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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

Taxis are a shady business pretty much world wide it feels like.

It depends, for several years now I order taxis in my city from the same company and never had any problems - price is similar to Uber, ordering takes literally several seconds over the phone (call, tell the street, hang up) and drivers always take the shortest route (they usually know the city in and out, hardly ever using GPS). The only downside is that the cars are quite old, but always clean and a fun fact - a 20 years old Mercedes is more comfortable than a brand new Toyota :)

In my city (Melbourne Aus)

- There's a surcharge for phone bookings

- Taxis generally refuse small fares

- Taxis still just use their gps

- Taxis are more expensive

- Taxis drive more aggressively

- The cars aren't as clean

And they're wondering why their business is getting eaten alive...

Here in Seattle they bitch when you want to use a credit card, then pull out the really old mechanical slide things to take payment.

Coming from Canada where the card just works I was shocked.

Not in Montreal. The law obligating taxis to accept CC just passed a few months ago and many drivers still try to pull the broken machine stunt.

Or when it's "working", it's a scam to copy your PIN and give you the last victim's card back: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/taxi-debit-scam-1.3478...

It's partly a consequence of there being so few banks in Canada, so you only need 5 or 6 fraudulent cards to hand back to the user.

I've had two different taxi drivers in Montreal offer up their cell phone with their personal Square card reader and account instead of the official machine. The first one pulled out the real machine when I called him out on it. I paid and filed a complaint against him. The second refused and acted like nothing was wrong, even though I clearly knew what was up. I refused payment, filed a complaint, and have continued to receive service from the same company without issue.

The taxi industry is corrupt as hell. Credit card fraud, drivers who take clueless tourists on an hour trip when it is a 15 minute drive, theft of forgotten items in cars, unlicensed drivers driving others' cars when the legal driver is off-hours, etc. Some of these people belong in jail, but the worst they ever face is a slap on the wrist or possibly losing their job. Any competition to them - legal or not, I don't give a shit anymore - is welcome. Their monopoly is abused by the owners as well as many individual drivers. Their business deserves to fall apart.

Can you let me in on "what was up" with the square reader? Credit card theft/fraud? I never take taxis.

Driver gets the money, not the company.

The good part is they're ripping the company, not you. Unless they input a "wrong" value into square and you don't notice.

The legitimate credit card machine is provided by the taxi company. At least for Co-Op Taxi in Montreal, the company takes a 7% cut of the fare for all credit card transactions made on such machines. So some drivers buy a Square reader and set up a personal account to fraudulently take payments directly from customers into their pocket to avoid the 7% cut.

The driver is not only stealing from their company, but is also opening up customers to suspicious transactions. Do I trust a random criminal - they are criminals, no doubt about it - to swipe my credit card into his cell phone? No.

I asked an Edmonton co-op driver about the commonness of refusing to use card readers and he told me that one reason it happens, particularly at the end of a month, is because the dispatchers don't pay out credit card payments for something like 6 weeks. I imagine using Square helps get around that as well.

Agree on the suspicious transaction (though the opportunity for a cab driver to put a skimmer in their machine is pretty substantial to begin with), but I have a hard time seeing this as stealing from the dispatcher. If the cab takes cash, this is really just the driver acting as middleman and paying cash to the dispatcher. Unless they're also doing it unmetered, I guess, but that's a whole other ballgame.

In particular, I expect the dispatcher claims the additional cut is for transaction fees associated with a credit card. The driver is in this case taking the fees on themselves.

What are mechanical slide things? Like you swipe instead of use chip?

I'm not certain that this is what the OP was referring to, but this is what I thought of:

http://www.possupply.com/media/catalog/category/4850-CC-Impr...

It's a machine that you use with copy paper and slide it over the card. The name and numbers are raised up on most credit cards and leave an imprint on the paper. The cardholder then signs the paper.

I've used them when I worked at a department store for customers who's magnetic strip had worn out to the point that our computers couldn't read the card. I imagine the main reasons for a taxi driver to use one is that 1) it's cheap and reliable, and 2) it works offline.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51bClUYQTPL._SL1000_.j...

They take an imprint of the embossed credit card details for later processing

What is there to imprint? Most cards I see dont' seem to have raised lettering; it's just printed numbers on the back.

Also, how does this work with chip-required cards?

This system was most commonly in the 90's and earlier. Back then all cards had raised letters. Many modern cards are online-only to reduce the rampant fraud possible with this old method.

I can't tell if you're being cheeky or are just really young. Up until the past decade or two, it was very common to process credit cards by placing the card onto a tray with a slip of paper over it, and swipe a pressure bar over the tray. This physically caused the digits on the card to make an impression on the paper:

http://cdn.toptenreviews.com/rev/misc/articles/4734/type-or-...

Many credit cards today simply have the digits printed on them in ink, rather than raised lettering, so I don't know how this would even work half the time today.

>Many credit cards today simply have the digits printed on them in ink, rather than raised lettering, so I don't know how this would even work half the time today.

It wouldn't and a lot of debit cards I know - at least in Europe - are issued exactly for that reason: So they don't work without online authorization.

I don't recall seeing a zip zap machine like that in the last 10 years.

clunk clunk

I dont think I've seen a mechanical recorder since the late 90s and even then it was rare.

