Big Apple locals hire Russians to game New York's taxi system

Two men have been charged for allegedly conspiring with Russian hackers to manipulate the taxi dispatch system at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Taxis may wait for several hours at the airport in a holding area before being allowed to pick up passengers. They do so because the fare into Manhattan – $52 …

[jake]

How? Easy ...

"The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York did not immediately respond to an inquiry to explain how the scheme was ultimately detected."

My guess is that one or more (comparatively) honest taxi drivers got fed up with watching the same dozen drivers always getting bumped up in the queue. The human brain is really good at seeing that kind of anomaly. Four or five drivers making calls to the Port Authority would probably be enough to flag it as being worth looking into.

The REAL question is why it took the Port Authority so long ... I'll bet the first complaints were rolling in within a couple weeks, a month at the outside.

[Danny 14]

Re: How? Easy ...

greed. The correct wheels werent greased enough.

[Gene Cash]

What is this shit?

Why the FUCK is it a regulated fee of over $50 to drive someone out of the airport?

As Adam Savage would say "THERE'S YER PRAHBLEM!"

[Orv]

Re: What is this shit?

Most cities in the US have a mandated flat fee for taxi trips to/from the airport. There are a variety of reasons for it, some good, some bad. Often part of the motivation is to limit congestion, and another part of it is to help keep people from out of town from being scammed. If it's a flat fee there's no reason for a taxi driver to take a roundabout route to run up the fare.

[Dinanziame]

Re: What is this shit?

Another reason is to make sure that it's worth it for taxis to come to the airport looking for a customer; an airport without enough taxis sounds like a pretty bad idea.

[Orv]

Re: What is this shit?

I suspect that's the case in the small city I live in. From the airport to downtown is only five miles, so it would hardly pay to stand around waiting if all they got was a per-mile fee.

[jake]

Re: What is this shit?

It's not a fee to drive somebody out of the airport. It's a standard fee to drive to a specific location. One fee for Manhattan, one for The Bronx, one for Yankee Stadium, etc. This is to stop unscrupulous cabbies[0] from doing several laps around Central Park, followed by a quick lap of Hoboken, just to to bump up the fee.

And quite frankly, fifty two bucks from JFK into lower Manhattan (13-14 miles, a trifle over half an hour on a good day) is a fair price[1] ... Sure beats walking!

[0] Not that such a thing would ever exist, of course. Honest as the day is long, those NYC hacks ...

[1] Drive it yourself once to find out. You'll never do it again ... Guess how I know.

[Orv]

Re: What is this shit?

One thing it doesn't stop is cabbies high-flagging the trip and then pocketing the money -- something I've observed nearly every time I've taken an airport cab -- but that's them ripping off their employer, which is none of my business.

[werdsmith]

Re: What is this shit?

Various bus and shuttle services exist if you just want to get into Manhattan close enough to Times Square. Less than $20 or $35 for a return ticket.

[Calum Morrison]

Re: What is this shit?

If you don't mind going round everyone else on the shuttle's hotels first... Can be a bargain if you're first off, a nightmare if you're last ☹

[werdsmith]

Re: What is this shit?

No, one in particular I use just goes between JFK and Port Authority Bus Terminal, 8th Avenue. A block from Times Square.

[Calum Morrison]

Re: What is this shit?

That sounds a better bet, though persuading the Mrs that she'd then want to transfer to a second taxi after a GLA-LHR shuttle, transfer, 7ish hours to JFK, 2 hours immigration then an hour in traffic may be my undoing!

Best result ever was BA mislaying our luggage meaning we were deposited at Newark with our $250 compo vouchers (c/o business class on Avios) and nowt but hand baggage - quick train into Penn and up the stairs to our digs in the New Yorker. The luggage arrived by next flight and courier the next morning - result!

[NoneSuch]

Re: What is this shit?

$52 also includes bridge and tunnel tolls which are not cheap, in and of themselves.

[JDC]

Re: What is this shit?

They have a flat fee out of Madrid airport into the centre, too. Previously a lot of drivers would take a somewhat roundabout route into town when they had tourists in the back...

