Results tagged “crownvictoria”

The Taxi and Limousine Commission has made it official: Cabs purchased after October 1, 2008 must get at least 25 miles per gallon. Then, after fall of 2009, newly purchased cabs must get at least 30 miles per gallon. As the AP puts it, this means "taxi fleet owners, who must replace their cabs every three to five years, will probably be forced to buy fuel-efficient hybrids, which run partly on electricity." The Taxicab Board...

On the Gothamist Newsmap, one of the incidents is "Pedestrian Struck | West 51 Btw 9th & 10th Ave I/f/o Club Posh Manhattan, NY | 5/9/2007 2:14 a.m." It turns out that the pedestrian isn't any ol' pedestrian -- it happens to be Steve Green, millionaire real-estate developer, onetime member of the "worst landlords of the city" club, and high-profile gay divorcee.

"Our taxicabs will be getting a makeover with graphics that communicate passenger information in a better and more uniform way," Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairman Matthew Daus said.

Continue reading "Clarifying Taxi Charges"

Did you see CBS 2 Investigates: Too Good For Gridlock? The too-good-for-gridlock offender is Isaac Heschel, a diamond dealer who is also a rabbi and volunteers time as a chaplain to the MTA and Port Authority Police. Heschel frequently uses sirens and lights in his Crown Victoria, but neither agency gave him sirens or lights, meaning that Heschel pimped the car out for emergency fun himself.

Gothamist likes to eat and can understand getting the late night munchies. But when we're on the road for business late on a Sunday night in a nice hotel that has room service and we get a food stipend, we usually order in. Apparently, if you're Duaner Sanchez in Miami, that's not what you do. Some details have been released about the early Monday morning accident the Mets reliever was involved in. Sanchez, his younger brother, and a "female friend" were all in a taxi when it was hit by a Crown Victoria on I-95 at 1:44 a.m. It's nice to know that the Mets don't have a curfew. As an aside - who knew that non-cops and old people drove Crown Vics (we assume that the driver wasn't a senior citizen as it was after their bedtimes). A Florida Highway Patrol lieutenant said that the accident could have been a lot worse for everyone involved, "That time of night is when you have the real horrendous wrecks."

Who knew that New York City was a Logan's Run for taxicabs? A lot of people apparently because dealing with "out of date" taxis turns out to be a nice subset of the Taxi business. Since 1996, taxis that are a part of a fleet in New York can be no older than three years old. The catch here is that that age limit is only in New York. In lesser cities like, for instance, Chicago, the age limit for taxis is anywhere from two to four years longer. After their time is up, many cabs are stripped down, reworked and moved on out to other pastures. But what exactly does that mean? In today's City section the Times find out by following a cab on the way out:

The Taxi and Limousine Commission has given the okay to introduce hybrid cars as new taxi cabs, starting as soon as this fall. The six new car models, two Hondas, two Toyotas, a Lexus (!), and a Ford, will be more expensive than the old stand-by of the Crown Victoria, but they will be more fuel efficient. Commissioner Matthew Daus says the Crown Vic gets 18 miles a gallon, while the hybrids get at least 29 miles. The NY Times has a graphic that breaks down the models, their cost, fuel efficiency and more. The TLC stalled on the issue of hybrid vehicles because legroom would be compromised; most Crown Vics have about 46 inches of legroom whereas the hybrids have around 36 inches. The NY Post notes that Commissioner Daus is 5'8". Gothamist is pretty excited about the new cabs, but we can wait for the technology to remove gross bus exhaust (especially on a hot summer day)!

Yesterday, the Design Trust for Public Space and Parsons held the Redesigning Taxi Cab discussion, and Newsday's Ellis Henican has a funny column about reactions and thoughts. He says that no one "seemed too eager yesterday to sing the praises the industry's current workhorse, Ford's 12-mile-a-gallon Crown Victoria, famous for its sunken seats and stringy legroom," but Taxi and Limousine Commissioner Matthew Daus said, "They're not that horrible. They're selling them on 42nd Street as Matchbox cars." Ha. Daus did emphasize "I feel very strong about the taxi staying yellow," and from Newsday's slideshow of images, it seems like most people agree. But this effort to discuss a redesign sounds lofty Gothamist, as much as we love it, because it seems that the TLC has some bureaucratic problems to deal with. Like auctioning discounted taxi medallions for fuel-efficient cars, but not actually approving fuel-efficient cars for use as cabs, as reported by the NY Times. That is seriously hilarious. Daus claims the TLC does want hybrids, just hybrids with lots of legroom, since passengers complain about legroom most, and not many of them have that much.