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I'm going to assume that by cab haters you are referring to anyone that supports Uber. If that is the case, then you lose your bet. While I always rent a car while I'm Vegas I will occasionally use a cab, last time was during my trip last December. I've never had a problem in a cab though I tend to stay near the strip
Supporting uber has nothing to do with your post. You are piling on with bad information. If you take cabs in LV you should know that giving a cab driver your credit card is NOTHING like giving a food server your card. But facts don't matter to YOU and others here. You must be a government worker
I don't take credit/debit cards from anyone... Nor should you accept one as a driver.
The machine is literally right in front of the passenger's face. We do not take the cards because we know that there is the tip option for the passenger to choose. There is also the fact that the passenger has to accept the amount that is being run on their card.
I would suggest some people poke their head in a cab waiting in a line somewhere. You dont have to ride... But have a look and you will see that the machine looks no different from one you would see at a grocery or convenience store. There is simply an additional step built into that machine to put in a tip amount or to choose to not put in a tip at all. How is this difficult? People who dont even speak English are able to handle it just fine.
I always give my credit card to the clerk when I shop----uh,uh would you do it for me, I'm too stoopid.
Supporting uber has nothing to do with your post. You are piling on with bad information. If you take cabs in LV you should know that giving a cab driver your credit card is NOTHING like giving a food server your card. But facts don't matter to YOU and others here. You must be a government worker
Wrong again, work for the private sector.
While I have taken cabs, I don't know how the credit card process goes because I make sure to use cash since I think the surcharge is ridiculous, I have not seen this in other cities and I have taken cabs in major cities like DC, New York, and Boston. While I understand that it may be a charge imposed by the vendor, when you're facing that much dislike from potential users you would think that the taxi company would eat that charge to garner some goodwill or at the very least find another vendor. I wouldn't have a problem if a minimum fare would be required in order to avoid the fee, like other businesses that require a $5 or $10 minimum to use a card.
My point is that there are times that you give your card away when you have the opportunity to swipe it yourself, I've had problems with my credit card and readers at some establishments so I've had to hand it over for it to get processed another way,and there isn't anything unusual about that and it certainly doesn't mean that it is ok for a driver to try to sneak in the tip and almost hit the jackpot when they got a cash tip.
I noticed that no one is disputing that the cab driver could do the transaction so the issue isn't why did the passenger give the driver his card when he could do it himself. I think it sucks that honest drivers have to take the brunt the hate for the few drivers that are jerks but throwing you hands up and saying there isn't anything we can do isn't going to help your cause.
First time we visited Las Vegas, we stayed at TI. We got taken the scenic route........... I had no idea we had been long hauled. The visitor shouldn't have to know these things. It leaves a sour taste that the first person you interact with in LV, cheats you.
So, you CHOSE to ignore all the signs, warnings, telephone number, car numbers etc.. And then wonder what happened.
Yes it would be nice if there were no dishonest people out in the world, but if you did nothing to catch them then you have no one to blame but yourself.
BTW you can get free show tickets by listening to a two hour presentation...did you know that?
So, you CHOSE to ignore all the signs, warnings, telephone number, car numbers etc.. And then wonder what happened.
Yes it would be nice if there were no dishonest people out in the world, but if you did nothing to catch them then you have no one to blame but yourself.
BTW you can get free show tickets by listening to a two hour presentation...did you know that?
Wrong.
The cab driver chose to cheat the customer. That is where the blame lies. Once the cabbie chose to cheat his fare, that's when the problem started. This doesn't happen in more civilized areas. This happens because too many cab drivers are dishonest.
Yes, it would be better if people called the taxi authority when they are cheated. But it wouldn't be necessary if our average cab driver had any ethics. How many times are you going to say the same thing? "Don't blame us if you don't do anything when we try to cheat you."
Do you have any idea how immature that sounds?
And what do timeshare presentations have to do with dishonest cab drivers? Other than the fact that timeshare OPCs, timeshare salesmen and cab drivers have roughly the same "anything for a buck" moral compass.
