NYC taxis prepare to go wireless, with a back-seat upgrade
NEW YORK -- For those who hate battling for a taxi on a crowded New York corner and then fumbling for the fare, relief may be just around the corner.
The city's 12,766 yellow cabs are scheduled to get wireless connections next year that will track drivers and help alert them to waiting customers. Riders will be able to pay by credit card, to check flight data, or to buy movie tickets. The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, after gathering ideas from 70 companies, such as
''This will bring a dinosaur industry into the 21st century," said Michael Levine, owner of Ronart Leasing Corp., a taxi company based in Queens that has 350 cars, and that Levine's grandfather started in 1937. ''It's about time something happened."
Yellow cabs, the only taxis in the biggest US city allowed to pick up people who flag them down, carry 238 million passengers a year and bring in about $1.5 billion. In Manhattan, where people in three of four households do not own a car, cabs carry babies home from hospitals, move furniture, and shuffle visitors between appointments.
The link from taxis to cellular networks and satellites would follow last year's 26 percent fare increase, the city's first in eight years, to increase the average driver's pay to more than $12 an hour.
''This is what we are giving to the customer in return for the fare increase," said the Taxi and Limousine commissioner, Matthew Daus. ''We want the experience in the back of the cab to be a better one."
Customers will soon find a touch-sensitive screen with a slot to swipe credit cards on the bullet-proof partition between the front and back seats. The screen will display a trip's fare and tip options, and riders will pay with a swipe and a finger.
Levine of Ronart expected 30 percent of the fares to be paid that way within 18 months, helped by business travelers who will not need cash receipts. About 87 percent of cabs now take only cash.
The monitor also may display an electronic map, sports scores, news headlines, flight times, and movie listings, and may allow hotel and air-travel check-in, said a Taxi and Limousine Commission spokesman, Allan Fromberg.
With a satellite link, cabs will boast global positioning systems that monitor every pick-up and drop-off, ridding drivers of the paper ''trip sheets" that they now fill in. It will also make it easier for customers to retrieve lost property because of the electronic record of where they were dropped off.
The city whittled down ideas from companies that attended cab technology meetings over the past 18 months, including
New York's first motorized taxis, imported from France, hit the streets in 1907. They followed the advent of gasoline-powered, meter-equipped taxis, in Paris in 1899 and London in 1903.
Now, there are about 41,000 New York taxi drivers, 90 percent of whom are immigrants. They make about 30 trips per shift, and the average fare, with tip, is $10.34.
Outfitting taxis with back-seat screens and card-processing systems may cost as much as $4,000 per car, said Levine, who plans to study whether to accept free equipment and let a vendor collect credit-card fees, or buy the material and take the fees. Levine said he also expected a cut of future advertising revenue.
Some passengers are as excited about film ads in a cab as they were about hearing Elmo, the Sesame Street character, order them to fasten seatbelts in a failed city experiment started in 1997. Others remember Taxi TV, which displayed ads for 10 months before it was shut off in August 2003.
''It was like watching TV when you're drunk," Ray Smith, an East Side resident, said as he looked for a cab on Lexington Avenue yesterday. ''I found it aggravating."
Smith, 49, said he takes at least 10 cabs a week, and that he will welcome paying with credit cards. As for the new monitors, they would be all right ''if you can turn them off."
As New York cabs enter the computer age, the city and state are offering incentives to medallion owners who use hybrid vehicles. Six hybrid Ford Escapes, powered by a mix of electricity and gasoline, hit the road last month. Daus says he will watch how they handle the punishment of the city's congested streets.
