Metro

19K taxi drivers accused of ripping off passengers won’t face charges

It was one of the biggest scandals in the taxi industry’s history, but nearly 90 percent of the 21,819 cabbies accused of ripping off passengers with inflated fares will get off scot-free, The Post has learned.

In a stunning move, the Taxi & Limousine Commission is giving a free ride to 19,515 yellow-cab drivers caught setting their meters to the higher, out-of-town rate while traveling around the city.

Overall, officials estimated that unwary passengers were fleeced for $1.1 million between 2008 and 2010. Of that, $238,854 in overcharges was attributed to the cabbies who will escape penalties.

When the sweeping swindle was discovered in 2010, officials promised to come down hard on the worst offenders and deal on a case-by-case basis with cabbies who were cited no more than nine times.

TLC Commissioner David Yassky told The Post the TLC ultimately decided only to pursue drivers with at least 10 violations.

“We are confident that a driver who committed 10 or more overcharges did so intentionally, and the fact that courts have routinely upheld our summonses in those cases shows we were correct,” Yassky said. “In the cases of drivers with fewer than 10 incidences of inappropriate Rate Code 4 usage, we recognized the possibility that these instances may have been inadvertent and we exercised our proper discretion to decline to take enforcement action.”

Rate 4 refers to the meter code for the suburban rate, which is double the in-town rate.

One source conceded that the sheer volume of cases made it “administratively unwieldy” to bring charges against every alleged culprit.

Those cabbies who didn’t get a pass were hammered with $2,171,259 in fines. Fifty-nine were also hit with criminal charges, and 318 lost their licenses.

“We identified the serious offenders who posed a real threat to the integrity of the taxi system and took strong action against them,” declared Yassky.

The law allows cabbies who lose their licenses to reapply for new ones after a year. One official said about two dozen bounced drivers took advantage of that law and “a few” were allowed to return.

On his radio show this morning, Mayor Bloomberg said the TLC’s decision made sense considering the mountain of cases it had to resolve.

“In a practical sense, it would take forever,” Bloomberg said. “And if they’ve done it once or twice, the argument would be,` I hit the wrong button by accident.’ No judge is going to hold them culpable.

“What we’ve chosen to do is rational thing given the law of big numbers. You go after the most egregious cases and those cases, incidentally, are the ones you;re most likely to win. And hopefully that will send a message to everyone.”

Records show that 13,315 of the 19,515 drivers who caught a break overcharged passengers only once or twice. That left 6,200 who did it between 3 and 9 times without being penalized.