The Gimlet Eye

I don’t know how I failed to mention it when I was ticking off the things to dislike about D.C., but, really, chief among them is the city’s cab drivers. They drive vehicles that long should have been scrapped, spend their time screaming into their cell phones (or, even worse, trying to argue politics with their fares), and seem to operate independently of any kind of traffic laws. This morning one of them yelled at me for crossing the street in front of his car. I was in a crosswalk. With a walk signal. And he was trying to make a u-turn across two lanes of traffic.

But the absolute most egregious D.C. cabbie behaviour occurs at late nights outside Union Station. With no dispatchers on duty, few taxis show up, and those that do, cherry-pick fares, refuse to drive to certain destinations, and force passengers to share cabs — all of which violate District law. Show up at the train station in New York or Baltimore or Philly, and none of this would ever happen. It’s so terrible that one friend of mine drives his otherwise moth-balled car to the station and pays $22 a day to park, just to avoid the cab line. The Post describes (what I would call) a typical late-night scene:

Vershell shook his head when he heard the story. His family had waited 25 minutes in line, in the rain, before they finally reached the front.

“We’re going to Takoma Park,” his wife told the driver pulling up in front of them.

“I’m not going there,” the driver responded.

“No, you can’t do that!’ she admonished.

But it was no use. The driver had already sped off. When a cabdriver finally agreed to take her to Maryland, all she wanted to say was, “Thank you.”