GPS Log Analysis Uncovers Millions In NYC Taxi Overcharges 232
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission is using GPS data collected in every cab to review millions of trips in New York City over the past 26 months and has discovered a huge number in which out-of-city rates, twice the rate charged for rides in the five boroughs, were improperly charged. The drivers' scheme, the commission says, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip when drivers flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million. Cab drivers are supposed to charge the higher rate only when they cross the border between New York City and Nassau or Westchester. 'We have not seen anything quite this pervasive,' said Matthew W. Daus, the taxi and limousine commissioner. 'It's very disturbing.' The taxi industry vigorously challenged the city's findings, saying it was unimaginable that such a pervasive problem could be the result of deliberate fraud. The commission says that 75% out of the city's 48,000 drivers had applied the higher rate at least once. Officials hope to roll out a short-term fix in two or three weeks in which an alert will appear on the backseat monitor when a cabbie activates the out-of-town rate."
Very easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
Require the use of GPS to automatically set the advertised rates at the correct points. Don't let the drivers flick the switch themselves.
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a tricky point for me.
As our information collection gets better, hidden income sources get eliminated.
Then the question becomes- does the "honest" rate really need to be raised?
For example- truck drivers used to be expected to make 8 stops and were paid 8x dollars.
Once GPS came in, suddenly they are being expected to make 11 stops (because the gps showed they were sitting around for 20 minutes) and work 100% while on. But the pay is still 8x dollars.
I wonder if there is a correlation between how much the out of town rate was activated and how slow a day the driver was having?
Our drivers in Houston are certainly not retiring wealthy (unlike some of our police sergeants). Cab driving should provide a decent living and with government intervention in rates, that can be tricky at times.
logic fail (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the problem isn't defrauding customers, it's getting caught.
"we have you on tape shoplifting a candy bar at the store but you've been trustworthy before so it doesn't match up."
Re:Perhaps related to medallion cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean reasonably priced services easily available to everyone?
Who is surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
I live in NYC and I am not surprised in the least by this. It's amazing that it's only 75%.
The taxi drivers expended a lot of social capital vigorously opposing and even striking over the GPS units, when everyone (taxi drivers included) knew that the GPS units would help keep the drivers honest. Now that fraud has been exposed, it will be even more difficult for the drivers to gain public support the next time they are angry about something.
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay the drivers on a per-delivery basis, allowing for things like distance driven and amount or weight of cargo to be variables that determine this rate. Then the drivers can decide how they wish to use that 20 minutes. If a driver can make 11 deliveries in X time, then he gets paid about 28% more than a driver who makes 8 deliveries in X time.
With that you get drivers rushing through their deliveries or trying to squeeze in an extra one or two runs per day. That's great and all and everyone wins, right? Until a driver that's taking drugs for alertness has a heart attack or one that doesn't falls asleep at the wheel. Cargo gets manhandled, customers get lousy service from cranky and rushed drivers, and the equipment takes a lot of abuse. The DEA starts sniffing around the employee lockers and trucks, insurance companies, workman's comp. adjusters, and lawsuit happy attorneys circle nearby.
The other suggestions (the LED one) I'm in favor of. Let the customer know he's (possibly) being cheated, and they can work it out from there.
Good, the plan is working (Score:4, Insightful)
And in return, don't expect cabbies to care when IBM outsources every IT job to India, or MS relocates to China.
Re:logic fail (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to get away with stealing 4-5 dollars, and if you do it often enough you make a tidy profit...
If someone loses diamonds or thousands of dollars they're going to come looking for it, and your chances of getting away with it are pretty slim.
Re:Very easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you fail to appreciate the sequence of events here. There's every reason to trust them, up until you find hard data showing that they have been overcharging. That is what happened. At this point, it's quite reasonable to want some verification. Automation isn't necessary either. All you need is a clear, unambiguous on/off indicator to let the customer know whether the out-of-town rate in question is being applied. Why wouldn't you want that to be done openly?
As long as this system makes it easy to unambiguously determine, at a glance, whether or not the out-of-town rate is being applied, then yeah that's rather silly of the passenger not to take notice. It'd be your standard failure to perform due diligence. If such systems are already in place and are already a standard feature, then the next step would be to determine why so many customers have been unaware of the information they are intended to provide.
