Back home again from a business trip, and once again, I failed to encounter a single cab driver who knew anything at all. I know that cab drivers have always sucked in one way or another. In many big cities, it's always been normal for them to be surly, or to try to cheat you. But it's not surliness that I get so often these days (except in D.C., which has very hostile cabbies).
It's mind-blowing ignorance. They don't know how to get anywhere. It's not an ethnic thing, and it's not a language thing. It cuts across all ethnicities of cabbies these days. None of them know a damned thing about the streets they drive on for a living.
This is a broad generalization, of course. I have had one cabbie in the past six years or so who actually knew where he was going. A Somali gentleman in Seattle, who never stopped for lights or signs and spent the whole ride cheerfully telling me how America ruined Somalia. I withheld my opinion that while America may have changed the nature of Somalia's shittiness, the information I've seen indicates that it was already a shithole a long time before we got there. After all, I didn't want to get Blackhawk Downed on my way to my hotel. But I digress.
I've had jobs in which driving constituted maybe a good 20% of my duties. And I learned the hell out of the streets on my turf, even though I'm not generally any good at that kind of thing. It was just practice, daily use. How can you drive a cab and not eventually learn something about the roads in your city? These guys should be fucking wizards on the road.
I don't get it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
comment spam?
So, do the taxi drivers in chicago suck that much? Cuz I've never had trouble with them. But I'm usually going to obvious places.
Yup. It was comment spam.
I've never taken a taxi in Chi-town, as far as I can remember. Maybe you've got the last of the good cabbies.
But since you've got that Audi RS6, who needs a taxi?
Alas, it is only an A4. And I only take taxis when I've been drinking or training.
D.C hacks suck? Same deal for Ottawa/Gatineau cabbies - must be a national capital thing. Ours was both surly and ungrateful - got all huffy cuz me Mom gave him a mere 10% tip. Maybe he thought we'd all struck it rich at the casino where he'd picked us up. Twit also spent half the (thankfully short) trip swearing, in English and French, into his CB.
Like tim above, we didn't have any prob with him finding his way, since we were going to a popular area.
Fun times.
hsüan
Well, Mike, it was either "Whimpering for Fellatio" or "Sympathy for Horatio." I decided to keep an R, rather than an NC17 rating, though.
And yeah, DC cabbies, in my experience, are pretty hostile. There must be some kind of profile of the most profitable customer... which I don't match. I've had DC cabbies refuse to pick me up. And this was when I was wearing a suit and tie.
Maybe it was too cheap a suit.
Even if they lower themselves to the point of picking you up, they are pissed off about where you're going and often try to cheat you. Make sure to check the fare zone map on the inside of the cab. They're required to stick to it, but only if you make them.
I never had a problem with the Chicago cabs. They're kind of like dragonflies. They hover around until they pick up a fair then they make a high-speed line straight to where they need to go, never mind that the line takes them through six panel trucks and a bus.
Maybe it's because lots of cabbies don't consider driving a cab to be their profession but just this thing that they do for money. To learn the streetmap would be to admit they wanted to be good at it and thus, impossible. Plus they hate us because we're getting out of the car while they have to keep driving.
Their only real entertainment is picking fights with busdrivers–I've seen some fabulous donnybrooks in Brighton–and pissing off other drivers [actually, they seem pretty dedicated about that part of the job description].
I hate taxi drivers. Can you tell?
I think Sentinel's words are probably the best explanation yet. I have known a few people who drove cabs for a short time, and apparently the income equation is quite lousy for the driver, leading to some very bad morale and the strong desire to get out.
In my experience, cab drivers are a menace to society, they pose a serious threat to public safety. A vast majority of cabbies have absolutely no regard for the safety of anyone or anything in their way. This industry must be stringently regulated, drivers should be required to demonstrate knowledge of city streets, and most importantly they should undergo safe driver training and be required to re-certify on some set interval. Cab drivers should be held to an even higher standard than "civilian" drivers.
Post a Comment