[Anonymous Coward]

Short Trips

I spent a couple of weeks installing kit in a customer DC that was very close to a major airport. I stayed in one of the airport hotels which was less than a mile away and but in practice it was a maze of 4 lane highways, fences and storm drains, so I had to get a cab to the site each morning. The cabs queued for 2 to 3 hours for the lucrative fare into the city and were always very unhappy about my short trip with no customers at the destination and little alternative but to join the back of the queue at the airport. There was a system for the cab's dispatcher to notify the airport cab-queue manager that the cab had had a short trip and they were allowed to jump the queue on their return but some of the cabbies said that this could cause problems with other drivers who thought they were queue-jumping and often wasn't worth the hassle.

They weren't allowed to refuse my trip and I came to dread getting in the cab in the morning but the job wouldn't flash for a hire car.

[sarusa]

They got tripped up by the usual

It was pretty clever, but they got tripped up by the usual mistake petty thieves make - they got greedy. If they'd just kept it to a small group they probably could have gotten away with it forever (they still got away with it for years), but when enough cabs are participating and everyone knows about it by word of mouth then even an entity as clumsy and stupid and slow as the Port Authority will notice. Of course I'm sure the Russians were pushing them to expand to increase the number of $10 fees to fund Pooty Poot's war machine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Best way NY airport to Downtown

Helicopter.

I did this once, included skyline tour and ride over all the traffic.

Taxis were queued at the helipad for the 2 block hop to the hotel.

[jake]

Re: Best way NY airport to Downtown

About a billion years ago (in Internet time, call it 1985ish), I was booked on an "emergency" flight to LAX to fix some computers for Disney. I got the call at noon, was in the air by 1PM. Unfortunately for me, the Disney offices were in Glendale, so I should have been flown into BUR ... which might as well be on another continent at 4PM on a Wednesday if you're using wheeled transportation.

Fortunately, helicopters exist. I was only 2 hours late. My fault, naturally.

Did the job, staff came in Thursday morning & were happy with the change, customer signed off on it at noon, and I was home in time for supper. Job well done, right? Maybe not ...

The PM (or necropsy, as I prefer to call such things) showed the temporary secretary assumed that everything in the LA area had to go through LAX ... but it was my fault anyway, as I should have known better & flagged the bogus destination before I boarded, This despite the fact that my instructions were oral "Take this briefcase full of hardware, fly to LA and install it. You will be met at the airport and taken to the site. Further instructions by telephone will follow." I didn't even know the name of the destination company until I was on the ground in LA. But my fault, so no bonus for the emergency call. It was right about then that I started thinking about going freelance ... it was also the incident that caused the company to outfit us emergency field service guys with new-fangled DynaTACs.

[Michael Strorm]

Sorry in advance

You were fixing computers for Disney? Sounds to me like it was a real Mickey Mouse operation!

[Headley_Grange]

Re: Sorry in advance

Mac Minnies?

[noisy_typist]

Re: Sorry in advance

Probably just needed a new mouse.

[jake]

Re: Sorry in advance

Close. It was an updated daughter board that a graphics tablet plus collaborative whiteboard plugged into. The underlying computer was a Sun2 "deskside" workstation (2/170? I don't remember, but it was Multibus, not VME). The whiteboard was an early variation on Xerox PARC's whiteboard technology. In theory, collaboration could happen anywhere your network reached[0] ... but in reality, the latency back then made it pretty much confined to on-campus use. Also in theory, it could handle up to 15 separate locations, but I never saw it work with more than five, and even then it slowed to a crawl. Primitive, in a first-world kinda way.

[0] In 1985, companies like IBM, Boeing, Ford, GM and the like had their own internal world-wide networks. The Internet of the time was still very young, somewhat flaky, slowish and not exactly friendly to businesses. Not much has changed.

[An_Old_Dog]

Hobson's Choice?

"Taxis may wait for several hours at the airport in a holding area before being allowed to pick up passengers."

Why does there need to be any sort of computerized "dispatch" for this? A cab comes in and parks at the end of the queue. A customer comes out of the airport and gets into the first available cab. Unless you're a spy, or something, the first cab in the queue should be fine...

[katrinab]

Re: Hobson's Choice?

Because:

The queue isn't an actual line of cars.

This means the driver doesn't need to advance one car length every time they move up a position in the queue.