What Should You Do If Your Car is Stolen?

From an email to Tyler Cowen comes this excellent advice on what you should do if your car is ever stolen, which I had never even considered:

If your car is ever stolen, your first calls should be to every cab company in the city. You offer a $50 reward to the driver who finds it AND a $50 reward to the dispatcher on duty when the car is found. The latter is to encourage dispatchers on shift to continually remind drivers of your stolen car. Of course you should call the police too but first things first. There are a lot more cabs than cops so cabbies will find it first -and they’re more frequently going in places cops typically don’t go, like apartment and motel complex parking lots, back alleys etc. Lastly, once the car is found, a swarm of cabs will descend and surround it because cabbies, like anyone else, love excitement and want to catch bad guys. Cabbies know a lot of stuff*. I found a traveling shoplifting ring in Phoenix once. Professional shoplifters always take cabs. So do strippers going to work but that’s another story.

Another tip here.

The London Cab-otel

Here’s a fun way to tap into the booming tourism market that comes with the Olympic Games. David Weekes, a full-time cab driver in London, has transformed his iconic black cab into a hotel for one, available to rent for £50 (US$78.50) a night. CNNGo explains:

The taxi comes with a “memory foam” mattress, pillow, duvet, a bedside lamp and a Paddington Bear teddy. 

It also offers a solar-powered fridge, a radio, an iPad and camping chairs and a portable table on request. 

But Weekes does have two rules: no smoking and no pets. 

The listing to book the cab-otel is here.