While I have taken cabs, I don't know how the credit card process goes because I make sure to use cash since I think the surcharge is ridiculous, I have not seen this in other cities and I have taken cabs in major cities like DC, New York, and Boston. While I understand that it may be a charge imposed by the vendor, when you're facing that much dislike from potential users you would think that the taxi company would eat that charge to garner some goodwill or at the very least find another vendor. I wouldn't have a problem if a minimum fare would be required in order to avoid the fee, like other businesses that require a $5 or $10 minimum to use a card.
My point is that there are times that you give your card away when you have the opportunity to swipe it yourself, I've had problems with my credit card and readers at some establishments so I've had to hand it over for it to get processed another way,and there isn't anything unusual about that and it certainly doesn't mean that it is ok for a driver to try to sneak in the tip and almost hit the jackpot when they got a cash tip.
I noticed that no one is disputing that the cab driver could do the transaction so the issue isn't why did the passenger give the driver his card when he could do it himself. I think it sucks that honest drivers have to take the brunt the hate for the few drivers that are jerks but throwing you hands up and saying there isn't anything we can do isn't going to help your cause.
And I suppose you just give someone your purse, and say take what you need. What could possibly go wrong.
The credit machine are in the back facing the passengers... In the back. In order for a driver to take a card from a passenger and add a tip in themself, they would have to get out of the cab and get in the backseat in order to slide the card. The digital screen is smooth, not contoured... You wouldn't be able to tell one "button" on the screen from another... Meaning there is no way for the driver to add in a tip themselves from the front seat. The driver would be blindly pushing on a screen they can't even see. Again... Take a look in a cab and you'll discover how ridiculous this whole story sounds.
Scoop, our average driver DOES have ethics, as determined by the study done by the mystery rider program you thought didn't exist.
You should walk into a cab lounge and tell them all how dishonest they all are... How they all will do anything for a buck... How their moral compass is lacking... Even though the MAJORITY of us are hard workers who do all we can to help the people who pay the city's bills. We lift overstuffed luggage sometimes without a tip or a single thank you. We get visitors to and from their destinations safely in one of the most accident-prone corridors in the entire country. The whole damned city hates us but the majority are good. Every profession has bad apples... He us rid them instead of pouting.
This tells me you don't grasp the enormity of the problem in front of you. I have personally never been longhauled. And that's because I almost never take cabs in this town. I do elsewhere. Not here.
But you have scores of personal, first-hand long-haul anecdotes on this thread. There are hundreds elsewhere. The cab industry in Las Vegas has an awful reputation -- much like timeshare salesmen. The difference is, timeshare salesmen aren't sniveling online, "Why don't you like us. Whyyyyy?!?!?!?!?" They know why. They have trashed their own reputation so thoroughly that nobody in their right mind believes a goddamned thing that comes out of a timeshare salesman's mouth. That's just how it is.
But reputation isn't the problem you face. Your entire industry is completely, utterly, and and indelibly redundant. Cab drivers are just the next domino to fall in the industries that the Internet has irrevocably broken.
Basically, you're in the same boat that travel agents were in the 1990s. Remember those days? Prior to Internet travel booking, every town (even really small towns) had at least one travel agent. That's who you called if you wanted (or needed) to fly. Big businesses would have their own in-house travel agency.
And the reason we needed them is because they spoke the electronic gibberish that was the SABRE system. Just seeing if there were available seats looked like poorly-written FORTRAN mixed with assembly code. It was a freakin' nightmare to remember it all. Some of it is still with us -- YY class ticket prices. A lot of people know what that means to this day.
When AOL first offered EasySabre, and when the first rudimentary travel websites appeared, travel agents were all kinds of indignant. They insisted that the general public was too stupid to learn how to book a flight. And even if they could actually book a flight, the agent's experience all but guaranteed better rates. You can't compete with us, they sneered, this is what we do!
