Fare warnings

Despite complaints, cabbies say abuse goes both ways

One cabdriver screamed and cursed at a Boston police cadet after the junior officer caught him swerving between lanes. A prosecutor from Denver fled from his cab terrified after the driver fell asleep at the wheel and nearly collided with an oncoming car. An East Boston business owner said she was in tears after her driver took her on a long, circuitous route to the hospital, then yelled "you're nothing" at her when she complained.

At a time when taxi drivers have received permission to charge passengers more, a Globe review of cab complaints filed with the city since the beginning of last year shows that their customers do not always get what they pay for.

Of the 500 complaints filed between January 2007 and Sept. 3, more than a quarter - 137 - focused on the driver's treatment of passengers, while 145 accused cabdrivers of overcharging them, according to figures from the Boston Police Department, which oversees the city's hackney licenses. Thirty-five were for unsafe or reckless driving.

"Simple courtesy, paying attention to where they're going, not yakking on the cellphones, being at least minimally polite, that's all I ask," said Debra Cebulski, a 39-year-old Allston temp worker who recently complained about a cab driver who inexplicably refused to take her to St. Elizabeth's Medical Center. The driver received a three-day suspension.

"Some of these cabdrivers act like you're inconveniencing them," Cebulski said. "Excuse me? You're making your money by accepting paying passengers. It's your job to at least have some consideration for the passenger."

Donna Blythe-Shaw, a United Steelworkers staff representative who represents Boston's 3,800 full-time cabdrivers, said the vast majority of drivers do.

The 500 complaints "out of 3,800 full-time drivers and 17 million trips a year is not a lot of complaints," she said. "That is a very minuscule percentage based on the number of fares that the drivers have in the course of a year. It shows that you have a very professional and, I would think, responsive taxi industry in the city of Boston."

Nearly half of the complaints were sustained and largely resulted in warnings.

A Boston taxi trip now costs $5 for the first mile and $2.80 after that, up from $2.40. The fare is among the highest in the nation. At the same time, cabdrivers will have to phase in an all-hybrid fleet - a requirement that many of them have decried as too expensive and cumbersome - install credit card machines, and stop chatting on cellphones when they have passengers in the back unless it is an emergency.

For every bad cab ride, there are many more smooth ones. And when things do get contentious, it is often the taxi driver who gets the bad end, dealing with rude, abusive, or intoxicated passengers. In most of those cases, the driver suffers in silence, said Marty Callinan, who drove taxis in the city for 20 years and is the former president of the Independent Taxi Operators Association in Boston.

"You've got to put up with what you got to," Callinan said. "The one thing that I always used to tell my drivers is, 'There are a lot of times you have to bite your tongue.' The customer is always right . . . What's the cab business without the customer? The customer has a right to complain."

But few customers take the time to write down the driver's hackney license, name, and medallion number, then call to voice their complaints.

Those who did take the time to call, however, reported behavior that ranged from the frightening to the bizarre to the trivial.

One cabdriver allegedly told a Massport employee, "I should shoot you," according to one complaint.

Another cursed, then stared so coldly at a passenger - who had complained about the change he had given her - that she said she felt "threatened."

"Now I feel more afraid to take a taxi, just because he might be the one driving it again," she wrote in an August 2007 complaint.

One passenger said his $800 Brooks Brothers suit was torn when he slid across his seat and got caught on an exposed screw.

Last fall, a tourist said he and his wife were annoyed when their driver took a winding route from Logan Airport to their hotel in the Back Bay. But they were aghast when the driver got out of the cab to get their suitcase and they saw that he was barefoot.

"I was never greeted by a cabdriver in a metropolitan city, in an American city, not wearing shoes," said Norman Edelsonof New York City, a 60-year-old real estate broker. "I don't think that Boston proper would want to project that image of taxicab drivers to a foreigner who is visiting for the first time."

Most of the complaints resulted in a warning, which is the standard punishment for a cabdriver who has a clean record, said Captain Robert Ciccolo, head of the hackney carriage unit.

"We try to keep a balanced perspective here," said Ciccolo. "There certainly is not an excuse for a driver to be rude. On the other hand, people frequently treat [drivers] badly. We have had passengers who complain that drivers swore at them, and upon investigation, that's because the passenger used a racial epithet at the driver."

The hackney division has been supervising drivers who receive fares since the department was founded in 1854, and has been receiving complaints almost as long.

One early complaint, Ciccolo said, was from passenger Sarah L. Lougee, who in May 1865 accused a carriage driver of overcharging her by asking her to pay $1 for a trip from Beacon Hill to Roxbury.

He was found guilty, according to the complaint. The most serious penalty at that time was a fee or jail time, Ciccolo said.

Now, a driver's hackney license could be suspended permanently if he or she has enough sustained complaints against them, he said.

Historically, complaints have come through the hackney's hot line, but last year the unit set up an e-mail address. Since then, many people with complaints - usually young professionals with Internet access on their cellphones, have been e-mailing them in, sometimes while still in the cab, Ciccolo said.

"We're getting to the point where we're getting the complaints before the cab ride is over," he said, adding that he expects the number of complaints to rise because of the e-mail address.

That's fine by cab driver Fadi Hanna, a 37-year-old Lebanese immigrant who has been driving taxis since 1993 and often complains about other drivers' behavior.

Last November, he reported a cabdriver who refused to drive a woman and her young child to Boston Children's Museum, then made an obscene gesture at Hanna after Hanna chided him.

"Most of the customers don't really report incidents like that, so I decided to take action," said Hanna. "Those guys are the ones that are making the bad names for the other drivers."

Matthew Carroll and Donovan Slack of the Globe staff contributed to this report.