Visitors to New York already knew it, but now it’s official: foreign tourists arriving in the city have a more than 50% chance of being ripped off on their first taxi ride.
Agents from the city’s Department of Investigation (DOI) posed as clueless tourists unable to speak English and took cabs from John F Kennedy airport to Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Of the 24 taxi drivers who unwittingly undertook this ”integrity test”, 13 overcharged. One took $130 for a trip to Brooklyn — at least $82 more than the metered fare. Another overcharged by $65. They have since been charged themselves — with fraudulent accosting and petty larceny — and their cabs have been impounded. Eleven other drivers demanded up to $20 more than the proper fare, and may face disciplinary action.
Rapacious taxi drivers are a tourist cliché around the world, and those in New York’s yellow cabs are an international fraternity well-known for their hard-nosed techniques for surviving in the city that never sleeps. But the authorities were shocked by the seriousness of the problem in their city.
”NYC’s tourists deserve the welcome mat, not the doormat. Ripping off visitors to the city will not be tolerated,” Rose Gill Hearn, the DOI’s commissioner, said in a statement yesterday [Friday]. She made it clear that the sting operations would continue.
From now on New York’s cabbies will not know if it’s a real tourist they pick up or a new test of their integrity. — Guardian Unlimited Â