And then programmers made it so anyone could parse SABRE (which is still in use -- you buy a ticket on Kayak, it just buys the ticket for you on a SABRE system). And now we don't have travel agencies in every small town in North America anymore. Hindsight is 20-20. There are still travel agencies -- but they're the specialists. They're the ones which book sailing cruises, river cruises, safaris, trekking, and hard-to-reach places. They do round-the-world travel. But they don't book tickets from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. That's what computers are for.
I absolutely guarantee you that all the scare mongering you've done WILL come true. Some maniac Uber driver will assault a passenger. Sure, it's going to happen. But it doesn't matter. The taxi industry as we know it is done. Stick a fork in it. Uber is worth five times what every cab company in America is worth -- combined. Think about that. All those cars. All those businesses. All that hard work. Swept away by the internet in favor of a more efficient system.
Hang on as long as you can. But you may as well try to sweep the tide back with a broom. Your industry is a casualty of the Internet revolution. There will be more industries which are made utterly obsolete by technology. I guarantee that, too.
Edit -- and the speed at which the Internet is leveling whole industries is increasing. Newspapers and magazines continue to circle the drain, and it's been 25 years since their "oh, crap!" moment. Travel agencies are mostly gone. But it took about 10 years to go from a travel agent in nearly every strip mall to where we are today. What Uber did to the taxi industry it did in a matter of MONTHS. In a few years, we're look back with just a hint of nostalgia for the old days. There will still be cabs, just like there are still travel agents. Just not nearly as many as today.
This tells me you don't grasp the enormity of the problem in front of you. I have personally never been longhauled. And that's because I almost never take cabs in this town. I do elsewhere. Not here.
But you have scores of personal, first-hand long-haul anecdotes on this thread. There are hundreds elsewhere. The cab industry in Las Vegas has an awful reputation -- much like timeshare salesmen. The difference is, timeshare salesmen aren't sniveling online, "Why don't you like us. Whyyyyy?!?!?!?!?" They know why. They have trashed their own reputation so thoroughly that nobody in their right mind believes a goddamned thing that comes out of a timeshare salesman's mouth. That's just how it is.
But reputation isn't the problem you face. Your entire industry is completely, utterly, and and indelibly redundant. Cab drivers are just the next domino to fall in the industries that the Internet has irrevocably broken.
Basically, you're in the same boat that travel agents were in the 1990s. Remember those days? Prior to Internet travel booking, every town (even really small towns) had at least one travel agent. That's who you called if you wanted (or needed) to fly. Big businesses would have their own in-house travel agency.
And the reason we needed them is because they spoke the electronic gibberish that was the SABRE system. Just seeing if there were available seats looked like poorly-written FORTRAN mixed with assembly code. It was a freakin' nightmare to remember it all. Some of it is still with us -- YY class ticket prices. A lot of people know what that means to this day.
When AOL first offered EasySabre, and when the first rudimentary travel websites appeared, travel agents were all kinds of indignant. They insisted that the general public was too stupid to learn how to book a flight. And even if they could actually book a flight, the agent's experience all but guaranteed better rates. You can't compete with us, they sneered, this is what we do!
And then programmers made it so anyone could parse SABRE (which is still in use -- you buy a ticket on Kayak, it just buys the ticket for you on a SABRE system). And now we don't have travel agencies in every small town in North America anymore. Hindsight is 20-20. There are still travel agencies -- but they're the specialists. They're the ones which book sailing cruises, river cruises, safaris, trekking, and hard-to-reach places. They do round-the-world travel. But they don't book tickets from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. That's what computers are for.
I absolutely guarantee you that all the scare mongering you've done WILL come true. Some maniac Uber driver will assault a passenger. Sure, it's going to happen. But it doesn't matter. The taxi industry as we know it is done. Stick a fork in it. Uber is worth five times what every cab company in America is worth -- combined. Think about that. All those cars. All those businesses. All that hard work. Swept away by the internet in favor of a more efficient system.
