So the other day, Web Watch was out on the road and needed to get from our hotel to a restaurant a few miles away.
We definitely had choices available, as taking a taxi wasn’t our only option — and we didn’t necessarily need to have door-to-door service as being dropped off anywhere in the general neighborhood would have been perfectly acceptable.
But being on a tight budget, we wanted to know ahead of time how much our taxi ride was going to cost us.
Taxi!: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver
That’s why we’re glad that there’s a website like TAXI FARE FINDER around, as it allows us to put in our current location and planned destination – and then their database of taxicab fees and popular routes will kick back an estimated fare ballpark that we were able to use to determine exactly where our $20 was going to take us.
And in a better use case, we were able to prove that taking a taxi by ourselves to the airport was not the most cost-effective means of travel that day – it always pays to chat up the other people in the cabbie line, doesn’t it? Our shared cab ride laughed all the way to the airport while we looked on at the poor (and now, poorer) single taxi riders next to us in the airport travel lanes.
Granted, the rates in TAXI FARE FINDER may vary wildly from your actual experience as the system can’t know about specific travel issues you may run into — but it’s good enough to give you a rough estimate… and sometimes that’s all you need to have to know whether you’re getting screwed over by your cabbie or if they’re giving you a reasonable fare.