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The long-awaited Sept. 1 celebration when every single D.C. cab would allow credit card payment is now 30 more days away.
About 4,200 District cabs said they would not meet the D.C. Taxicab Commission’s Sept. 1 deadline to install electronic payment readers in their cabs and applied to the agency for a 30-day extension. That amounts to about 65 percent of D.C.’s fleet of approximately 6,500 cabs.
The deadline to apply for the extension was midnight Thursday.
In order to qualify for the extension, the cab’s payment service provider had to apply on the cab’s behalf and prove it had concrete plans in place to meet the extended deadline at the end of September.
The Taxicab Commission said it expects to have 2,500 credit card readers installed by the end of August and have nearly 100 percent compliance by the end of September, according to Neville Waters, the spokesman for the commission.
If a cab does not have a credit card reader by Sept. 1, the original deadline, or a letter on hand saying it was approved for an extension, “they will be impounded,” Waters says.
Photo by Darrow Montgomery