Results tagged “thetaxi”

The Taxi and Limousine Commission has announced that it and the NYPD will be embarking on an undercover program to crackdown on bad cabbie behavior. Cabbies are supposed to let passengers pay with credit cards, not to mention not be rude and chatting on a cell phone during the ride, but the TLC says they hear otherwise.

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...

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Waring Ave. and White Plains Rd. in the Bronx, a water rescue at the foot of East 79th St. in Manhattan, and a pedestrian fatally struck at Cropsy Ave. and the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. A Jewish family had to have their housekeeper call animal control to report a five-foot-long snake in their Brooklyn driveway. The definitions of midtown and the stress of establishing boundaries. New...

The Taxi Workers Alliance announced plans for a second taxi strike on October 22. Last month, members of the TWA taxi union participated in a two-day strike to protest new technology, including GPS and credit card payment systems, in cabs. Many drivers feel the technology is unproven and useless (for one, if it breaks down, then the entire meter breaks down), while the Taxi and Limousine Commission says that the new technology benefits everyone (for example, if you lose something in a cab, you could call 311 and mention where the cab dropped you off, instead of needing the medallion number, to track the cab).

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a water rescue off West St. at Battery Place in Manhattan, missing children on Grimsby St. on Staten Island, and a DOA floater in the Harlem River off Manhattan.
• New Yorkers may have just seen their water bill rates hiked 11.5% three months ago, but officials are now saying property owners can expect a rate increase of another 18% as early as the start of next year.
• Idle speculation at Eater about the future of the Brooklyn Inn in Boerum Hill is not appreciated by the bar's manager. [Caution: strong language]
• Mayor Bloomberg worked out a tentative new contract with the NYPD detectives union that promises a 20% pay raise over the next four years via higher salaries. A first grade detective with more than 20 years on the force will be able to earn more than $118,000 a annually.
• Fare Wars II: The Taxi Strike's Back. NYC cab drivers will have another go at striking in protest of GPS devices in their cars this Wednesday.
• Newark Mayor Cory Booker has a special vested interested in improving living conditions for young people in his city. He serves as a Big Brother to three teen-aged young men, attempting to mentor them towards the straight and narrow.
• The Daily Intelligencer locates a rather large TBS billboard that will be salt in the wounds of disappointed Mets fans.
• A man was shot to death by the man he was playing dice with outside a building on West 131st St. in Manhattan this morning.

Monday will mark the entrance of a new taxi logo on New York cabs, in a move to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the iconic yellow cab. Cars that appear for their annual inspection will be required to sport the new logo, so the sooner you see a cab with the new look, the more recently they've presumably been inspected. The redesigned graphics feature a checked motif that is supposed to be reminiscent of New York's old checker cabs, the last of which was sold in 1999.

A federal U.S. district judge decided not to block the City of New York from requiring the installation of GPS and credit card equipment in taxis. The Taxi Workers Alliance went to the courts after a strike by its members earlier this month had a less than dramatic impact and failed to sway public and political opinions. Some drivers are opposed to the installation of the equipment because they say GPS tracking invades their privacy and that poorly designed credit card equipment and fare meters will cost them in lost revenues. The federal judge in the case ruled that the benefit to customers outweighed the privacy concerns of drivers.

The taxi strike is over and rates are back to normal, but many people may have discovered that ride-sharing in a cab is a great way to save money. Fortunately, there are a few online services that can facilitate sharing a cab and splitting the fare to the airport or around town with fellow New Yorkers. Consider it yellow-carpooling. Last year we wrote about hitchsters.com, the online service that formalizes ride shares by matching users through its database. Hitchsters.com works by matching flight information with time, dates, and locations of passengers to make splitting a cab to the airport easier. Similarly, the recently launched SplitaCab.com also focuses on sharing rides to the three major area airports using a GoogleMaps mashup. Both services focus on rides to the airport to and from Manhattan, although hitchsters.com has a beta version that includes Brooklyn.

Here we are - day two of the taxi strike by a group of taxi drivers upset with the changes that the Taxi and Limousine Commission has enacted. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which organized the strike, claimed that 90% of -owned cabs were on the streets (versus 93% last Wednesday), but that doesn't include owner-operated cabs (fleets comprise only 30-40% of cabs). A taxi industry group reported that 72% of the city's 3,200 cabs were on the road.

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance said that it definitely will strike on Wednesday and Thursday to protest the city's plans to put new technology, including GPS systems, in all taxi cabs. NYTWA spokeswoman Bhairavi Desai said, "Leave the car parked at home or at the garage. No yellow cabs for hire."

If you rely on taxis, you may want to adjust your transportation plans: The Taxi Workers Alliance says that drivers it represents will strike on September 5 and 6 to protest the Taxi and Limousine Commission's decision to add GPS systems to all yellow cabs. But then the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, another advocacy group, said that there would be no strike (with spokesman Fernando Mateo saying, "Read my lips: There will be no strike."). Our thoughts: Pray there's no unusual weather event and take mass transit or your bike.

Come October, your experience in the backseat of a taxi could be a little more high-tech. The Taxi & Limousine Commission unanimously approved touch-screen "passenger information monitors" for all 13,000 yellow cabs on the streets. In addition to showing information, entertainment, and advertising, these monitors will show a map of the taxi's current location using GPS. The new systems would also accept credit card payments. Some cab drivers expressed their opposition to the systems, citing the large costs and privacy issues of the GPS systems. The systems (medalion owners have 4 to choose from) are supposed to have a maximum three-year cost of $7,400.

Car makers are flocking to the city with the New York International Auto Show opening this weekend (media previews start tomorrow) at the Javits Convention Center, and there's one particularly NYC-focused exhibit: Taxi '07.

