Maryland Injury Law Center
Most of my information and opinions on taxis and taxi drivers come from the television show Taxi. Unlike most 70s/80s television shows, Taxi holds up fairly well on reruns.
Anyway, Baltimore City and Prince George’s County cab companies are a different animal than Alex Reager’s Sunshine Cab Company. There are a lot of single cab operators who disproportionately have MAIF insurance with a 20k/40k coverage limit. For people outside of Maryland, MAIF is a state-owned car insurance company for Maryland car owners who cannot get insurance elsewhere but are licensed to drive in Maryland. Let’s be polite and call these folks high-risk drivers.
It is borderline insane, given how much time a taxi driver spends on the road compared to the rest of us, that (1) he/she may drive with a shoddy driving record, and that (2) taxi drivers may drive around with 20k/40k coverage limits.
There would be a lot of wisdom in raising the bar for who can drive a taxicab in Maryland and in requiring taxis to have a minimum 100k/300k in insurance coverage. That level of coverage is insufficient, but it would be a start, and we could phase higher limits in.