Some Phila. Cabbies Refuse Rides to Visually Impaired
by KYW’s John McDevitt
“Even though it’s the law, some cab drivers are refusing service to blind people in the city of Philadelphia because of their guide dogs. . . .”
What’s the real reason cab drivers aren’t picking up people with seeing-eye dogs? There’s a strict law in Philadelphia that any doggie “accidents” must be taken care of, or the dog’s owner receives a heavy fine. Thousands of cameras are programmed to swivel about in the hopes of recording a dog and its owner leaving a mess behind. When that happens, Philadelphia’s famed “Clean Streets” squads spring into action. They issue tickets which mandate thousand dollar fines.
The blind are unable to tell that their dog has had an “accident”. As a result, thousands of them have been heavily fined. Some have been driven by desperation to turn their white canes into “pooper-scoopers”. That has not worked well. When they approach a blind person swinging his cane where he thinks there may be the remains of an “accident”, throngs of pedestrians have been known to veer into the street. There, many have been run over by the fleets of huge, empty buses that careen through town at high rates of speed to provide the illusion that public transportation is “vitally important”.
So, the people who train the seeing-eye dogs have taught their dogs, when they feel the need, to nuzzle against their owner, who is told that signal means the dog is tired, needs to stop walking, and ride in a taxicab. Before the owner can get in, the dog, as it’s been trained, jumps into the cab, and does its business out of camera range.
Then, it returns to its owner, gives a signal to continue walking, and they go on down the street, as if nothing had happened. The taxi driver, separated from the rear compartment by a hermetically sealed sheet of bullet-proof glass, has no idea that there’s a mess in the back of his cab. Neither, of course, does the dog’s owner.
Native Philadelphians, most of whom live in the utter squalor that characterizes the city, are unaware that there’s anything unusual when they enter and exit the cab. In the City of Brotherly Love, the only people who will ride in cabs are, in fact, native Philadelphians. To get business from the dwindling number of out-of-towners who can be inveigled to enter Philadelphia, the cabs are hosed out once a week in an environmentally approved strawberry farm far off in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
After several years, a growing number of Philadelphia cabbies have made the connection between seeing-eye dogs and the intolerable condition of their cabs. As a result, they tend to drive by the blind. Class-action lawsuits against the cab companies were discouraged when it was pointed out that few, if any, of the blind people ignored by the cabbie realized that they were waiting for a cab, or even knew that they had been passed by.
The dogs, of course, were allowed to sue, but Philadelphia’s archaic court system did not recognize the validity of dogs as plaintiffs. “What’s next, are we going to have chickens sue Colonel Sanders?”, asked the disallowing judge. Plans are afoot to replace him with a more progressive jurist who will follow the Philadelphia tradition of helping Philadelphia lawyers.
