New York Icon Getting a Makeover
March 19, 2008

By Kate McLeod

NEW YORK -- New York City’s bright-yellow taxicab is so entwined with the Big Apple’s identity that tourists put hailing a cab on their to-do lists, along with riding the subway and seeing a Broadway show. A cab ride in New York is a singular experience; it has character.

Now, it appears, the New York taxicab will be reinvented. The deputy commissioner for public affairs at the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), Allan Fromberg, recently released a request for information (RFI) asking for proposals to redesign New York’s taxicab fleet.

The TLC has a long, long wish list that includes improving ride quality and rear-crash safety, making entry and exit easier, adding a vision system that reduces risk when exiting and enhancing the cab-availability light. Increasing space and making it flexible is another goal, including room for three adults in the rear and additional luggage storage. Also on the table is a separate heat/AC/ventilation system in the rear. Add to that a minimum of 25 mpg city fuel economy from Oct 2008 (30 mpg from Oct 2009); 100 percent compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act; reduced pollutant emissions and improved air quality; reduced physical footprint; greater recycled content; easier end-of-life recycling; and reduced impact injury to pedestrians and cyclists. Package all those requirements in a design that will again be an icon.

Whew! This sounds like a demand for a taxi that is bigger yet smaller, heavier yet stingier on fuel. The TLC has cast its net worldwide; India, China, Korea, Czechoslovakia and any country that makes a car, as well as General Motors and Ford, have been asked to respond.

But creating such a thing from scratch is likely to be impossible when you consider there are only about 13,150 taxicabs and about 47,000 other vehicles governed by the TLC in New York. The problem is that retooling for just 13,000 vehicles isn’t economically feasible. New York’s new taxicab fleet will have to be a modification of an existing vehicle.

Serious buzz about revamping New York’s taxicabs started about a year ago when TLC Commissioner Matthew Daus brought manufacturers and representatives of the TLC together to begin discussing how to go about bringing taxis into the 21st century. This year is the centennial of the gasoline-powered taxi, giving the TLC a peg to hang its proposal on.

The current mainstay of the fleet is the Ford Crown Victoria. It’s an ancient design with low mileage, but it can run for 200,000 miles under often-brutal New York City conditions. Working with the London Cab Company, whose taxis are even more famous than New York’s, has proved to be too expensive.

So New Yorkers and visitors will have to wait for responses to the RFI to see whether new taxis become a reality.

A more practical way might be to ask one automaker, probably Ford, as they rule the taxi fleet now, if it can modify one of its vehicles in exchange for all the business. However, this is the public sector; we couldn’t expect a solution that simple.

But if that perfect taxi ever arrives, not that we expect it, some of us will miss those wild rides in the back of taxis surrounded by heavy plush carpeting, the blast of intensely perfumed air freshener and a spinal adjustment when bottoming out in a pothole.

Photos by Kate McLeod

Kate McLeod is a New York City-based contributor to AutoObserver.

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