The city's desire to keep closer tabs on taxi drivers may prompt the drivers to strike. The city wants to install a GPS-tracking video monitor in cabs, which the city claims will help passengers retrieve lost items (even if they don't have receipts or medallion numbers) because the Taxi and Limousine Commission will be able to find the taxi that dropped them off at a certain location.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission revealed new features for taxis of tomorrow, and Gothamist is in love with many of them. For starters, since the taxis will have GPS tracking, when if you lose something in a cab and don't have a medallion number, if you call the helpline, the TLC will try to track the cab, based on where you were dropped off. Brilliant! (But you should still collect a receipt, because that has a medallion number on it.)

The Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved an 11% taxi fare hike. The hikes are meant to better compensate drivers, given rising gas prices (not to mention that NYC still has one of the least expensive taxi rates in the country). There are two changes:

That's a lotta taxi medallions!

A cab carrying a group of friends early Sunday morning crashed into a building, causing one passenger to be thrown from the car and then fatally hit by an oncoming cab. The accident claimed the life of Danielle Ricco, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, as the cab headed south on the West Side Highway. The cab's other passengers claim the driver, Hassan Afzal, was trying to scare them by driving quickly, after they had complained about the loud music. Afzal lost control around West Houston Street, and ended up crashing into 340 West Street. That's when Ricco was thrown from the car, and another cab that was trying to avoid the crash ended up hitting her. Her friends say Ricco was actually trying to climb out of the car.

It's two follow-ups in one: Two people have filed separate lawsuits against the NYPD for excessive police force. Playboy's Miss November 1992, Stephanie Adams, complained about the police treating her roughly last month, after an altercation with a cabby. Adams's cabby refused to drop her off outside her Chelsea apartment building, leading them to argue and each call the police. But the cabby claimed Adams had a gun (which she didn't), so when police arrived on the scene, they shoved her to the ground, with their guns aimed at her. Adams filed a notice of claim (the precursor to a lawsuit) against the NYPD, city, and the cops who mistreated her and is looking for $5 million in damages. She also added that the police leered at her while checking to see if she was packing heat. The police and cabby deny Adams's account, with cabby Eric Darko telling the Post he felt like his life was in danger, saying Adams threatened to shoot him. The Taxi and Limousine Commission is also looking into the matter.

Usually when Gothamist is riding in a cab in New York, we're just happy if we can communicate, get to our destination in one piece, and that the driver doesn't get lost. All reasonable expectations, we think. The Taxi and Limousine Commission announced their cab driver of the year yesterday, who, by most standards seems to have done his job very well. Hossam Abdalla, an Egyptian cab driver, has been driving a taxi since 1999, returned $1 million worth of gold, diamonds, and titanium left in his cab last year. With all that, he could have joined the some of those other millionaires out there.

Chewing the Fat

The Taxi and Limousine Commission thinks that summons issued to cabdrivers for rudeness dropped 26% because of 311, since it's much easier for NYers to call up and complain about bad behavior. Well, here's Gothamist theory for the better mood: The taxi fare hike! While other taxi driver behavior complaints from riders have dropped, there's a spike in complaints about drivers breaking traffic rules. Which is intriguing to Gothamist, because we always thought the unofficial rule of taxi-riding was to get a driver who could break the rules and get you from Point A to Point B faster. Perhaps these riders were in the cabs where the drivers get into arguments with other cars and end up speed racing up and down the West Side Highway.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission is looking to redesign taxi cab partitions for the future. The NY Times notes that the partition was originally created to prevent crimes, like robberies and murder, but now things like legroom and giving riders a view of the city are making the TLC wonder if they need to shake things up. The article also waxes nostalgic about cabbie conversations, but lately, Gothamist would imagine most riders think they are going crazy because they think the driver is speaking to them, but the driver is actually on the phone. And believe us, Gothamist loves talking to cabbies, but there have been times when we've been told we were going to die very soon (we've never had the luck to meet the matchmaking cabbie!). Perhaps taxis need roof windows (not sunroofs, because then there would be ways for the fare to cheap out) to show off the city's vistas. Gothamist's favorite quote was from the former TLC Commissioner, Jack Lusk: "Those partitions create a plastic surgeon's dream." No kidding - we've been people whose faces have crashed into the partitions when cabs stop short and it's not pretty, so buckle your seatbelts, even if it doesn't help with bumpy rides.

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)!

- And why the cows came

Yesterday morning, a taxi that rear ended a station wagon and then tried to escape the scene ended up hitting a pedestrian and causing more crashes that left cars in mangled shape. At 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, a station wagon had slowed down to let a pedestrian walk across. A taxi, driven by 54 year old Syad Zia, had been speeding and hit the station wagon, causing the wagon to hit the pedestrian, a 67 year old man. Then Zia swerved to leave the scene of the crime, hitting the same pedestrian (!!) and then, per Newsday, "sideswiped a minibus and Chevy Impala and crashed into another taxi cab," and then second cab then crashed into four other taxi cabs "like a row of dominos." One bystander said, "It was a chain reaction. It was just crunch, crunch, crunch." The pedestrian, Rubin Albayez, was pinned under the station wagon, and ten others were injured, including Zia's passengers: an 8-and-1/2 months pregnant woman and her husband, who had just visited the obstetrician. The woman delivered a healthy baby but she suffered "ruptured esophagus, a broken bone in her neck and a broken wrist."

Actually, no.

At first glance, it seems fair to us that you'd be charged more than the flat $45 from airport to Manhattan rate, since you're making a stop in Brooklyn that's out of the way of the cabbie (meaning that he'd lose money shuttling you to Brooklyn and then to Manhattan).

Chris Eigeman, Actor

– When you or your friend looks clearly drunk; if we walk, we'd come home with skinned knees. Just don't drive too fast, because that makes us throw up.