Inevitable This Week: Dearth of Taxis

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

This year, the hottest seat at Fashion Week is turning out to be the backseat of a Ford Crown Victoria.


The common yellow cab has become almost impossible to come by. With Fashion Week and the World Summit at the United Nations playing out in tandem, the wait for a cab can be half an hour long. “It’s pretty rough,” a man J.C. Penney hired to stand by the tents in Bryant Park and assist people into and out of taxis, Lawrence Jay Annunziata, said. “Demand is definitely greater than supply.”


The impact reaches across the city. The doorman at the Regency Hotel, Luis Acosta, said: “It’s been awful. This whole week has been a nightmare.”


Visitors from the fashion and diplomatic worlds are helping themselves to the city’s few yellow beauties. To make matters worse, several streets are closed off for the World Summit, and traffic congestion reigns. Getting around this week is such an ordeal that many of the drivers of the city’s 12,760 licensed cabs have decided not to show up for work. One-third of the drivers at New York Cab Company in Harlem, which licenses a fleet of 135 cabs, skipped work yesterday. “They don’t want to deal with the traffic,” their manager, Sunni Zahoori, said.


Some resilient souls have worked the cab deficit to their advantage. The director of women’s ready-to-wear at Bloomingdale’s, Susan Solomon, has been making do by piling into cabs with strangers.


“I’ve been making a lot of new friends,” she said.


Another surprised beneficiary of the shortage of taxis was a Toronto-based fashion editor, Jessica Johnson. After it took her half an hour to find a cab to the Roland Mouret show on Tuesday, she arrived so late that she was given the front-row seat that was being guarded until the last minute for a very important no-show.


“I got to sit with Anna Wintour and Scarlett Johansson,” she said. “If I’d gotten there on time, who knows what they would have done with me.”


Still, Ms. Johnson’s fairytale ending is far from typical. Due to the dearth of cabs, this week has been marked by missed meetings, canceled meals, and high dry-cleaning bills.


When a public-relations woman, Gail Horowitz, left her business meeting Monday afternoon, her wait for a taxi kept her on a street corner for 20 minutes.


“Why couldn’t it have been a real fall day?” she said. “It was a hundred degrees out and, of course, the taxi didn’t have air-conditioning.”


Trying to flag down a taxi on a cab starved street can be impossible, but some old tricks might be worth a try.


If you walk to the corner with your hand in the air, there’s a chance a cab will pull up before you get there.


The president of the taxi industry bank Medallion Financial, Andrew Murstein, relies on strategic “hot spots” where cabs are plentiful.


“Park Avenue facing downtown in the 50s is a great place,” he said. “If you’re headed uptown, get it to loop around. There are some other places, but I don’t want to give them away.”


Mr. Acosta, the hotel doorman, said cabs tend to put on their “off-duty” signs and ignore passengers during heavy traffic, for fear of being stuck in a logjam for an hour. He finds the one accessory that helps lure drivers is a suitcase.


“They know they’re going to leave the city and get a decent fare,” Mr. Acosta said.


This week might be terrible, taxi drivers say, but the worst has yet to come.


“It gets even crazier during Christmas,” a driver of three years, Amadou Sanoh, said.


“With all the shoppers and O.T.s,” he explained, using the shorthand for outof-towners.


Similarly, the general manager of the Kitano Hotel on Park Avenue, Hans Basse, said: “This is just the beginning.” His hotel, near the United Nations, is popular with the diplomat set. But generally, they needn’t worry.


“Most of them hire limos,” Mr. Basse said.


The New York Sun

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