Club for Growth

Adventures in Cab Driving

I took a cab both to and from lunch today. I love chatting with the drivers because they've always got something interesting to say (here's a previous post on the subject).

The first driver today was updating me on the so-called "war" that taxi drivers are having with the local government. The pretext to the war is that the city uses speeding cameras that photograph cars if they go too fast. If you're caught, you get a poignant letter in the mail several days later with a picture of your car as proof of your offense (they identify you by your license plate number).

These cameras are cash cows for the city, and naturally, cab drivers are hit the hardest by this "taxi tax" since they drive all day long. At first, cab drivers tipped each other off to let everyone know where the cameras were stationed. Count that as a battle victory for the cabbies.

But the government got wise to this and installed cameras in unmanned parked cars. Every so often, they'd move the cars leaving the cab drivers guessing. Score one for the government.

Now it seems the war has escalated. I was told today that cab drivers are using aerosol cans that spray an invisible film over their license plates so when a speeding camera takes a picture of a car, the license plate can't be identified because the spray somehow turns black on the photo film. Clever, eh?

Stay tuned for how the government will respond to that.

As for the other cab driver who brought me back from lunch today, he was a professional. A professional stock trader, that is. Or so he seemed. On his dashboard sat his laptop with a wireless modem providing him with real-time quotes and charts.

Being a former stock trader myself, I found the guy to be quite knowledgable. He told me he was a technical trader, which is kind of whacked out, but he knew his stuff. He was talking about 200-day moving averages, Bollinger Bands, and dead cat bounces. I asked him what he thought of Level 3 Communications (ticker is LVLT). He said it's due for a new high. Great, but I'm not holding my breath.

All in all, you can look to the 3-4% growth in GDP to prove that we're no longer in a recession, but when cab drivers are trading stocks again, you know the investor class is roaring back to full strength.

Cab drivers. You gotta love these guys. They are the salt of the earth.

Posted by Andrew Roth on March 3, 2006 5:13 PM | Trackback (1) | Print | #