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:3, Insightful)
Not so easy. You think your solution hasn't been tried before / exist now? All it leads to is drivers taking uppers to stay awake and drive hours past when they should be taking a break, as well as encouraging them to speed.
Won't someone PLEASE think of the cabbies! (Score:3, Insightful)
They almost always conveniently forget the flat fare rate from JFK to Manhattan. One time, I was in a cab and someone cut the guy off - so the cabbie sped up and started yelling at him - needless to say I was not amused. After telling a cab driver once we were making 3 stops, he refused to take us any further than the first stop - he was "on break".
This is an industry with a history of mob control and immoral behavior. If it takes GPS to help put an end to these things - I'm all for it.
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't even come close to making sense, yet it superficially sounds good. You must be in management.
Re:Bullshit (except in London) (Score:5, Insightful)
At least 9 out of 10 taxi drivers in NYC do not know enough about the city's streets or the city's traffic patterns to know when it is appropriate to make a judgement call to deviate from the GPS-selected route.
That is one huge unsupported assertion. You can provide a link to something in london that anyone can google, but you can't provide any backing support for such a massively outlandish claim?
Re:Hand washing (Score:3, Insightful)
New Yorkers are not suckers, and those of us who have lived here a while know roughly how much a cab ride from Point A to Point B will cost. But the taximeter labels on fare schedules ("fare 1" versus "fare 4") are subtle and easily missed. I'm sure the hacks knew to cheat people who are either (a) tourists, (b) people in a REAL hurry (c) drunks. Plenty of those to go around.
Re:Perhaps related to medallion cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
Private healthcare has a 45% average overhead. Medicare has 3%. Funny how the equation works without magic - national healthcare doesn't need to advertise itself...
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:1, Insightful)
Cab driving should not be a good job. Unskilled labor anyone could do.
Your post reeks of wealth redistribution
1.8 million incidents out of 360 million trips (Score:5, Insightful)
Taxi drivers are people. People make mistakes. One mistake per two hundred trips does not seem unreasonable, especially considering that the frequency of incidents per driver probably follows a power-law distribution and the median number of mistakes per driver is likely much lower. Another way of looking at it is that 25% of drivers didn't make a single mistake in more than two years of driving.
Which isn't to say that these were all honest mistakes. However, I don't see this as the massive systematic fraud the article seems to be suggestion. A 0.5% chance of being overcharged just doesn't seem like something to get excited about (even if I lived in New York, which I don't).
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:3, Insightful)
That is, until the stress associated with being spied on all the time makes the drivers surly and accident prone. You'll notice that executives never get spied on to make sure they're REALLY making business deals while golfing.
Human beings are not 100% efficient. Try to make them so and something will eventually fail spectacularly.
The world is a better place when everyone gets a little slack.
0.6% of trips are overcharged. So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
So there are 13,257 medallions in new york.
Lets estimate each cab makes an average of 30 trips per day. So every day there are about 397710 cab trips made or 145 million trips a year.
They are saying that 1.8 million trips were overcharged over a period of 2 years. So over 2 years there were about 290 million trips of which 1.8 million were overcharged.
So approximately 0.6% of the trips made were overcharged by about $5.
Doesn't sound like it's so bad to me. Half a percent is a legitimate rate of errors for any human endeavour. So the previous trip was out of the city area and the rate wasn't switched back for the next rider would be a good example of how that would happen.
The story seems a little sensational to me. I'm sure there are a few legitimate abusers but the numbers don't seem to imply a widespread problem to me.
Re:Perhaps related to medallion cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
And we call that an increase in *supply*
You know what happens to prices when supply goes up, right?
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's hardly fair to the driver, as being stuck in a traffic jam costs them more - and there are plenty of unforeseen events, such as detours for construction work or accidents."
Unforeseen events tend to average out. So taxi company just adds a couple of percents to the price to compensate for it.
And most certainly, drivers do make money.
Re:1.8 million incidents out of 360 million trips (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:logic fail (Score:3, Insightful)
It's easy to get away with stealing 4-5 dollars, and if you do it often enough you make a tidy profit... If someone loses diamonds or thousands of dollars they're going to come looking for it, and your chances of getting away with it are pretty slim.
