Cracking down on cabs

The Rockville Centre Police Department has begun stepping up enforcement of the village’s taxi laws, cracking down on cab companies that solicit fares in the streets and tie up traffic in the downtown area.

The decision came from Police Commissioner Charles Gennario, after he sat through the recent hearings and public comment sessions focusing on Village Car Service’s application to operate in the village, and heard residents talking about the existing service.

“The taxi laws are tough,” Gennario said. “They’re tough for cops to enforce when they have other issues like bar brawls and things like that. You have to follow the cab, and there’s a lot of investigation that goes on before you can enforce the village code.”

Police will be alert to violations for failure to possess or display a village taxi license, failure to keep cabs clean, and searching for or soliciting passengers on the street, which violates village code.

According to Gennario, the Police Department’s enforcement of village taxi laws has slipped over the years. But as he listened to residents discuss taxi service during the hearings, and read Letters to the Editor in the Herald, he decided that he needed to do something.

“So I told my guys we’re going to start enforcing it,” he said. “But I felt that, since we haven’t done it in such a long time, as a matter of courtesy to the biggest offenders, we would let them know prior.”

Gennario sent a letter to the three taxi services that operate in the village that he said most often violate the village code: Frank’s Taxi, of Oceanside, Village Car Service, of Lynbrook, and Dawson Taxi, of Baldwin.

He also said that police would increase inspections of the village’s licensed taxi company, All-Island Transportation. Gennario said that officers would be checking to make sure that drivers are licensed, that All-Island has all the required permits and that the cars are clean and safe.

“From the complaints that [the Herald has published] from the citizenry about the condition of the cabs,” Gennario said, “we have stepped up our inspection of All-Island.”

One of the things Gennario hopes will change with the new focus on enforcement is the state of the downtown area at night, which he said sometimes resembles Queens. “[The cabs] stop in the middle of Park Avenue looking for fares,” he said. “It causes traffic jams and it’s a mess. It’s a quality-of-life issue that I have to address.”