Edward Tutunjian, one of the largest owners of Boston cab medallions, agreed to plead guilty to payroll tax evasion, employing illegal aliens and failing to pay overtime wages today and agreed to pay more than $2.3 million in fines and restitution, the US Attorney's office reports. Read more.
Cara captured the scene in Copley Square where one cab driver rear-ended another.
The Globe reports, quotes one rep as saying the measure is not really to help cabbies but to help the "small" banks he says could be devastated if the cab medallions they lent money for collapse in value.
The Globe reports on an order issued by a federal judge yesterday that gives the city six months to revise its car-for-hire rules - and that if it wants to continue treating services such as Uber and Lyft differently, it it better be prepared to show some really good reasons.
All 6,000 of them under a new Boston Police regulation. What about Uber and Lyft drivers? They're not cabbies, so exempt from any BPD regulations, but the Globe reports legislation on Beacon Hill would require those drivers to get fingerprinted as well.
The T or MassDOT or somebody last week shifted the taxi stand at Forest Hills from in front of the station down Washington Street near Ukraine Way. The sign did not go unaltered for long.
Cab drivers are not happy about the shift, Jamaica Plain News reports.
Boston Magazine braces us for today's State House hearing on regulating ride-hailing service such as Uber and Lyft.
State Police report a cab driver who picked up a man and a woman in downtown Boston early this morning found himself stunned with a taser and his cab stolen from him on I-93 southbound near the Keystone Apartments. Read more.
The Boston Business Journal reports Worcester's Commerce Bank has just hired a senior vice president to head up lending to Boston taxi-fleet owners to buy medallions.
The Supreme Judicial Court today ruled today that Boston cabbies who "lease" cabs for daily shifts are independent contractors and so owed nothing under the state's minimum-wage and unemployment laws.
The state's highest court noted that the state law that defines "employees" explicitly excludes cab drivers.
The judges also rejected the cabbies' assertion that collectively the medallion and radio-assocation owners were "a singular employer exercising monolithic control over the taxicab industry."
As she waited at 1 a.m. today in this long cab line at Logan, Rachael Ringenberg wondered:
Totally makes sense not to encourage Uber here??
Xconomy reports the price of a cab medallion in Boston has dropped from $700,000 to $500,000 in just one year - and that Carriage News, a newspaper for the Boston taxi industry, stopped publishing last month.
Mary Moore writes she had actually been proud to have never taken an Uber car.
My patience ended this morning, when I stood on the street for 20 minutes in temperatures that hovered in the teens, waiting for a taxi that I'd ordered the night before.
According to a new study (warning, PDF) released by Uber, yesterday, its Boston drivers - of which it estimates there are now 10,000 - are earning an average of $19 per hour, ~33-percent more than area taxi drivers and chauffeurs.
The study came under immediate criticism because its research was co-conducted in-house by John Hall, Uber Technologies' "Head of Policy Research", so, yeah, he had a conflict of interest. He has a doctorate from Harvard University, though, so there's that.
Heavily regulated Boston cab owners last week filed a federal lawsuit against city and state regulators they charge have put them at a competitive disadvantage by letting Uber, Lyft and similar concerns steal their business.
In their lawsuit, filed in US District Court, the Boston Taxi Owners Association and two individual medallion owners charge the city is ruining their investments in expensive medallions by letting ride-share or "transportation network companies" pick up passengers for hire without any similar investment.
The Herald reports on an incident around 1:20 a.m. on Sunday at Boylston and Berkeley streets, in which four alleged goons got into an argument with their cab driver at Boylston and Berkeley streets that ended with them pulling him from the cab, beating him and leaving him lying on the ground.
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