Taxi and Limousine Commission Unveils New High-Tech Fleet

Cab-riding New Yorkers may be watching television during their commutes and paying with plastic come Monday.

The era of handwritten trip sheets and paying cabbies solely in cash is coming to an end, as the city's yellow cabs enter the 21st century with backseat screens broadcasting a mix of offerings including the Taxi Entertainment Network, ESPN headlines, movie trailers, clips from "The Today Show," news headlines, and, of course, plenty of advertisements.

Passengers will be able to pay their fares with credit or debit cards, and electronic maps will chart their trips through the city in real time. Cabs will also be fitted with GPS-systems, and text-messaging between drivers and the TLC will allow the option of matching available cabs with hailing customers.

"We can send them instant emergency information about traffic, black outs, or a water main break, and we can send them business opportunities, letting them know when certain major events are letting out," a spokesman for the TLC, Alan Fromberg, said.

Two hundred new cabs, constituting a "beta" test fleet, will start rolling next week, and the TLC plans to have its entire 13,000 fleet fitted with the taxi technology by next fall.

The exteriors of cabs in the beta fleet look the same as the old cabs, and so passengers will have to wait until they get in to discover if they've hailed a "high-tech" cab.

New Yorkers who endured the 2004 fare hike — the largest in the city's history, raising taxi fares by 26% — will now see an example of where their money has gone. The new technology, which costs between $3,900 and $5,300 a cab, will be bankrolled by taxi owners.

While some owners have expressed concern over assuming the costs, they're getting tough love from the industry.

"It was part of the agreement in 2004 that we were going to do this," the commissioner of the Department of Transportation, Iris Weinshall, said, referring to the fare hike, which resulted in an increase of about $350 million a year in revenues for the taxi industry. "They shouldn't be complaining that much that they'll have to pay for this," Ms. Weinshall said.

Taxi drivers and owners are also expected to reap some reward from the new technology. "It's an absolute fact that people tip and spend more on plastic," Mr. Fromberg said.

While Chicago, San Francisco, and Las Vegas have been ahead of New York in offering credit and debit payment options in their taxis, New York is the first city in the country to integrate so many technologies together, according to Mr. Fromberg.

The four companies providing the technology polled advocacy groups, industry specialists, and New Yorkers about what information they would find helpful when riding in a cab to help determine the content provided on the passenger screens.

Passengers who prefer riding without the company of perky newscasters and the white noise of advertisements always have the option of turning their screens off, which was not the case during the last experiment with TV screens for taxi passengers, which ran between September 2002 and August 2003.