Taxi Drivers Take the Lead in Honesty – Honesty Story #7

January 30th, 2007

Taxi drivers often only get recognized for the bad reputation of their driving, especially in some of the larger cities around the world. If you go to Latin America, in some cases, you could consider it a substitute for a rollercoaster ride. They do deserve some positive mention though. This story shows another side of taxi drivers you might have not know about. Last week, I wrote about the honest taxi driver in L.A. that returned $350,000 in diamonds. This week, I’m writing about the results of a very interesting nine-country survey involving 900 taxi drivers. The results might surprise some of you.

This study was conducted in 2005 by PointSec and focused primarily on lost mobile electronics. Surveyed were taxi drivers in Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States. The sampled cities in their survey were Sydney, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Paris, Munich, London, Great Britain and Chicago. The most staggering number of lost items was found in the Chicago company’s taxi fleet. There were 85,619 mobile phones, 21,460 PDAs and 4,425 laptops left behind by passengers. Only London’s sampled taxi fleet had a higher incident rate of 0.21 of lost laptops per taxi cab versus Chicago’s 0.18. Pretty amazing figures!

The great and very compelling part of this survey was that thanks to the honesty of the taxi drivers, globally 80% of passengers had their mobile phones returned to them and an amazing 96% of PDAs and laptops also made their way back to their owners. This week, taxi drivers definitely took the lead in demonstrating honesty.

(Photo Wikipedia Commons)

Entry Filed under: Honesty

               

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