About 3,000 New York City taxi drivers routinely overcharged riders over two years by surreptitiously fixing their meters to charge rates that would normally apply only to trips outside the five boroughs, according to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.

. . .

The Taxi and Limousine Commission directed meter manufacturers to modify the equipment, to warn riders when the rate rises.
The drivers’ scheme, the commission said, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip. The drivers, officials said, flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million.

An air traffic controller’s stunt in letting his 9-year-old twins direct planes has landed with a thud — on the kids.

The brother and sister are blaming themselves because their father has been suspended for bringing them to work at Kennedy Airport, a relative said Thursday.

. . .

Mayor Bloomberg also weighed in, saying he was mystified by Duffy’s stunt.

“It was certainly inappropriate,” said Bloomberg, a licensed pilot.

I’m almost more offended by where some people take their dogs than where these children were and what they were doing . . .

Location Scout: JFK.

The Bloomy Law & Order event also conveniently came a couple weeks after the Voice reported that the mayor handed the son of a close friend a $114,000 a year job at what’s now called NYC Media. The mayor’s managers never even bothered to interview anyone else for the post, or comply with the city’s own equal opportunity rules.

The mayor’s Law & Order minority hiring plan is also a step or two divorced from everyday reality. Since Wierson, Scotland and a few other miscreants were booted last spring, Bloomberg’s managers have filled at least four top jobs at the city station, all of which have gone to whites who either worked at Bloomberg’s own private TV outfit, or who are friends of station executives. Not a single minority has been hired.

It has come to this: Pop-Tarts and Doritos have trumped homemade brownies as acceptable foods allowed to be sold at bake sales inside the city’s public schools.

As the shared-ride program was unveiled yesterday, an undercover Post reporter rode along with three Upper East Side women and gave them a taste of some of the uncouth behavior they could encounter when crammed in the back seat with fellow commuters.

Turning on the dreaded taxi TV was the first of countless annoying ways our reporter was able to disrupt the ride.

Reading too much into actions, manufacturing an “issue” where nothing is there and proving the negative — sounds a lot like blogging actually! And this after fewer than two dozen people actually took advantage of the shared-ride program.

Dolphins may be among the smartest mammals in the animal kingdom, but how exactly did one end up in Newtown Creek?

Location Scout: Newtown Creek.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating employees at the Kennedy Airport air-traffic control tower for apparently allowing a school-age child to transmit directions to pilots.

Location Scout: JFK.

Using one calculation method, the city Parks Department could estimate the price of an oak tree 24 inches in diameter at $15,600. Using another, they could charge an unfathomable $123,500.

Often, the bill falls somewhere in between — and always without explanation.

The City Council plans to vote legislation today that’s meant to clear things up.

. . .

Giving builders the option of planting trees would be a particular boost for the Island, Altman added, because it could help move development more quickly and potentially lower costs. The Parks Department charges $1,900 to plant one 8-inch sapling, and usually takes months to do so; builders who testified before the Council said they pay anywhere between $300 and $500 to purchase the same tree.

“It’s been a disaster. It is one of these massive computer projects that very seldom ever is successful,” said Bloomberg, who made his fortune with financial data systems.

Now imagine that sentence applied to congestion pricing had that been implemented (kind of amazing, by the way, that Bloomberg has kept plugging congestion pricing now that the MTA is having money trouble).

Now there are two aspects to CityTime — one is a paperless timekeeping system and the other is the aforementioned punch clock doodad. It would be interesting to know where the problem is. A paperless timekeeping system theoretically has some positive benefits: it is “green” in the sense that there are no more paper timecards and automating the timekeeping system theoretically means the city needs fewer timekeepers. On the other hand, the biometric punch clocks that unnecessarily agitated desk workers always seemed like a huge waste of money. You only need punch clocks if you’re worried workers are leaving early — instead of babysitting them why not just make sure there is enough actual work to do?

Another awesome tidbit about the punch clocks is that instead of using the actual time an employee punches in and out, the machines instead round up and down to the nearest fifteen-minute increment. So that, say, an employee punches in at 9:07 and leaves at 4:53, that employee will have “worked” a full seven-hour day. Over the course of a work week, that’s 70 minutes free. Brilliant! (And if the employee punches in at 8:52 and punches out at 4:53 the machine will give him or her fifteen minutes of comp time — love it!) The other unintended consequence is that employees are less likely to hang out after five to work on projects. We’ve heard of both scenarios occurring.