All stories about "Taxis"

Ford premiered a new design for New York City's fleet of yellow cabs at this week's New York Auto Show. The press release for the Ford Transit Connect Taxi concept says the new cab is "a fresh take on taxis." The updated on/off duty sign sounds pretty cool: it's described as a "space-age looking flat-panel unit, mounted horizontally above the Taxi concept's roof, [that's] lit on all four sides -- green if the cab is available, orange if it's occupied." The taxi also features a boxy shape that allows for lots of passenger and cargo room, and work stations for drivers with in-dash computers that provide GPS navigation and full high speed internet access. One thing the concept cab doesn't have is a hybrid engine. Though Ford outfitted San Francisco and New York with fleets of Hybrid Ford Escape taxis back in 2005, this new model has a standard engine that's already left editors at our auto-crazy sister blog, Jalopnik, wondering if it will still make a good cab in spite of the higher gas mileage.

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Anyone who's lived in or visited Brooklyn enough knows the frustrations of calling car services (frequent busy signals, indecipherable dispatchers). All these problems should be resolved with SMS Cab, a startup text messaging car service now in five BK neighborhoods. Whenever you need a car, text your address and where you're going to 767222, and in three minutes the dispatcher will text you back the time a car can come and the fare. [via]

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The World Taximeter is a simple tool to estimate taxi fare in a variety of cities. Currently covering Barcelona, London, Madrid, New York, Prague, Rome, and San Francisco, the fares seem pretty accurate for a coupe New York tests -- though it seems to have difficulty locating simple street addresses for start and endpoints, preferring to map with preprogrammed local points of interest. Now show me taxi fare from Times Square to Ghirardelli Square. [World Taximeter]

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The Washington Post is hosting a pretty slick Google Maps mashup that calculates route and estimates fare for a DC taxi trip. Not only does it give you the cost under the city's current zone system, but it gives you a trio of estimates (varying by travel time) using the new metered-fare system, which takes effect in April. You can enter addresses or just drag & drop the route endpoints; you can even reverse the route to see how one-way streets affect things. [WP]

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Most major cities have seen their fair share of obtrusive taxi decorations and ad wraps, but the new circus wrap in San Francisco, an ad that covers the entire cab and adds a fake "circus tent" top, may have crossed the line with a lot of cabbies. The author of SF Taxi Live, a taxi driver's blog, reports that he would neither drive a cab with the gimmicky wrap nor would he ride as a passenger in one. [via]

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Hitchters, the online service hooking up travelers with rides to the airport, announced their expansion to Brooklyn yesterday. This is a welcome development, as most Brooklynites use car services over yellow cabs when heading to LaGuardia or JKF anyhow. But this way you can avoid those maddening human interactions with the car dispatchers and do everything online. Hitchsters also lets you weed out potential creeps (or aids your perverse ride-share fantasy) by specifying a gender preference, and they'll send you a text with your co-rider's info. Problem is, depending on where you live, you might not save that much money, considering Hitchsters adds in a $6 "pick up charge" and costs a wee bit more for the ride than your usual car service. However, if you live nowhere near an airport, it's an eco-friendly-ish money saver.

Hitchsters [Official site]

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Third-world taxi drivers fully deserve the opprobrium heaped upon them. Unfortunately, the good eggs usually get painted with the same brush of rapacious thievery, with nary a chance to get a word in edgewise. Though ostensibly metered and regulated, Istanbul's hacks frequently revert to their traditional habits of applying the "night fare" to rides at 3 p.m., driving like glue-sniffing feral children, and interpreting the city's "smoke-free" ordinance to mean "keep the outside smoke-free by trapping it inside the taxi."

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New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved a plan to require touchscreen info-monitors in all taxis by October 2007. The screens will ostensibly allow payment by credit card and consulting a map of the area one's cabbing through. I've encountered several cabs armed with test versions of these screens over the past few weeks, and I have no idea if they're worth a damn. That's because I, like everyone I know, immediately stabs the screen's "off" button upon entering the cab, thus killing the blast of advertising that provides the real justification for the screens. Amusingly, the screengrab at right -- from the above-linked AP story -- earlier showed a different screen with a prominent ad from Lukos Oil, the Russian petro-behemoth. Guess that seemed a little too on-the-nose.

Taxi rides in NYC going high-tech [AP]

-- Chris Mohney

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