Hang on as long as you can. But you may as well try to sweep the tide back with a broom. Your industry is a casualty of the Internet revolution. There will be more industries which are made utterly obsolete by technology. I guarantee that, too.
Edit -- and the speed at which the Internet is leveling whole industries is increasing. Newspapers and magazines continue to circle the drain, and it's been 25 years since their "oh, crap!" moment. Travel agencies are mostly gone. But it took about 10 years to go from a travel agent in nearly every strip mall to where we are today. What Uber did to the taxi industry it did in a matter of MONTHS. In a few years, we're look back with just a hint of nostalgia for the old days. There will still be cabs, just like there are still travel agents. Just not nearly as many as today.
Millions upon of millions tourists are never going to order a car on their phone that has to travel to pick them up AND THEY HAVE TO SOMEHOW FIND IN A GIANT CLUSTER**** to take them from Ballys to the Venetian when ample cars are waiting to do that exact thing with zero effort from the passenger ! You think these tourists are filled with your hate, rage and heavy handed personal agenda, they are not! Most people over 40 have never even heard of UBER.
The credit machine are in the back facing the passengers... In the back. In order for a driver to take a card from a passenger and add a tip in themself, they would have to get out of the cab and get in the backseat in order to slide the card. The digital screen is smooth, not contoured... You wouldn't be able to tell one "button" on the screen from another... Meaning there is no way for the driver to add in a tip themselves from the front seat. The driver would be blindly pushing on a screen they can't even see. Again... Take a look in a cab and you'll discover how ridiculous this whole story sounds.
Scoop, our average driver DOES have ethics, as determined by the study done by the mystery rider program you thought didn't exist.
You should walk into a cab lounge and tell them all how dishonest they all are... How they all will do anything for a buck... How their moral compass is lacking... Even though the MAJORITY of us are hard workers who do all we can to help the people who pay the city's bills. We lift overstuffed luggage sometimes without a tip or a single thank you. We get visitors to and from their destinations safely in one of the most accident-prone corridors in the entire country. The whole damned city hates us but the majority are good. Every profession has bad apples... He us rid them instead of pouting.
So are you saying that EVERY cab in Vegas has their credit card machine ONLY in the back and there is no way for the driver to process the payment from the front? Or is it possible that your company is one of several that do it that way but others may have different setups?
It would be one thing if it was a small percentage of drivers that were the problem, but a Taxicab Audit showed that almost 1 and 4 rides are long hauls . It's estimated that long hauling cost passengers almost $15 million in 2012, and that's being conservative. Even looking at the drivers that have been FOUND GUILTY multiple offenders only make up about 10% of the 770+violators in the past year. Now unless you truly believe that all the non-multiple offenders were caught the first time they did it, even conservative extrapolations will show that there are thousands of drivers that are the problem. I assuming that not every driver that was cited was found guilty, and several of you have noted that not every incident gets reported and it's also plausible that not every person that get's long hauled knows that it happened. So your claim of a majority is starting to look tenuous at best. The consequences to drivers are a joke, it isn't until the 5th violation, I'm assuming adjudicated, that a driver faces the POSSIBILITY of their permit being revoked or the could just get a $500 fine. It would be one thing if these were for lifetime violations, but to get to that point they would have to have been caught and convicted 5 times in 12 months. For someone to get to that point how many complaints we probably filed and how many instances were probably not reported and their penalties up to the 5 violation would have been POSSIBLY 15-19 days suspension and $1100 in fines and neither are mandatory punishments.
The other thing that you keep touting is the sign with estimated fares, while it is a good step towards stopping the issue, I surprised to see that this is something that has only been in place for about 18 months! I'm sure that long hauling has been a problem even before the tunnel but even if we say that that was the start of the problem, the tunnel was opened over 15 years ago and I know that complaints and warnings happened soon after. So before you mock someone for not seeing the sign, ask if the problem happened in the 15+ years before the sign was put up
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