The Off-Duty Light: Should It Stay, or Should It Go?

It's now been several weeks since the Taxi & Limousine Commission -- at the end of November -- passed, by a vote of 7-1, a regulation that will  eliminate the off-duty light from the roof of New York City medallion cabs.  By May 1, off-duty lights must be out of sight, if not out of mind.

They'd been perched atop cabs for years, on both sides of the medallion number that, when illuminated, means a cab is otherwise available to pick up hails from the street.  An unlit medallion light has signified a cab has a fare and is thus unavailable.  A lit off-duty light has signaled a cabbie was either taking a break or had ended his or her shift and was heading back to their garage.

So, hey, the off-duty designation's been right up there with tradition and lore.  Kinda like the New York Giants baseball team was before they and the Dodgers moved to California at the end of the 1957 season.  What's going on here?  Is this déjà vu one more time, all over again?

The TLC majority said the off-duty light was confusing to the public and hard to see.  More importantly, they argued, cab drivers had used it to dupe the public as to whether they were actually free for fares or not, so that they could press desperate passengers to pay higher-than-legal fares.

It's no secret that some drivers are cheats.  How they do it is they have both their medallion and off-duty lights on, thus sending mixed signals as to whether they're available or unavailable to pick up fares.  That gives them an opening to negotiate with passengers about where they would be willing to go and how much they'd charge for going there.  That's illegal.  A passenger is only supposed to pay the figure the meter shows at the trip's conclusion.  But the public, feeling helpless, has often been willing to negotiate a fare price that's unfair to the rider.

That's been especially true on nights like New Year's Eve, when hopeful riders in the early morning hours sometimes outnumbered free cabs by thirty to one.  A cab would pull over with its off-duty lights on, and take the highest bid.  Illegal, but who was to stop them? 

On the other hand, a cab driver who, say, is legitimately off-duty and driving back to their garage at shift's end, does sometime stop to give rides to passengers if those rides are roughly on the way to their garage.  That's technically illegal as well, but probably shouldn't be -- because it's really just all-around practical sense, and in the interest of both the driver and the public.  In those instances the passenger   -- who's in search of a taxi in any case -- pays what the meter says, and is paying no more and no less than the legal rate.

No denying that there's been confusion.  Matt Flegenheimer, the reporter who wrote up the TLC's decision in the New York Times, showed himself among the confused by his fuzzy distinction between an available and unavailable cab. 

But will eliminating the off-duty light make things any clearer, for either resident New Yorkers or out-of-towners in the city for a limited stay?

Will doing away with off-duty lights prevent unscrupulous cabbies from turning off their medallion lights -- which, under the new guidelines, is meant to indicate they are unavailable -- and pulling over to people hungry for rides and negotiating a higher-than-legal fare? 

No way.  Nothing's gonna change (unless the TLC gets its own undercover inspectors out onto the streets at key times, and don't hold your breath for that).

"It's still going to go on," said Iris Weinshall, the city's former transportation commissioner and the lone member of the taxi commission's board to vote against the roof-light proposal. So if the new rules won't curtail "cherry-picking fares, why mess with it?" she reportedly said in an interview.

Here we have not only a city with some really significant problems, but a city in a country gone economically awry, where supposedly intelligent people are not even asking telling questions as to how the wage structure has evolved to radically favor the rich and well-placed in the course of this last century (at the expense of the rest of us).

To be engaged in mindless quibbling about off-duty lights on yellow cabs is, in context, the real tragedy.  Sure, the TLC commissioners get paid nice dollars for this waste of time, but the issue was much ado about nothing to begin with.