Trusted Taxis

I’m in the middle of a lot of travel at the moment so no doubt I’ll have plenty of stories to tell, but here is the first.

Late last night I cam back from Milan, next week I go to Poland, then New York then Spain with a quick trip back to the UK squeezed in between those dates as well.

My carbon footprint is massive I fear.

So my recent trip to Milan found me being very obviously conned by a taxi driver, now at this point I don’t want to single out a nationality for conning passengers out of their money, I’m an equal opportunity blogger I’ve been conned (or an attempt been made to be conned) by lots of taxi drivers from lots of differing countries, its not the nationality that makes me concerned when getting into a taxi.

Its the occupation of the driver and my obvious lack of shared nationality with them.

Anyhow this taxi driver in Milan picked me up from the central station to take me to a hotel on the south west of Milan, according to the hotel’s website this is 8km away from the centre of Milan.

Now some top tips to any would be fraud minded taxi drivers reading this blog;

1. When your pick up has given you a Google map print out of the hotel address its pretty much obvious that I know the general location of the hotel in question in relation to Milan centre, south west.
2. Don’t pre program your pick up with the line “Oh that’s in a different town and long way away ” and don’t then reply that it will only take 10 minutes to get there.
3. Don’t leave your portable navigation system on with the map showing.
4. Don’t program in the destination a third of the way into the trip showing me distance to the hotel.
5. Don’t do the obvious and say “oh look I’ve programmed in the destination and we’ve got 15km left to go” to make it look like its a long way

My taxi driver didn’t have the benefit of hindsight and the pleasure of reading my blog so did all the above, after letting me watch him on the navigation map firstly drive directly East out of the centre for about 6Km, then watch him plug in the destination which then took us round the ring of Milan for a total trip distance of 28Km.

See my nice graphic below (not to scale)

milan taxi route

Now being a navigation designer in my past life I’m fairly sure that this was not the shortest, or even in fact the fastest route to my hotel.

After pointing this out to him plus using my GPS phone to also point out the distance from the Hotel to the central station, the fare was reduced from the 67 Euros on the meter to my offer of 30 Euros (there was some shouting and offers to ring the police as well).

Still after my rant at nearly being ripped off, it raises the question of what we can do to stop this behaviour? Yes there are lots of websites stating about taxi scams. Yes I could have booked before hand etc etc etc.

But sometimes work and life get in the way of all these things, the Isochrones post mentioned that there was moves to integrate fare data along with travel times on isochrone maps. this would have been an excellent way for me to gauge the cost of the taxi journey before hand.

Or even an application that could add the local cost of the taxi companies in the navigation routing, then we could have options such as:

• Quickest
• Shortest
• Avoid motorways
• Avoid dishonest taxi drivers! (or maybe better named as “price of taxi route”)

I’m sure one of the navigation companies out there have already though of this?

I hope so, as a very frequent traveller this would be helpful for the likes of me, let me know and I’ll buy one now.

Tags: con, Isochrones, Italy, itravel, Milan, navigation, portable navigation, taxi, taxi fraud