This column originally appeared in On The Way, a weekly newsletter covering everything you need to know about NYC-area transportation.<\/p>\n
Sign up<\/a> to get the full version, which includes answers to reader questions, trivia, service changes and more, in your inbox every Thursday.<\/p>\n The taxi hustlers<\/a> who bilk unsuspecting tourists out of illegally high fares at New York City airports are now running schemes far more sophisticated \u2014 and brazen \u2014 than ever, says a swindler who drove an illegal cab for a half-century before hanging it up last year.<\/p>\n Jan \u201cRocco\u201d Uzzo is one in a long line of drivers who have made a living over the years by skirting city regulations that require any taxi or for-hire vehicle trip to be operated by a car licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission. From the 1970s until he retired last summer, Uzzo would coax tourists into his car at major travel hubs across the city, and charge them a rate higher than what\u2019s legally allowed.<\/p>\n He said he used to work mostly alone. But in recent years, Uzzo said he\u2019s noticed a growing trend of scammers roaming airport terminals with walkie talkies, acting as illegal dispatchers who connect taxi hustlers with their marks and take a cut of the fare.<\/p>\n \u201cIllegal dispatchers are out there hunting for rides and they have their drivers lined up,\u201d said Uzzo. \u201cWe never had that, that never existed.\u201d<\/p>\n Gothamist recently found that the number of hustlers at the airports has boomed since the COVID-19 pandemic. We reported on a Kenyan couple who were charged $800 for a ride from JFK to Times Square<\/a>, more than 10 times the legal rate. Tabitha Abed, who took the ride with her husband, said she was approached by one of the illegal dispatchers at the airport.<\/p>\n \u201cHe told me, \u2018You look so beautiful\u2019 and I was like \u2018Wow, these are things I want to hear,\u2019\u201d she recalled. \u201cHe said, \u2018Welcome to New York.\u2019 We were so happy to be received like that.\u201d<\/p>\n A few minutes later, the man led them to another driver who gave them a ride into the city, where they were overcharged. The couple later got their money back after an airport worker helped them track down their driver.<\/p>\n Uzzo said he got into the unlicensed taxi game in 1974 when he was driving a yellow cab. He said a friend introduced him to the \u201cshorty line\u201d at JFK Airport, where travelers would hail rides between the terminals for several bucks, years before the AirTrain opened. He had to ditch the shorty line after he lost his TLC license, and started scouring the airports in his own car looking for people to take into the city.<\/p>\n He and his friends would call their targets \u201clollys,\u201d like a lollipop, because he said they were suckers who didn\u2019t know their way around New York. Uzzo said they\u2019re the people who are \u201cexhausted\u201d and you could \u201ctell them anything you like and they\u2019re not going to disagree with you.\u201d He said he\u2019d charge some people hundreds of dollars.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aI’d walk into Kennedy Airport like I owned it, wouldn’t talk to any other drivers, even guys that I personally knew,\u201d he said. \u201c’Cause I was there to do one thing and one thing only: Capture my lolly and get the f\u2014 out.\u201d<\/p>\n Uzzo acknowledged he was scamming tourists, but nowhere near the level that\u2019s happening today.<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aAll hustlers are not thieves,\u201d Uzzo said. \u201cKennedy Airport has now, in the last several years, become just a reflection of the city of this country. People are desperate.\u201d<\/p>\n Gas prices. They\u2019re steep \u2014\u00a0over $4 \u2014 but not steep enough to deter drivers from clogging the roads for spring break. Meanwhile, security lines at local airports are easing up after some TSA workers began receiving backpay amid the ongoing partial government shutdown, but callout rates still remain well above-average. So give yourself extra time if you plan on getting out of town this weekend<\/a>.<\/p>\n The new \u201cBoulevard of Death?\u201d Linden Boulevard, a 6-mile, eight-lane thoroughfare running from Flatbush to Ozone Park, was the site of two hit-and-run deaths last month<\/a>, prompting the local city councilmember to call for safety redesigns.<\/p>\n Free fares for the needy. Under the City Council\u2019s latest budget proposal, nearly 1 million low-income New Yorkers who currently qualify for half-priced bus and subway fares wouldn\u2019t have to pay at all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Student OMNY cards. Kids are complaining that their city-issued OMNY cards are flimsy and don\u2019t function consistently, a problem that in turn encourages fare evasion<\/a>.<\/p>\n Curious Commuter<\/p>\n Question from Louis in Manhattan<\/p>\n Are the “fare required” signs on MTA buses a result of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign proposal to make buses free?<\/p>\n Answer<\/p>\n No. Those digital messages on the city’s fleet of buses date back to 2020, when state officials suspended fare collection for six months in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The MTA opted to make the fare free to protect bus drivers from getting sick by requiring passengers to board through the rear door. After that six-month period, the transit agency brought fares back to the buses<\/a> and began displaying the \u201cfare required\u201d messages, which officials said was necessary because many people didn\u2019t realize they had to keep paying.<\/p>\n Louis\u2019 question comes as New York Post reporter Craig McCarthy posed a similar query on social media<\/a>, wondering if the digital signs on the buses were prompted by the mayor\u2019s campaign pledge to make all the city\u2019s buses free<\/a>. But in reality, New Yorkers have been seeing those messages for nearly six years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This column originally appeared in On The Way, a weekly newsletter covering everything you need to know about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":{"0":"post-184644","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bronx","8":"tag-bronx","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-nyc","12":"tag-the-bronx","13":"tag-the-bronx-headlines","14":"tag-the-bronx-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}