Boston cabbies deny credit cards

Scores of stubborn Hub cabbies have brazenly flouted a two-year-old city rule and flat-out refused to let cash-short riders use credit cards this year — with some drivers accused of lying and coercing customers into forking over hard currency, a Herald review of consumer complaints found. “All the time. It happens all the time,” Boston businessman William Shaw, 47, told the Herald after paying cash for a cab ride to South Station this week. “The struggles of living in the city are hard enough. I don’t want to struggle with a cab driver.” Boston police have fielded nearly 100 complaints since Jan. 1 accusing taxi drivers of spurning customer requests to use plastic to pay for their rides, the review found — even though cabbies have had to accept credit cards since 2009 and the processing fees were factored into a 16-percent fare hike. First-time offenders are slapped with a three-day suspension. Mark Cohen, chief of the Boston Police Department’s Hackney Carriage Unit, said the offenders belong to a small but persistent group of drivers who long for the cab trade’s bygone cash-only era. “They’re moving from an underground economy to the traditional role of a businessperson. There’s a general sense of uneasiness about that,” Cohen acknowledged. “It is not a rarity for a passenger to get into a cab in Boston, ask to pay with a credit card and be . . . refused or given a long song and dance about why it’s not a good idea for the cab driver.” A Herald reporter took several cab rides this week, asking after each trip whether he could pay with a credit card. Some drivers welcomed the plastic gladly, with one even offering the option. Another accepted a credit card payment but had a piece of black electrical tape draped over his card reader’s display. A third cabbie complained he made no money on credit card payments. “Why, you don’t got cash?” the driver said when he was offered MasterCard. After a pause, he added, “Drivers don’t make any money when you use the card.” Any answer other than “yes” is inappropriate, Cohen said. “If you say to the cab driver, ‘Do you take credit cards?’ and the cab driver says anything but ‘Yes,’ I consider that to be a bit of coercion,” Cohen said. “In the end, I think passengers are to some degree intimidated . . . and I think that’s wrong.” Boston taxi drivers do, in fact, profit from credit card transactions, Cohen noted. Card-processing fees are capped at 6 percent, and Cohen said those fees were factored into a 16-percent fare hike in 2009 to cover the cost of card readers and other business expenses such as gas price increases. That means cash-paying customers — currently, about two-thirds of Hub cab riders, Cohen said — are actually giving their drivers a bonus — another possible incentive for cabbies to discourage plastic. “If one third of the fares use credit cards, there’s another two thirds out there that aren’t even being charged that 6 percent,” Cohen said. “(Cabbies) win two out of three times currently. They are way far ahead.” Driver Naoufel Titiahi, 47, said credit cards are convenient for customers yet insisted they hurt his bottom line. “That 6 percent (processing fee) hurts us because we have family, kids to feed,” he said.