That and it's easier to resolve the cognitive dissonance of stealing a little while still believing that you are an honest person. Think "Oh, it's only a buck or two, it probably won't make a difference anyway" (or even "this guy makes 10x what I do; he won't miss it") versus "I'm not the sort of person who would steal thousands of dollars!".
Re:Because Cab drivers are notoriously ethical (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you get the baseline data? How do you control for delivery complexity? How do you determine pay? What do you 'expect' your drivers to handle? How do you handle owner-ops vs. leased trucks? Accidents? Training? Maintenance? What about drivers that perform significantly below the norm -- you're paying them fairly by your own standards, but you're incurring the overhead of maintaining their paperwork. How do you handle long deliveries vs. short deliveries? Hazardous cargo? Insurance? Benefits?
Re:1.8 million incidents out of 360 million trips (Score:1, Insightful)
Did the article mention how often the drivers should have charged the higher rate and forgot to? it would seem that if this were an honest mistake, then these numbers should be similar. If, on the other hand, the errors are always in the taxi drivers favor, then I would think that makes it more likely something sneaky is going on. It may also be that only a few drivers are doing it.
The incidence may even be much higher among passengers who are not aware of the fare changes.
Making it obvious to the passenger probably won't help much - no one is going to know what the light indicates.
The Taxicab Story in Washington, DC (Score:5, Insightful)
People (particularly tourists) complained about this system because it didn't make complete sense and a tourist, or even just someone not familiar with the zone map, wasn't going to be able to look at the map and see where the zone boundaries were. As an example, if I was in a hurry, I could take a taxi from my home, to work. The total was 3 zones (with a minimum, of course, of 1). However, if I walked 1 block south from home, hailed a taxi, and had it drop me off 1 block north of work, it would be 1 zone. That would save a good percentage of the cab fare.
However, a tourist getting in the car would have no idea - furthermore, if a tourist was being dropped off, say, right near a border, if the cabbie says "Hey, traffic is bad here, mind if I drop you off across the street?" most people would say "OK", figuring that in most cities, that's probably nothing, or maybe an extra quarter or so. In DC, it could be an extra $2.
A little over a year ago DC switched to a metered taxi system, as mandated by Congress. Prior to the switchover, taxi drivers in DC went on strike, saying they'd lose significant money in a switch, despite the fact that the rates were set such that the average metered trip would actually net more for the driver than the old zone system would - but only under the assumption (which the people setting the rates were using) that the zone system was being used fairly and customers were not being diverted, sometimes only short distances, in order to add zones (sometimes, near zone borders, moving a few blocks could be two extra zones!).
You'd get a constant circle:
Taxi Driver Committee Representative: "We'll lose tons of money switching to meters!"
Taxicab Commission: "But under this new system, a driver would actually be getting more money on an average trip than before, unless they were routinely cheating customers in a way the new system would prevent. Look, we'll open the books to you, examine the whole thing."
Taxi Driver Committee Representative: "Ah. I see. We, of course, have never cheated anyone. But notwithstanding that, we'll lose tons of money!"
The change took place anyway, and the world hasn't ended, although the data does seem to reflect that cabdrivers are making less than before, yet somehow the data also shows that they're making more per trip than before. How? Because before they were manipulating the system to charge more.
I doubt this is any different. Most people in the cab in NYC aren't going to notice if the fare is $X or $X+4, unless they're a native. Just like I could tell my cabdriver in DC "No, drop me off here" whenever they tried to move an extra block near a zone boundary, a native might catch it. But someone unfamiliar? No. Thus, I'm going to side with the GPS on this one.
Re:Perhaps related to medallion cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
On a per-patient basis, not a per-dollar basis, Medicare's administrative costs are higher than private insurance [heritage.org].
The link you gave is dead for me (500 unexpected error), so forgive me if this is answered there.
Is that per-patient that's on private insurance but could be on Medicare vs patient on Medicare or is it just random patient on private insurance vs Medicare patient? I'd imagine the average Medicare patient to require more medical treatment than the average person on private insurance due to the fact that the qualify for Medicare in the first place.