From the monthly archives:

November 2008

No Respect for Speed Limits

November 30, 2008

When it comes to speeding, many American motorists don’t worry about safety. They just worry about getting caught. Those are the findings by researchers from Purdue University who surveyed nearly 1,000 motorists about speed limits and driving habits. They found that many drivers are cynical about the safety benefits of driving within speed limits, and [...]

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Adding to the City’s Coffers, One Ticket at a Time

November 29, 2008

A couple approach a tow truck hauling away their car on West 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the most-ticketed block in the city. The most-ticketed block in New York City is 14th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The number of parking tickets issued citywide has surged 42 percent since Mayor Michael R. [...]

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Memo to Bloomberg: Hypermiling Taxis

November 19, 2008

Jackrabbit starts and sudden stops are a hallmark of New York City taxicabs, but they aren’t very fuel-efficient. New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is fighting to replace the Crown Victorias in the city’s taxi fleet with relatively fuel-efficient hybrid cars, as my colleague William Neuman has reported. Here’s another idea for saving gas: requiring taxi [...]

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Dangerous Drivers at Northside Car Service!

November 18, 2008

ANDREW BARWICK, a 25-year-old architect who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was biking to work one day a few weeks ago on Kent Avenue, along the Williamsburg waterfront, at what he recalled as “a pretty good clip.” As a result, he had little time to react when a sedan from a car service making a [...]

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Communication Breakdown Part One

November 17, 2008

“Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours” -Benjamin Disraeli Recently, deep into the morning, as I lingered with my fellow drivers, waiting on line to consummate our payment ritual with the night dispatcher, one of my colleagues eyeballed me and blurted out: “Don’t you just love it when passengers spend the [...]

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Glitch keeps stale content on taxi TVs

November 15, 2008

Getting into a taxi was a little like getting into a time machine this week. A ticker-tape of headlines that runs along the bottom of TV screens in many yellow taxis displayed news items that were weeks old because of a technical snafu. Jesse Davis, president of Creative Mobile Technologies, the company that runs the [...]

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Traffic Center Opens in Long Island City

November 15, 2008

When the northbound Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive was shut down from about 10:25 to 11 a.m. on Thursday so that President Bush could get from the downtown heliport to the United Nations, the video screens at the newly opened Joint Traffic Management Center in Long Island City, Queens, showed the unusual sight of a city [...]

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Bloomberg Hails Eco-Taxi in Green Scheme

November 15, 2008

Blocked by a federal judge from imposing stricter fuel standards on taxis, Mayor Bloomberg took a new route yesterday to persuade cab fleets to go green. In an industry dependent on tips, the mayor dangled significant financial incentives before fleet owners reluctant to make the switch to cleaner hybrids. The mayor said the Taxi and [...]

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