Opinion
New York City Taxis and the ‘Suicide Surcharge’: Cameron on Transportation
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“You know how much money I make driving this cab?” the thickly accented New York cabbie asked me as we careened down Lexington Avenue. I was just trying to make conversation, as I usually do (often in my Canadian French), and after a trite observation about the weather, I asked him about the new taxi/car service surcharge recently applied to Manhattan rides: $2.50 for taxis and $2.75 for Uber and Lyft. He exploded. It was proposed as a fund-raising effort to fix the subways. But the taxi drivers, call it the “suicide surcharge” — making taxi rides so expensive the industry will collapse.