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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

The scam was primarily perpetrated by a small number of drivers, with 3,000 of them overcharging more than 100 times, the agency said.

While the 1.8 million overcharged trips is a large number, it represents only 0.5 percent of the 361 million taxi trips taken during the 26-month period the agency studied.

Given the tiny percentage, I think calling it a "scam" is a bit over the top. Who doesn't make an occasional mistake?

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A single cabby was accused this month of overcharging passengers a total of $40,000.

On the other hand, this was probably not a mistake. But in many cases, I would guess it was an innocent mistake.

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The "innocent mistake" primarily consisted of a small number of drivers who did it more than 100 times... That's pretty telling. If it was a mistake why did they do it over 100 times?

The rules are pretty simple and no cabbie mistakenly thinks they are in Westchester when they are on Park Ave. It's quite obviously a scam, but not one that all NYC cabbies perpetrated.

I already acknowledged that some cases are pretty clearly not just human error. And I haven't really been to New York (drove through there on the way to the Boston area once), so I don't really know firsthand. However, the cliche is that New York cabbies are typically foreign and speak poor English. So I have a little difficulty thinking that they all are perfectly clear about every detail of their jobs and there are no mistakes rooted in language barrier/cultural barrier/just not knowing the geography as well as a native of the area likely would.

This is no where near as big a problem these days with navigation systems. Of course, good cab drivers with the 'knowledge' will beat the navigation system ones a lot. At least now the bad cab drivers get you there now. Without having to spend 10 minutes reading a map.

Hey, I am all for GPS navigation and the like. I have a certificate in GIS. :-D

(Not that it's done my career any good...at least not yet.)

Foreign and speak poor English != stupid. I've had very few cabbies who didn't clearly know what they were doing, regardless of whether I could understand them or not. And the idea that they don't know the geography? What is it, exactly, that you think cab drivers do?

I think 100 times in a period of 2 years is not so much, is it? 2 years is approx. 100 weeks of work. So 100 mistakes would merely mean about 1 overcharge per week. I'd only suspect the drivers that were overcharging more than once a day.

What is the value of the "mistakes" made by cabbies undercharging Westchester travelers with the Manhattan rate?

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