There You Go Again

This is fancified lawyerspeak for what exactly? A cab driver’s right to unencumbered privacy? Who knows:

Officials with a taxi-driver advocacy group and the Taxi & Limousine Commission are slated to meet today with a federal judge after the drivers’ group filed a class action lawsuit Wednesday to keep global positioning technology out of the city’s 13,000 yellow cabs.

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which orchestrated a two-day strike earlier this month, and eight individual drivers filed the suit against the commission, saying the GPS technology is unconstitutional. A lawyer for the plaintiffs said the opposing parties were to meet in court Thursday at noon.

If no resolution is reached, cabbies may strike again, the alliance said.

. . .

Of the eight individual plaintiffs, six allege that they refused to sign a contract with one of four vendors of the GPS technology. They now face costly penalties and suspension of their medallions, according to the suit. The other two argue they would have to pay for the equipment even though one leases the cab, and the other owns his cab but not the medallion.

“We will fight any attempt by the TLC to encumber our client’s property without due process or which violates our client’s right to privacy under the guise of improving taxi service,” Richard Koehler, the alliance’s attorney, said in a statement.

Tom Robbins outlined some legitimate sounding reasons to oppose the GPS requirement — so how come we get platitudes about privacy rights? They should stick with the facts, assuming that what Robbins reported is correct:

After cab owners began installing the devices in their taxis this year, drivers noted other problems as well: The gadgets often didn’t work. Apparently, there were blackout areas in the city where the credit-card machinery failed to kick in. This resulted in the taxi meters instantly shutting down as well. In the taxi business, a nonworking meter is the equivalent of a “closed” sign hanging in a restaurant window.

. . .

One of the approved vendors, a startup New Jersey firm, has had no experience in taxis or anything else. Another is a Queens company that already services taxi meters and whose wireless credit-card units were panned when originally introduced. Another firm is co-owned by Ronald Sherman, the head of the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, the group that represents the powerful taxi-fleet owners. When the commission originally said it was going to make the equipment mandatory in all cabs, Sherman complained at a public hearing that it would be too expensive. Then he realized that wouldn’t be a problem if he started his own company to provide the units. This he promptly did. Amazingly, his was one of those the commission approved.

The commission’s experts never even examined the product of a British company, Cabvision, whose credit-card and wireless-communication units are already working in 1,000 London taxis. The British proposal was especially intriguing because it offered to provide and install the units for free, just as it does in London.

Unfortunately, the Cabvision proposal was rejected after it was deemed to have missed the deadline. Company owners protested that they’d been assured by taxi-commission officials that a one-day delay in transoceanic mail wouldn’t be a problem. Then it turned out that the agency’s chief contracting officer had opened and read the proposal, even though it is against all the rules to do so once a submission has been rejected for tardiness. Commission officials apologized for the slipup and promised to send the proposal back. When last heard from, the British firm was still waiting for the package.