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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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.)

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