The city is hacking away at dangerous yellow-cab drivers.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission has issued almost 5,000 safety-related tickets to the hacks so far this year — a 95 percent jump from 2013.
The huge increase comes even as the number of summonses decreased in the first three months of this year.
Tickets skyrocketed in April, when the agency ramped up enforcement as part of the city’s Vision Zero campaign to reduce traffic injuries and deaths.
The summonses are for speeding, tailgating, blowing stop signs, and unsafe lane changes, among others infractions.
Veteran cabby Pasang Sherpa, 47, said he was recently slapped with a summons for driving with a Bluetooth device in his ear, but claimed he wasn’t talking on the phone.
“They took away my cab license and my [cab registration] for a half-hour and gave it back,” Sherpa said, adding that he is waiting to receive the summons in the mail.
“I told the TLC officer to check the phone. Even the customer said I didn’t use it,” he added “The TLC said it’s a rule, and I cannot use the device.”
Through Aug. 31, a total of 4,812 tickets were issued this year, in contrast to 2,474 in 2013, according to TLC statistics.
The biggest month for the city came this past June, when 958 tickets were issued — a 279 percent spike when compared with the same month a year earlier.
In comparison, the TLC issued a mere 850 summonses for the first three months of 2014 combined — down 31 percent when held up against the 1,229 given out in January, February and March of 2013.
“As part of the TLC’s Vision Zero mission, we’ve placed safety-specific violations at the top of our list of priorities,” TLC Commissioner Meera Joshi said in a statement.
The numbers do not include tickets issued by the NYPD.
Additional reporting by Kyle Schnitzer