Re: Gas price has skyrocketed, everything is expensive except taxi fares!
Rahul,
Please e-mail or text me your phone number or call me ASAP...
-Mike Foulks, President, Chicago Cabdriver Organization (CCO), chinatownmike@yahoo.com, (312) 933-1932
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Replying to:
It is now known for everyone in Chicago that everything from milk to Bus fare has increased, but cab fare is same in spite of the skyrocketing gas price.
Gas is now amost to 4$ a gallon and cabbies are barely making money to be able to pay bills.
The city keeps making money by putting new drivers on the street everyday and flooding the Chicago street with cabs. Sometimes it looks like there are more cabs out there then regular private cars.
Drivers are being ignored by the Commisioner and Mayor
and instead they always find new ways to punish drivers. Cabbies face harrassment by regular public and mistreatment by the city.
You know why Cabbies are being ignored and treated like dogs by the city? Cos we are immigrants and they think they can ignore us and mistreat us anyway they like. But we are ourselves the ones who are going through with this tough times.
Chicago is one of the city with highest gas price but among the low in cab fare.
We are being forced to accept credit cards and lose 5% of our fare in the card process and sometimes lose the whole money for bad card.
We are being deceived and lied by the Commisioner saying it's safer and better for us to accept cards even though they did not hold meeting with cab drivers about this credit card acceptance.
City is talking about 50 cent to 1$ surcharge in cab fares to tackle the high gas price, but this will confuse the passengers as we already have surcharge when we have addional passengers in cab ride and thus there will be more false complaint against cab drivers by the public.
The best way to solve the cabbie's concern is increase the taxi meter fare itself rather then ass surcharge. I'd rather be happy with what it is now then have fight with passenger over this surcharge and get false complaint filed with the Consumer services.
All this mistreatment by City seems to me like a human rights violation and intentional act to starve the cabbies.
We should stand up for our rights and demand a fare increase not a surcharge because it will not work.
If we don't fight by ourselve, the city and public will keep mistreating us.
