Wednesday night, after drinking myself silly till late trying to assuage my wounded only $140! Babes for Boobs ego, I took an Arlington cab home and watched the meter in amazement. A 20 minute journey, what Google Maps tells me was around 6 miles, came out to $11. The next morning, stumbling through a hang-over to work, my morning taxi was $9.90 for a 2 mile commute.
Tell me, does that compute?
Not the drinking part, but the amazing 3x more expensive per mile drive in a DC Taxi with the new taxi fares. And yet when I talked with the taxi driver, all he could do was say, in a mindless repetition, gas prices, gas prices, gas prices.
Well gas prices my ass – even at $3 a gallon. If DC cabs weren’t $6.50 to go three blocks, or if you get out on the wrong side of the street $8.80 because you crossed an imaginary, arbitrary, and ill-defined line, we would take more of them, more often. I wouldn’t walk the extra two blocks to save $2, and I could take one across town with confidence instead of confusion.
When I tried to explain the difference between 10 rides at $8.80 and 20 at $5, again all the taxi driver could do was mumble about gas prices. Like he wasn’t wasting half his tank just circling around looking for a fare anyway, getting closer to a psycho taxi driver breakdown.
Please, now that we’re about to be Smoke Free DC, can we be Taxi Meter DC too?
This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs
