So what you’re doing is warning us that Bah = humbug.
The cabbie drove you home in the middle of the night and didn’t get to charge anyone for the long ride back. Doubling the rate seems perfectly fair to me despite what the politicians might think.
Very sorry for your crappy experience, Argent Towers. For future reference, the flat fee for getting into a cab should never be more than a couple of bucks. It’s ordinarily $2.50, and very early or very late it might be another dollar on top of that. And I think there are flat fees for things like airport trips, but you won’t see a huge flat payment plus a regular rate. This jerk obviously figured that at that hour and with someone coming out of Penn, he could pull a fast one. I’m not surprised they haven’t been able to identify the guy; although it sounds like there are potentially legitimate reasons (there are a lot of Bahs) instead of just laziness. Most of my experiences with cabs in the city have been good, but once in a while you get someone who has no idea where he’s going or is generally horrible. In fact the last time I got a cab in Queens, the driver didn’t know where to go either.
This is the way to go. Cabbies are not allowed to turn you down based on where you want to go period, no exceptions. There’s a list of rules posted inside cabs that explains this. However it’s still a good idea not to tell them where you’re going until you’re in the cab in case the driver decides he’d rather look for someone who will give him more money.
The driver has every opportunity to catch a hail back to Manhattan. In fact, in some Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods, it’s actually quite easy to find a fare that needs to get to Manhattan in all hours of the night. In addition, BOTH airports are in Queens, they can just hit the airport taxi while they are “in the neighborhood.”
Where the driver is not permitted by law to pick up a return passenger, as in when leaving the city limits, they are permitted to charge double. They are not permitted to charge double because maybe possibly they might not get a fare, or because wah wah wah it sucks to follow the rules.
DC got rid of the zone system. Cabs have meters now. Either way, you should never get in a cab without knowing approximately how much its gonna cost. That goes double for places you are unfamiliar with, or foreign countries. Many big US cities also have online fare calculators (like this or this) that can be ease the process as well.
One of the few times I was in an NY cab I gave the driver a $50 bill for a $12 fare, he asked did I want the change! 
Is this a serious post? Nowhere in Queens or Brooklyn is it “easy” to find a return hail at 4 am. Maybe if you know a strip club is closing or something. Guess what, the reason cab drivers turn down money and risk their license to refuse to go to Brooklyn should tell you exactly how easy those return hails are to find.
As for the airports, I believe that’s why it’s generally easier to get a cab to Queens instead of Brooklyn. But there is a huge line of waiting cabs at every taxi stand, and if you’re going off shift in a couple hours, you can’t afford to wait that long.
Yes, taxis should follow the TLC rules, but there are very sound economic reasons why many evade those rules. To pretend it’s because the drivers are crybabies is to discount the very thin margins that bottom-of-the-barrel drivers (graveyard shift) make their meager living on.
I drove a cab on the night shift for a while in NYC, and I never found any outer-borough neighborhoods where it was easy to pick up a Manhattan-bound fare. I never found any neighborhoods anywhere where it was easy to pick up a fare at 4:00 A.M.
LaGaurdia is in Queens; JFK is in Brooklyn. That said, Queens is big and Brooklyn is huge—there are plenty of places in both boroughs that are nowhere near an airport. Also, I doubt either airport has incoming flights at 4:30 A.M., though I don’t know for sure. Also, waiting at an airport is a pain in the butt, and in the wallet, because it means sitting on the hack line for anywhere from a half-hour to an hour and a half waiting until you get to the front of the line. At any time other than rush hour, if I took someone to LaGaurdia, I’d head back to Manhattan empty rather than sit around losing money.
Not that any of this is more than tangentially related to the OP. I’m just sayin’.
That’s why they have hack inspectors. The hack inspector waves down a cab, asks to go to Queens, gets the refusal, and writes the guy up.
Don’t be so dismissive; some of them are very good at their jobs.
This is exactly what I thought while reading the OP. Are you sure he didn’t just accept your money, assuming it was some glorious tip?
Were you in a medallion cab? The fact that it wasn’t a sedan does not matter. Ford Escape hybrids can also be yellow medallion cabs.
Your receipt should have all the information you need to file a complaint and identify the driver. Also, there are stickers facing the passenger seats that explain fares, destinations, etc.
When I get in a cab, I send myself a text message of the medallion number just in case I have an issue.
Medallions may not turn down any destination within NYC, and Queens is in NYC. They also can’t ask you your destination before you get into the taxi. If they are destination shopping, they will try and ask you where you are going before you get in. Don’t tell them.
If you got into something that was not a medallion cab, those drivers are not subject to the same rules.
What did you get into?
Godfrey Cambridge had a solution to this. If a cab refused to take him anywhere and drove off, he zinged a steel ball bearing thru the cab’s rear window. As a result, the cabbie couldn’t claim in court that he had no words with the potential passenger, as words were always “exchanged.”
The cabbie has the problem of explaining why you have his plate number and specifics about the meeting. And a cabbie who turns down fares isn’t going to do it just once. Who’s going to believe a guy who keep getting these complaints and always says he never met the fare?
I think it’s more than a nitpick that someone claiming to be an experienced cab driver doesn’t know that JFK is in Queens. Or that JFK is an airport with flights landing 24/7. As a matter of fact, over 30 flights are scheduled to land, today, between 3 am and 6am. A futher 35 are scheduled to land between midnight and 3am.
It’s true that Queens is a big borough, and that being a cabbie is a hard job. But the job comes with rules (quite a lot of rules, actually) and if you don’t like them, find another line of work. 45 drivers were arrested in 2010 and charged with felonies for charging the out-of-city rate for an in-city trip. It’s not a joke or a form of protest to overcharge. It’s a crime. And it also affects the reputation and tourist economy of the entire city.
Yellow cabs are not allowed to pick up street hails outside of Manhattan.
That’s fucked up. Why not? They should change that law.
If it’s anything like Boston, they’d be taking fares away from cabbies who have their medallions in the borroughs.
I agree; the current law is a result of a compromise between the medallion cabs and the car services (who are not allowed to pick up street hails anywhere.)
The fare structure does disincentivize cabbies from going to the outer boroughs. Unless you’re going close to an airport or bus depot or other spot where there’s a taxi line, it’s difficult (and sometimes illegal) for them to get a return fare.