Taxi

Injunction halts lower taxi mileage rates A Baltimore Circuit Court judge has granted a group of Baltimore taxi drivers a temporary injunction to stop the state Public Service Commission from making lower mileage rates effective Sunday, a representative of the group said yesterday. Rates were set to decrease from $2.20 per mile to $1.65 March 1, an automatic adjustment based on a twice-annual review of gas prices in January and July. A flat rate from downtown hotels to BWI Marshall Airport would also decrease from $30 to $22. Two cab companies have petitioned the PSC, which regulates taxi rates in Baltimore, Baltimore County and Cumberland, to keep mileage rates the same.

Gangsta Granny's getting no love. No signal 10s, no flags, no regulars. In plain English: No customers and no money. Now the sleepy scene outside the Doubletree Hotel in North Baltimore seems to promise more of the same. "Nothing's moving," she says with a weary sigh, edging onto University Parkway. It's just after 10 in the morning, but Lucy Davis, aka Gangsta Granny, has been on the job six hours already. So far it is shaping up as a so-so day, maybe worse. For cabbies like her, that's life nowadays.

Motorists arrested for drunken driving after Labor Day festivities in Baltimore saloons won't have the excuse that they didn't have another way home. AAA Mid-Atlantic is teaming up with Yellow Cab and the State Highway Administration to offer free cab rides for alcohol-indulging drivers as part of its Tipsy? Taxi! program. Free rides will be available by calling 877-963-TAXI between 4 p.m. tomorrow and 4 a.m. Tuesday. Riders must be age 21 or older and have been drinking at a bar or restaurant in Baltimore.

The 65th Venice International Film Festival got under way last week with a star-studded lineup, including Brad Pitt and George Clooney. But you don't have to be a film fan to visit this gem of an Italian city. In fact, if Hollywood made a movie about Venice, it could easily be called Where the Tourists Are. The city receives up to 20 million visitors a year. 1 Ride a gondola on the Grand Canal: The city's main thoroughfare, the Grand Canal, is nearly two miles long and is lined with churches, palaces and other historic buildings.

It's not 'just the facts, Ma'am,' " says Alex Gibney, channeling TV's Dragne t's Jack Webb. The writer-director-producer, who won the best documentary Oscar this year for Taxi to the Darkside and is currently promoting Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, abhors the notion that a filmmaker can capture reality simply by pointing his camera at it. That's why this disciplined and prolific artist (he also executive-produced Charles Ferguson's Oscar-nominated...

Taxi drivers at BWI Marshall Airport are looking for options to protect themselves after one of them was shot in the stomach during an attempted robbery. The drivers who gathered Monday to plead for witnesses to come forward said they don't feel safe after last Wednesday's shooting of Aston Beadle, 63, who was ambushed as he arrived home in the Woodlawn area after work. Beadle was being treated at Maryland Shock Trauma Center and is expected to survive. "It's terrible that something like this would happen to someone just trying to make a living," said Russell Brannan, who has been driving cabs for 32 years.

Hailing a cab in Baltimore could get more difficult this summer. With the average gas price threatening to top $4 a gallon, several Baltimore cabdrivers said yesterday that the steep jump in fuel costs is taking money out of their pockets and forcing them to wait more at taxi stands, where riders come to them, rather than driving around the city and burning fuel while trying to pick up fares. "You can't drive around all day," said Otisi Okiyi, 50, a Diamond Cab driver, while parked at a taxi stand at the Inner Harbor yesterday.

Since assuming the city's highest office, Mayor Sheila Dixon is usually driven around town in a bulky Ford Expedition, a bodyguard at the wheel. And yet there she was yesterday in the back of a taxi. A cost-cutting measure? Not quite. The cab was unusual, the first of its kind. It was a green-and-yellow Toyota Prius taxi, an environmentally friendly, fuel-efficient, gas-and-electric compact vehicle that is to be one of many such cabs on Baltimore's streets. "Nice ride," Dixon said as she stepped out of the Prius at a trail entrance in Druid Hill Park, where she announced a series of events tied to Baltimore's Green Week, which kicks off Friday.

Drivers from Baltimore City Cab, Diamond Cab and other companies clogged up a taxi stand yesterday on the side of Penn Station usually reserved for Yellow Cab taxis, protesting that company's exclusive rights contracts to pick up passengers at many downtown hotels, hospitals and other places in the city. About 20 drivers took part in the protest, which was organized in response to what many of them say is the newest exclusive deal awarded Yellow Cab at the downtown Renaissance Hotel. Protesters said the hotel had allowed all taxi companies to pick up passengers before March 24, the day an exclusive-rights contract Renaissance officials signed with Yellow Cab went into effect.

Alex Gibney's Oscar-nominated Taxi to the Dark Side sheds welcome, if not comforting, light on the half-truths that have surrounded the United States' treatment of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other military installations throughout the world. It is, at once, among the most riveting and hard-to-watch documentaries of recent years. Gibney's 2005 Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room laid bare the festering wound that is corporate greed and hubris in 21st-century America.