The Daily Free Press reports on a Saturday incident involving a cab driver who held a woman's bags hostage while he forced her to pay twice for her ride from the airport:
After she swiped her card and accepted the payment, a message on the machine thanked her for the payment.
An aggravated citizen reports:
I took a cab from my home is roslindale to Logan arriving at 5am. I tried to pay w. credit card but the driver insisted the system wouldn't work until 7. Taxi 592 forest hills independent taxi service. I have been in too many Boston cabs where "the system isn't working" for credit cards.
The state Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation, which oversees the now infamous standards division, said today the division will issue an operating certificate to Uber now that it has learned a national standards body is evaluating GPS-based metering systems like the one Uber uses.
The Boston Business Journal reports City Hall is talking about meeting with Uber at some point, now that state officials have said it's breaking state law by using GPSes instead of taxi meters.
Hickey (l), CunneenBoston Police report arresting a couple of alleged sad sacks for carjacking a cab in City Square last night.
Police say one of the men jumped behind the wheel but managed to get only a short distance down Devens Street before colliding with two parked cars. The other man, police say, then ran up to the cab because in all the commotion, he'd forgotten to grab a "floral arrangement consisting of orange, yellow and red flowers" he'd brought with him.
Police say the two men, one wearing a Bruins T-shirt, the other a Celtics T, decided around 6 p.m. that rather than paying their fare, they'd hold up the cab driver.
Boston Police report Steven Lovering took a cab to the 7-Eleven store at 55 Berkeley St. in the South End early this morning, then decided to hold the place up even though the cabbie refused to stick around for him.
An Atlantic article on cab-alternative Uber focuses on Washington, DC, but a lot of it sounds familiar:
Boston Police report a Charlestown man who jumped out of a cab without paying early this morning attacked the driver when he got out to demand the driver's money and then tried to flee with the man's wallet, only to be tripped up by his own feet.
A disgruntled employee at a local cab company gets to the bottom of a mystery that's been plaguing him and co-workers since the required introduction of credit-card readers: People who leave things behind keep calling up asking to have Cab 1051 searched:
A South Boston man and a man with no fixed address will be arraigned today on charges the stabbed the cab driver early this morning at Shawmut Avenue and Lenox Street, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.
Mr. Magellan reports on an incident that happened as he was getting out of a cab at Tremont and Park Saturday night:
Matt Karolian reports a harrowing ride today with a cabbie who refused to accept that city regulations prohibit him from charging the cost of the return toll to people headed to East Boston - a ride that ended at Boston Police District A-7, where the cabbie wanted Karolian charged with fare evasion and Karolian threatened to press a kidnapping charge.
Boston Police report arresting a pair of Milton residents who they say hailed a cab in the 1100 block of Blue Hill Avenue and had him drive around for awhile before directing him to the nearby Mac's Guest House on Callender Street:
With nothing else to do as he slowly inches to the front of a taxi line at Terminal B, Paul Levy analyses the taxi dispatching problem and comes up with a possible solution to the long lines caused, he said, not by demand, but by the way taxis are dispatched from the central cab parking area.
Maybe the city was onto something with the proposal to paint cabs green.
At a sometimes contentious hearing on taxi regulation - at which cabbies revealed plans to sue the city over its credit-card requirements - drivers, city councilors and the city taxi czar agreed on one point: The city needs to crack down on unregulated livery drivers and out-of-town cabbies stealing business from the locals.
All sides agreed drivers of black - and now sometimes white - cars need to finally come under city regulations. All sides raised the specter of livery drivers attacking passengers and driving without background checks.
City councilors today quickly warmed to a proposal to require Boston cabs to be painted a common color, like in New York, as a way to help confused people figure out which cars are legally licensed - and their drivers subjected to background checks - and which are unregulated gypsy cabs.
Mark Cohen, the director of licensing for the police hackney division, told councilors at a hearing today he already has a plan ready to go. Cohen said students at Suffolk University drafted a single-color plan - they started with a focus group of rape counselors, since finding a cab quickly can be an issue for rape victims.
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