automobiles. I was happy to leave the driving to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, though the MTA is poorly run and will always find new ways to make you late for important events.

But time has changed the game plan and I am now one of the lucky people in the five boroughs with a vehicle. Being in one of the farther reaches of Queens, parking is not as worrisome as it would be in Manhattan or other more densely populated parts of the city.

I still work in Manhattan and take public transit to and from work every weekday and will use public transit a lot on the weekends if driving and parking will be bothersome. So I have the dual perspective on city life as viewed from both car driver and mass transit commuter. Mayor de Blasio’s plan to lower the standard speed limit in New York City to 25 miles per hour is ill-advised, unfair and counterproductive.

The administration got the idea from a committee that proposed other measures as well, such as more red light cameras that would automatically dole out tickets and more speed bumps. But if you are serious about cutting down on traffic fatalities, getting bad drivers off of the road should be top priority. More aggressive enforcement is part of the new “Vision Zero” plan, but too much is going to hedge on the speed limit reduction. And that is a punishment to the entire city.

Trying to slow down the whole city won’t work. Driving 25 miles per hour is unrealistically slow for most drivers. Soon after announcing his plans for a change, Mayor de Blasio’s motorcade was caught speeding and violating other traffic laws by CBS News.

Real, aggressive enforcement of traffic laws would put the de Blasio administration up against a variety of groups that he would normally not want to upset.

When I was living in Northern Manhattan, I once saw a livery cab drive on the wrong side of the street in front of police in order to make a light and merge into traffic. I have been in cabs with drivers who lacked English proficiency needed for a New York State driver’s license, let alone a livery license. Cracking down on unqualified and dangerous cab drivers would make our roads a lot safer, but the ideas proposed by the Mayor include needlessly punitive things such as putting devices on cabs that would stop the meter if they were speeding. Cab drivers are opposing those new proposals anyway. You might as well get on their bad side with the right proposals for the right reasons.

Really cracking down on people who consistently violate traffic laws would be an improvement, but there is some evidence to suggest this would have a disparate impact on racial minorities. It’s politically easier to punish everyone with a lower speed limit than to target the drivers that are causing havoc on the city streets.

Reducing cyclist deaths would mean really stopping and ticketing the legions of bad cyclists who ride the wrong way down one-way streets and ride on sidewalks. That would put the Mayor at odds with more of his natural political allies.

We see this kind of response on the part of city government all of the time, when making things worse for everyone can also generate results that political leaders can point to and claim credit for, public be damned.

And here’s something else advocates of the plan fail to consider: A 25-mile-per-hour speed limit would also allow the police to stop just about any driver any time for speeding. It would be a city-wide speed trap that would put us on the same page as Podunk counties in rural areas that collect a large chunk of their revenue from unknowing out-of-town motorists.

The only people who would normally drive 25 miles per hour are the obese or elderly driving motorized scooters. No fully functional driver would drive that slowly without there being traffic congestion or inclement weather. Hopefully this proposal will be kicked to the curb. 

The Call of the American Road

After nearly 15 years of living without a car, it came time to join most of America in owning an automobile again. I faced the prospect of being a car owner with excitement and apprehension. My past experiences as a car owner were all bad. 

The last vehicle I owned was a 1977 Plymouth Voyager van that I gladly gave away to a charity before driving a U-Haul back to New York. My van was a big, 15-passenger van that was puke-mustard yellow with a beige white stripe. If you looked at the van at the right angle, you could faintly decipher the old lettering on the side from a church that had owned it. I bought it from a redneck in the back woods of rural North Georgia who was shirtless and drinking beer at two o’clock in the afternoon. 

           

            It was so large that it was often mistaken for the large taxi vans that were popular in Athens, Georgia at the time. I remember driving down Broad Street at night after the bars closed and crowds of drunken college students trying to hail me. It was embarrassing.

I was not born into the standard American car culture, growing up mostly in a city. When I first moved to the suburbs, I found it strange that there were no sidewalks. Sidewalks came with civilization, just like paved roads and running water. But car culture rules the suburbs, and I adjusted quickly. I got myself a car at the first opportunity. I was a teenager and there is nothing lamer for a teenager than to be dependent on their parents for a ride (although it remains perfectly acceptable to rely on parents for food, clothing, education, life itself).

My first car was a 1987 Plymouth Horizon. It broke down a lot. A minor accident had damaged the front end and one of the headlights wobbled, making my car look like it had a lazy eye at night. It eventually was destroyed when the engine caught fire.

            When I moved back to New York, I relished the idea of being free from the obligations and troubles of owning an automobile. No more calling tow trucks, no more sitting in traffic or wondering nervously about strange sounds coming from the engine. After years of endless automotive headaches, I yearned to be part of the cosmopolitan class that was free from the shackles that were auto ownership. And I could get as drunk as I wanted to because someone else was always driving me home.

           

            But things change and now I find myself living in Queens  with a woman who has not only been accustomed to owning a car while living in New York City, she also has a space in our building’s parking lot that she waited five years for and intends to keep. It was time for us to have our own. The last of my family left the city several years ago, and asking people to pick you up from the train station gets old when you’re pushing 40.

            I also found myself wanting more of the unbounded freedom that comes with an automobile. One time, on a business trip, I picked up a shitty rental car from the airport in Palm Springs, Calif. and set out to find my even shittier motel. Despite the circumstances, it felt great to be behind the wheel of a car again after so much time away. The rap song ‘California Love’ came on the radio and I felt like I was the coolest pimp in the universe.

America, a large and vast country, is filled with the spirit of travel and adventure that we can tap most easily via the automobile. Sure, one can ride the rails and see a good bit of America that way, but a car gives you the power of self determination and destiny that Americans habitually crave. The auto took the place of the pioneer’s wagon as a vehicle of continental exploration and conquest.

            It’s true we’ve become a nation of sloths who would drive ourselves to the bathroom if we could, but it’s also true that this freedom of movement made possible by cars became part of our national character long before our disabling gluttony. For better or worse, the car is part of the American way of life.

            The car fits right in with the American spirit of individuality and self reliance. Every time you need to use public transportation, you’re rolling the dice on a thousand variables. People get sick on the bus, busses get stuck in traffic, people get hit by trains, signal malfunctions stop trains between stations. Taking public transportation puts a terrible amount of trust in the general public to help you get to work on time. Your best advantage is that most of the other people around you are on the same quest. If you’re someone who must work nights and weekends, you’re screwed.

            Admittedly, in large cities, public transportation makes sense. I will gladly endure the hell of New York’s subway rush hour to avoid the hell of parking in Manhattan. I’ll let a million homeless people sneeze on me before I risk getting a car towed and having to pay hundreds of dollars in tickets and fees. But the Byzantine parking laws of New York are not representative of the U.S. as a whole. And, as much as I love New York, I must admit that one needs to frequently leave New York City in order to maintain one’s sanity.

See you on the road.