It’s only Wednesday, and the Uber leglislation fracas has already roughed up the public image of Washington cab drivers. Now the week’s about to get a little worse for the District’s taxis: Witness the increasing popularity on Twitter and Facebook of D.C. Cabs Suck.
The site is a take on the frustrations of hailing a cab in Washington. It initially comes off like another arm of Uber’s crafty marketing effort, but is actually the unconnected but fortuitously timed creation of Joshua Belhumuer and his co-workers at creative agency Brink.
A few weeks ago, Belhumuer took a cab to meet a client. When he asked for a receipt, the driver only gave him a blank piece of paper.
“If I can’t use my AmEx card and I can’t get a good receipt, it makes it really hard for our bookkeeping to get reimbursed for that,” Belhumuer says.
Belhumuer and his co-workers set to work making the site in their free time. At the suggestion of users on Reddit’s Washington section, Belhumuer contacted lawyer Daniel Hornal, who is on a one-man quest to reform the city’s cabs through lawsuits, to write a guide to passengers’ rights for the site.
Belhumuer hopes that chatter about the site and the hashtag it spawned on Twitter (#dccabssuck) will make people talk more about how to improve the industry. Fortunately for Belhumuer and his ilks, the two proposals he says he would implement at the D.C. Taxicab Commission—-a uniform color scheme and adding credit-card readers to cabs—-passed a Council vote yesterday.