Forced Ride Share=Forced Safety Risk

What is it with DC cabs? Let's not even talk about the fares. What I'm most confused about is this common practice of forcing people to share cabs.

I travel a lot for work. And DC is the only place where I have witnessed this ridiculous practice. For those of you that don't travel much, here's the deal: at National Airport, and at Union Station, when you arrive and need a taxi to get home, the dispatchers at the curb attempt to get 2 or 3 other people into the cab with you.

Why? You may ask. Well, apparently when they are busy, they are afraid they don't have enough cabs or the wait will be too long to accomodate everyone. So if you need a ride to Georgetown, they will yell out "who is going to Georgetown?" and they will keep yelling until they have more people to put into the cab.

I am extremely uncomfortable with this arrangement. I have had to share rides with strangers on numerous occasions. The ride home takes much longer, and as they drop passengers off, there is no rhyme nor reason to how they calculate your portion of the fare. Each time this has happened to me, I quietly stewed with anger. Not just because of the inconvenience. To me, it's a safety issue.

Most people that know me, know that I am a risk taker. And I'm very independent. But when it comes to issues of my personal safety, I am quite cautious. My door is always locked- I do not open it for strangers. I have lived alone, traveled alone, in many cities- and I believe that one of the reasons I've been able to do that with little to no problem has been my cautiousness.

And now I find myself in a scenario where I am not only forced to reveal my home address to a car full of strangers, I practically show them the way to my door. Am I being paranoid? Maybe, but I don't think so.

Do single women that live alone give their home address to strangers on the street? Of course not.

Do we give our home address to someone we meet in a bar? Nope.

Do we ask our blind online dates to pick us up at our home? Not gonna happen.

So I don't appreciate the assumption that it's OK to give up our privacy for the convenience of the cab company. I finally put my foot down when I arrived home the other night. When I got to the front of the line and the dispatcher asked me "where to?", I told him and then said "But I do not want to share". (Even saying that out loud felt funny, going against what I'd been taught as a toddler.)

So the other guy working there yelled out the name of my town (that's OK, it's a big town), but then yelled "Never mind! She says she doesn't want to share!"

Since it was about 20 degrees outside, I could feel the hard stares I got from the people in line behind me. I felt good that I stood up for myself, and yet guilty that I was "messing up the system". Geesh!

And now, no one but the creepy taxi driver that likes to make weird guttural noises knows where I live.