Hacking your Hack...

I'm

fascinated and ever so curious about the process that foreign citizens go

through when they come to this country.

I'm absolutely convinced that there's some shady character out there

that pulls ordinary intelligent people out of the line to become a hard working

U.S. Citizen and puts them into the driver's seat of a Taxi. In the same

lamentable way that teenage run-aways become prostitutes or drug runners,

potential Illinois farmers from Eastern Block countries become hardened

scammers, hacking a cab in the only city they've been made aware of and

pilfering every penny they can out of your pocket.

It's sad,

really. While a hardened citizen of New York knows the streets well enough to know when he's

off the beaten path, a tourist might innocently ask to be taken to "Madison Square

Garden" for example, only to be

"accidentally" taken to New

York's Botanical

Garden instead.

You can

protect yourself by knowing the address of where you're headed; a quick free

call to GOOG-411 will give you

that. Look confident, and get a general

idea of the direction you're heading from a friend, bell-hop, or

concierge. Ask someone who knows, what

fare you should expect to pay to get where you're going. If a toll road or bridge is involved, you

should know ahead of time what the fee is.

Cabbies in the NYC area love to add a random fee for "tolls"

when they pick up newbies from the airport.

Curiously, they forget any English when you argue that you only crossed

one bridge and that a $20 toll fee seems "excessive."

There's a

new website out there that can help also.

The World Taxi-Meter is in

Beta form but I sure hope it takes off!

They support the following cities right now: London,

New York, San Francisco,

Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, and Prague. All of these are world-class "Cab

Cities" and you'd do yourself a favor to take the time to get a general

feel of the place before you climb into a cab there. The World Taximeter can help you answer

questions like, "Is $10 enough to get to the airport from here?" or

"I wonder if they take AMX?"

The intent is to give you a fast way to enter a source and destination

and it will calculate general traffic wait times, tolls, etc, along the fastest

route from A to B, then it will tell you what you can expect to pay. It will even book a cab for you, at a

specified time.

So, if

you're not worried about the cost, the route, etc, you can concentrate on a

pleasant conversation with your cabbie; or on how you plan to get the cab's

smell out of your nice jacket!