They're still kept around as a fallback in case the POS system goes down. At least, that was the case when I worked as a grocery store clerk 7-8 years ago.

EFT used to go down at the store I worked at weekly midnight Monday morning for maintenance for a few hours.

Processing them manually was the only option.

It's rare but I've seen them < 5 years ago in remote locations where electricity isn't everywhere (like rural tourist destinations).

I love them - makes me feel like I'm leading the travel high life in the 1970's. (same feeling I had when landing in Tunis national airport - cash exchange registers, competing with each other on rates! Actual coin operated pay phones! Loved it)

The taxi drivers in Edinburgh used them until about 8 years ago. Then they were replaced with mobile phone based payment, then finally with chip and pin. When they used the mechanical impression machines, they wouldn't accept card payment from on-street pickups due to the risk of fraud (as perceived by the driver).

The other place I saw one used c2008 was when buying a ticket from a guard on the platform at Kings Cross after I missed my train. Then the ticket price didn't show up on my online card statement for about a month.

The only time I've seen one (actually the first time I learned about them) was at an outdoor market where I bought some handmade jewelry. The woman kept it around as a novelty alternative to her phone-dongle card reader.

Until very recently they tended to do the same thing in Edmonton and Calgary, and they only started uniformly taking debit in the last couple of years at all, so that's definitely not a universally Canadian thing.

You should see their faces when you pay through the app they set up recently. Most of them don't know wtf is going on.

> You should see their faces when you pay through the app they set up recently

Well, then they can't pull the "credit card machine in the car isn't working, so let me drive you to an ATM so you can take out money to pay me. Sorry that I waited until after driving you to your destination to tell you this, despite the fact that my car advertises credit card payments on the outside. Oops! I also left the meter on while we drove to the ATM! Silly me! You still have to pay me for the extra on the meter, though." (Of course, if you threaten not to pay, the credit card machine magically comes to life.)

I wonder if any drivers will try and claim you haven't paid them when using the app (because witchcraft)

I had one radio into dispatch about it. Fortunately I wasn't in a hurry, so it was mostly amusing.

I miss being able to just jump out of the vehicle in Uber since they pulled out a couple months back. Hopefully they're back soon.

Try taking a cab in Düsseldorf, there they don't have the slider and type down the CC number with a pen. Payment takes a couple minutes..

They also complain about you paying with CC, even after they had introduced a credit card surcharge last time I was there

I visited Adelaide once and had to get the map book out of the passenger-side pocket. For a destination in the CBD.

Same in Canberra - the problem most of the time is driver turnover. Say what you will about London cabs, but The Knowledge is an amazing thing.

I waited almost an hour for a cab in Sydney a few months ago, calling 3 times in between being told every time 'it's on its way', with a 3 and a 5 year old waiting outside on the sidewalk - not fun. Had to take the bus to get to my destination at all. Have gotten extremely suspicious of aus cabs since, despite my usual airport service being excellent.

Sydney has easily the worst cab service in the country. Half the time the cab doesn't even have A/C.

Also, I find that the airport service is made wonderfully redundant by the mostly excellent Airtrain.

> 20 years old Mercedes is more comfortable than a brand new Toyota

Is that true? It's been a long time since I've been in a 1996 S-class [0], but the Toyota Avalon Hybrid is rather comfortable.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Mercedes...

Most Uber x drivers aren't in an Avalon. I usually get a Camry or a Prius here in the bay.

I'd wager that a Camry is still more comfortable than a 20 year old Merc. The Prius is debatable.

The new Camry and Prius (V) are fantastic - that's what the taxis in Canberra, Australia are being replaced with, since the Ford Falcon AU hasn't been made since 2005 and the cars are starting to fall apart.

I'd say yes. Had a 92 E class and it was one comfortable car.

Uber was a godsend when I was in Kenya where metered taxis were out of the question and where taxi drivers were especially exhausting to haggle with. Even when I could possibly negotiate a cheaper price with a normal cab, I would usually call an Uber anyways just for the peace of mind.

That is, unless I sought the sheer thrill of tearing through the streets of Nairobi on the back of a motorcycle taxi.

They are so due to the business of issuing medallions.

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of...

In Japan taxis are very pleasant, but expensive, and can be complicated.

I say pleasant because the drivers are usually super-polite, dressed in a neat uniform, quick to get out of the car to help you, keep their cars immaculate, etc.

I say complicated because Japan has an infernal resistance to using street names and marking addresses. If you can get your destination to appear on the "navi", you're OK. If not, you'll be doing a lot of "more towards the castle" and similar guesswork.

Japan's amazing urban geography doesn't seem like something Uber can fix, surely.

Could you tell the driver a GPS address?

If you know it, probably. But if you don't, and if the navigation system doesn't know, it's going to be hard. The street numbering is different from the West.

In Japan and South Korea, a city is divided into small numbered zones. The houses within each zone are then labelled in the order in which they were constructed, or clockwise around the block.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_numbering

Korea introduced street names and house numbers a few years ago and the new system is now the only official, though of course the former system is still popular. For taxis usually you still name nearby landmarks but they can also input a (western-style) address into their GPS.

Usually, they can tap in the phone number of your destination and it will come up. That's a popular way to use in-car GPS here, and reasonably reliable.

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