If you’ve taken a D.C. taxicab since the stroke of midnight last night, you may have been surprised by a cab driver insisting that you pay an extra $1 gas surcharge. Didn’t the gas surcharge expire in September? It did, but last week the D.C. Taxicab Commission quietly passed an emergency measure to bring back the $1 fee, beginning at 12:01 a.m. this morning and lasting until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, 2008.

“Prices continue to spiral up, drivers need help, and the Commission has no choice but to provide it in this way,” said Leon J. Swain, Jr., Chairperson of the Taxicab Commission, in a statement. Average gas prices in Washington, D.C. are currently $3.13 a gallon, according to WashingtonDCGasPrices.com.

Since the switch to time and distance meters won’t happen until April, we’ve pasted the zone chart with the $1 fees added below. If cab drivers ask you for an additional dollar starting today, they are well within their rights.

UPDATE at 5:02 p.m.: We could be wrong about this, but a quick search of Google News shows that the gas surcharge that went into effect overnight hasn’t been reported anywhere else (at least not online). We don’t mention this to toot our own horn — we were only alerted to the surcharge from our reader tipline, which prompted us to go to the D.C. Taxicab Commission web site. The web site was where we found a press release, dated yesterday, about the increase. Shouldn’t the Commission be doing a better job than that of alerting customers to fare changes? We can imagine a lot of taxi riders are going to dispute the fee this weekend if they haven’t heard a word about it. Local media outlets apparently only had one day of notice to get the word out, and none had done so as of this writing.