Unhappy fares steer N.Y. cabbies straight to court.

The cabdriver, a recent immigrant from Pakistan, felt perfectly justified in slugging the unruly passenger. In his country, he explained, “Women aren’t allowed to speak disrespectfully to men.”

Another threatened two riders with a baseball bat. A third exposed himself to the 16-year-old girl riding in the back seat.

New Yorkers take 400,000 taxi rides each day. They accept, as a matter of course, that they will be whizzing through red lights, playing chicken with lumbering city buses and dodging bicycle messengers who dart like mosquitoes through traffic.

But when something happens that goes beyond the hair-raising norm, there is the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission’s taxi court.

Each day, about 400 cases are decided by the administrative law judges--usually moonlighting lawyers--who sit in the eight tiny, windowless hearing rooms. Another 200 or so cases are scheduled, but the drivers or complainants do not show up.

The load has doubled over the past year, thanks to more city inspectors on the streets looking for technical violations and more citizens who are fed up enough to go to the trouble of filing a complaint and seeing it through.

Taxi court is no-frills justice, just the cabbie and his accuser in front of a judge with a tape recorder. As often as not, the hearing ends up as a shouting match. When it is over, judges make a practice of offering complaining passengers an escort--and a head start--out a back way.

“Is this Russia or is this the United States?” one driver demanded the other day, as Judge Jane Owens fined him $200 for driving with a license that had been revoked over his failure to pay a ticket.

The agency has undergone a transformation in its 14 months under 38-year-old Chairman Jack S. Lusk. When he came into office, drivers routinely ignored summonses. Citizens often had to wait months before their complaints were processed, in part because the computer system was not up to the job. And one recent chairman had left amid a corruption inquiry.

“I decided that no one was going to take us seriously if the Taxi and Limousine Commission operated like a little rinky-dink, mom-and-pop store. The approach has been that the agency has to be very active in order to be taken seriously,” said Lusk, who is waiting to see if he will be reappointed under the new mayor, David N. Dinkins.

The commission’s headquarters is in one of the seedier sections of Manhattan. Lusk regularly shares his office with undercover police officers doing surveillance of the drug deals that go down on the 42nd Street sidewalks below.

The commission has had to triple the size of the area where taxi drivers wait, sometimes for hours, to have their cases heard. Nonetheless, it is standing room only many afternoons in the noisy, litter-strewn room that seats 60, and further expansion is planned.

“It looks like something out of a Dostoevsky novel,” concedes Abbot Solomon, assistant director of adjudications, making himself heard above the din.

No one will dispute that driving a cab is one of the toughest ways to make a living in New York. Cabbies complain that they are too often forced to lose entire workdays fighting what driver’s union Secretary-Treasurer Larry Goldberg calls “a lot of Mickey Mouse stuff,” such as minor discrepancies in paper work.

One Columbia University professor, for example, recently hauled a driver in front of Judge Owens contending that the cabbie had made a face at the size of his tip.

Most of the citizen complaints involve drivers who refuse to take passengers where they want to go, who endanger passengers, who overcharge or who behave abusively. And as taxi driving has become almost exclusively a job held by new immigrants, there are also cultural misunderstandings and language problems as well.

Stepping into a cab, “you don’t get a guy named Sid any more,” Solomon says. However, in New York City, you may get one of 3,000 guys named Singh, including 37 Amarjit Singhs, according to the commission’s listing of drivers that it has licensed. There is also a racial component to many of the complaints, with blacks in particular frequently charging that drivers refuse to pick them up. In a hearing last week before Judge Peter Buzescu, a middle-aged black man contended that a driver at Kennedy International Airport waved him away and then stopped for a white woman standing a few feet behind him. The driver denied the incident, and it came down to his word against the complainant’s.

“It’s hard for me to believe that someone would make up that whole story, and go to the pain of writing a letter and coming up here if it wasn’t true,” said the judge, an attorney who had driven a cab himself as a Romanian immigrant working his way through law school. Buzescu fined the driver $100.