People Who Ride Cabs Are Not Poor, Think Cabs Should Cost Less, According to Survey

There's a new survey of people who take taxis, and it reveals things that are mostly obvious, except -- did you know that despite a general dislike of TVs in cabs, people who take cabs will, if prompted, fill out polls from the TLC on cab video screens? We are so capricious.

In other results of the survey, reported today in the Post, 42 percent of riders make $100,000 or more annually, 19 percent make more than $50,000, 16 percent wouldn't answer what they made -- and 46 percent of all of the responders think that they're being charged too much in cabs.

The polls entails a total of 22 questions, 3 or 4 of which pop up per ride. The TLC has gotten 113,000 responses so far, since October. Among the learnings:

• People dislike "aggressive driving" and, more than 25 precent of the time, wish they'd taken the subway and not a cab.
• There aren't enough wheelchair-accessible cabs.
• Paying with a credit card is enjoyed by the majority of people. (Not including cabbies, necessarily.)
• Owning a car in New York City is a pain in the ass.
• Environmentally friendly cabs are lovely to people who care about environmentally friendly things.
• Some people still don't understand when a cab is free or not. (Related: 22 percent of people responding to the survey were tourists.)
• 79 percent of people had no trouble communicating with their driver and called the communication either good or great.
• People take cabs to save time, or because it's late.

As per news last week, a TLC sting operation showed that drivers refused to take people where they wanted to go (in the outer boroughs) 27 percent of the time. And our number one complaint about cabs is, essentially, that. Also, that stop-and-start pumping the gas thing they do. It makes us queasy.

Customers 'flag' cabs on price but enjoy ride [NYP]

[JDoll / @thisisjendoll]

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