Cab Drivers Know What’s Best For Business

It’s going to take a lot more Operation Secret Riders to defeat the culture cab drivers have created:

More New Yorkers have come forward with stories of cabbies-gone-crazy when they tried to pay their fare with a credit card.

Sarah Snedeker, 24, says a driver locked her in a cab in Manhattan and spit in her face.

When his maniac driver refused to use plastic, Michael Blumenthal, 28, says he ended up running away from him through a Queens alleyway.

. . .

Snedeker and Blumenthal said they asked the drivers if they could pay with a credit card before hopping into the cab.

Snedeker wound up in a 5-minute argument when her driver suddenly said the credit card machine was broken as they sat outside her upper West Side apartment on Jan. 24. The driver locked the doors when she went to get out, trapping her “for what seemed like forever,” she said.

“He . . . put his face into the plexiglass separation, the section that is left open, and screamed ‘You f—— b—-!’ and spit at me, which I could feel spray all over my face,” she said. “I screamed the loudest I have ever screamed in my life: ‘Let me out of this cab!'”

Snedeker said she yanked on the door handle repeatedly as the cab idled on W. 89th St.

“Then, out of nowhere a man banged on the cab driver’s window and forced him to let me out,” she said. “It was horrifying.”

. . .

[Blumenthal’s] ride turned hellish about three blocks from his Queens home when the cabbie also switched his story, saying the credit card machine was broken.

After the cabbie threatened to drive Blumenthal back to Manhattan, the account executive said he attempted to get out of the car, opening the door at two red lights. Each time, the cabbie hit the gas. He finally got out of the cab at a red light at Crescent St. and 41st Ave. in Long Island City on Jan. 17.

“He then jumps out to come after me and I start to run,” Blumenthal said. “He ran back to his cab and threw it in reverse. I run into an alley and he stops to go in after me with the car.”

Blumenthal said the cabbie couldn’t catch him because the taxi got stuck behind a street-cleaning truck.