Bangalore Autos... Of the people..... But FOR the people??

This post is about a subject very close to my heart... The Indian public transport system... Or rather, its lack of a system.
I considered myself a person who can be a little short tempered, and sometimes even bitchy and nasty, but never someone who actively harbored any hatred towards someone else.... till I came to Bangalore. I actually am starting to actively HATE Bangalore auto drivers. Every last one of them.
I honestly want to know why they have a meter if they don't bother to use it? Or if they do bother to use it, on what grounds are we expected to pay them 10 bucks extra? And why do they think it is justified to ask someone to pay 50 bucks to travel less than two kilometres.. even better, how do they have the audacity to suggest such a thing.. with a straight face!! The ones I can never get over are when they ask you to pay them double the meter reading, when at the most the law says you should pay them 1 and a 1/2, or when I have to shell out a 120 bucks to travel a distance I can walk in under ten minutes, just because it's 11.30 PM.
And because I can't come up with any plausible explanation for this behavior other than the obvious 'they're just crooks', I frequently pose this question to the drivers in question. Their responses range from the ludicrous (It's night, so we can charge extra... ???!!!?) to the illogical (we won't get a return passenger... this is my problem because..?), to the generally annoying (the sheepish smile and vague shrug..... oh my god! say something!!), to the aggressive (because I said so, and I know you won't get another ric for a while) and the downright egotistical (It's my due...it's really really not..)
And what really annoys me about Bangalore auto drivers is that they're inconsistent crooks. Once you have finished haggling with them, they start the whole process again on reaching your destination demanding additional compensation for a three minute traffic jam you encountered twenty minutes ago. You just can't trust the guys!
And really? We have to pay them extra because they hit traffic?? Geez, what are the chances of that happening?!
But in all honesty, our ric drivers have the most warped view on how to do their job... they think they're doing us a favor by giving us a lift, but they're being paid for it... They can't even follow through on their thought process of doing us a favor because they'll refuse to take us where we want to go... They think we have to pay for any hardship in their job - from a petrol hike to a road block.. Can you imagine if we went to work everyday and tried to sell this kind of attitude?
The strange thing is that I'm not alone in my daily misery, there's a whole city full of people sharing my plight.. and my fury, and yet somehow no one seems to be able to do anything about it. From staging city wide coups of boycotting auto rickshaws, to generally raging and screaming individually everyday, we still seem to be losing this battle.
The problem is, you can only win an argument when the other party concedes that you won. When you're faced with this stony, implacable, 'deal with it' glare, your only choice it appears, is to subside and seethe within.