Taxi Drivers Rally, Threaten To Strike Unless TLC Imposes Fuel Surcharge
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

New York City’s taxi drivers yesterday threatened to strike unless the Taxi and Limousine Commission imposes a fuel surcharge on fares and abandons its plan to require that medallion owners install an interactive passenger information monitor in each of the city’s nearly 13,000 cabs.
At a rally on Rector Street yesterday outside the offices of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, representatives of the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance, a union of more than 6,500 New York taxi drivers, decried the monitors as a tool for the state to spy on them and criticized the TLC commissioner, Matthew Daus, for his lack of response to surging gas prices.
According to director of the alliance, Bhairavi Desai, the monitors would consist of Global Positioning Systems that would track every movement drivers make, a violation of drivers’ and riders’ civil rights. She said the monitors would cost $3,000 each to install and $125 to $175 a month to maintain.
“I don’t know where they got those figures,” Mr. Daus told The New York Sun in a telephone interview.
“We are in negotiations to bring the cost down to zero for the medallion owners,” he said, adding that the devices would be paid for by advertisements.
Even if the medallion owners were required to pay for the equipment, the cost would not be passed on to the drivers, according to Mr. Daus, because taxi leases are capped, and most have already reached their maximum.
Mr. Daus called the alliance’s claims of civil liberties violations “absolutely ridiculous. … We need to be able to locate a cab only for very specific reasons,” including lost property, car theft, and information on where more cabs are needed to meet demand. “This would be good for the drivers,” he said.
The monitors will also inform drivers of traffic conditions, allow the police to direct them in an emergency, and display hotel and airline information to passengers, according to Mr. Daus. They should appear in all New York cabs in early 2006, the press officer of the TLC, Allan Fromberg, said.
Ms. Desai also called for a surcharge of $1 while gas costs more than $3 a gallon, and fifty cents while prices exceeded $2. The current average price for unleaded regular gas in New York is $2.966.
Mr. Daus said his office was research ing the surcharge, but said, “It would be inappropriate to make a decision about it so quickly, especially when the economic conditions keep changing.”
Asked if he was prepared for a strike, an organizer for the New York alliance, Billy Acquire, who has been driving a cab for more than five years, said, “We’ll do what it takes. … We could all go on welfare – it’s not like we have bank accounts.”