Cab drivers might have once pretended they don't like to take credit cards (really, they don't mind anymore), but this week cabbies learned things can be pretty bad when those readers don't work. A wireless glitch outed credit card readers in a few thousand cabs on Wednesday and Thursday, leaving them unable to accept non-cash fares.
Paying for cabs with credit cards has become very popular since the readers were installed in 2007, and drivers say this recent glitch, which is estimated to have affected over 2,000 cabs, cost them some revenue. Cabbies spend on-duty hours trying to get their readers—and for many, their televisions and meters—fixed at the Long Island City dispatch hub. "We lost our money,” Mohammed Mijan, 31, told the Daily News. "This is not fair what they’re doing right now. It’s so unfair."
The Taxi Cab and Limousine Commission says the glitch affected cabs outfitted with Creative Mobile Technologies' communications devices, all of which use Sprint as their primary wireless network. "It's our understanding that it was a limited outage of the Sprint network, and that it was resolved yesterday afternoon," spokesman Allan Fromberg told us. We contacted Creative Mobile Technologies for comment, but have not heard back. CMT put out a statement yesterday noting that they were fixing the problem: "While this process may not be immediate, CMT is closely monitoring the situation and is working closely with its customers to ensure a smooth reentry into the system." And Sprint says they're looking into the situation to make sure it doesn't resurface.
