Most cabbies complain about nyc car service cars picking up people who hail them from the street. That is an illegal thing to do, but these drivers are at least licensed professionals who have the job of specifically driving passengers around in all parts of New York City, some of the neighborhoods aren’t so safe either, so it is an unwritten rule to look the other way with this behavior. Everybody has to make a living, and these drivers are at least licensed by New York City to drive New Yorkers around.

What bothers me is a particular rare breed of taxicab that is not even licensed by New York City. Rather these cars, older yellow Ford Crown Victorias with various taxicab stickers designed to look similar to the official NYC taxi stickers, is licensed to operate in another town in New York State. Legally these taxis, are supposed to pick-up people in Westchester County or wherever, not in New York City. I shoudn’t be seeing them going a crosstown, I shouldn’t be seeing them cruising the Lower East Side and Williamsburg at 3am on the weekends, and I definitely shouldn’t be seeing them parked across the street from a hotel. It is one thing to be picking up people illegally, but this cab takes it one step further by lying to customers, pretending it is something it isn’t.

The value of a New York City taxi medallion is $800,000 dollars now, and these cabs don’t have a medallion.
The pricing on the meter is unregulated and officially stated on the door to increase every 6th of a mile, while the legal taxicabs have a regulated meter that increases every 5th of a mile.
Because these cabs are not regulated by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, they follow absolutely none of the rules of the commission. This car is too old to be a yellow cab, the meter charges more, they do not take credit cards, who knows what else is wrong with this.

For all I know there could be 4 or 5 of these cars working for a company illegally. Here are my pictures:

I saw this car at 83rd street or 85th street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. The car was parked there all day long, which convinces me that the owner lives in the neighborhood, which I might add is the wealthiest neighborhood in New York City. The following 7 pictures are of the same car. each picture is examining decals on the cab which are similar but different from official New York licensed decals, designed to give the customer enough confidence to ride in this car. 3 more pictures are posted of another cab I’ve seen more recently driving around New York City doing the same thing.

The city comptroller stepped into the debate over the accessibility of city taxis, vowing on Wednesday to reject the contract for a fleet of new yellow cabs unless Mayor Michael Bloomberg amends the deal to require all—not just some—be wheelchair accessible.

Comptroller John Liu said he would block the contract “as is” because it violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. He promised to use all legal tools at his disposal to fight the contract if the mayor tries to bypass his office. Under the city charter, the comptroller can reject city contracts with vendors, but only under certain circumstances.

The city law department accused Mr. Liu of skirting his responsibilities as comptroller. “None of the matters he raised today—including ADA compliance—would constitute lawful grounds for refusing” to approve the contract, law department spokeswoman Kate Ahlers said in a statement.

Mr. Liu’s announcement comes months after the mayor and Gov. Andrew Cuomo brokered a deal that would boost by 2,000 the number wheelchair-accessible yellow cabs on city streets and offer incentives to current medallion owners who buy them instead of other taxis.

Currently, 232 of the city’s roughly 13,000 yellow cabs are wheelchair accessible. Mr. Liu’s announcement does not pertain to livery cabs.

“A TLC spokesman called Mr. Liu’s actions ‘both mysterious and clearly ill-informed.’”

The city is also fighting a federal judge’s ruling in December that it’s not doing enough to make yellow cabs accessible to wheelchair users. The suit was stayed by the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing the city to move forward.

The city plans to convert all taxicabs to a single model: a van made by Nissan Motor Co. that is expected to begin hitting the streets in 2013. That vehicle isn’t wheelchair-accessible, but can be retrofitted to allow wheelchairs in and out.

Flanked by disability-rights advocates at the press conference, Mr. Liu said the city should have followed London, where all taxis can handle riders in wheelchairs, when picking the so-called Taxi of Tomorrow. “How can it really be the Taxi of Tomorrow if a growing number of people cannot use it?” he said.

Following the press conference, the comptroller’s spokesman, Peter Thorne, said Mr. Liu “will use every legal action available to ensure the contract does not move forward until it adheres to the ADA and makes yellow cabs wheelchair-accessible.”

A Taxi and Limousine Commission spokesman, Allan Fromberg, called Mr. Liu’s actions “both mysterious and clearly ill-informed,” saying the TLC is in compliance with ADA laws.

The comptroller’s office lawyer, Valerie Budzik, replied: “It is absurd to suggest that the City Comptroller should register a contract that is discriminatory and in violation of federal civil rights law.”

Assemblyman Micah Kellner, a Democrat who has hounded the Bloomberg administration to provide greater access for wheelchair-bound taxi passengers, supported Mr. Liu. Having agreed to standards that would require more accessible cabs, Mr. Kellner said, “Why would you then lock the industry into a vehicle that is not accessible?”

It’s lime-green, it shuns Manhattan, it’s … a taxi?

Officials unveiled the city’s new outer-borough cab Sunday, which Mayor Bloomberg dubbed “The Apple Green Boro Taxi.”

“For decades, the goal of bringing better taxi service to residents and visitors outside of Manhattan eluded the city,” Bloomberg said Sunday. “At long last New Yorkers in all five boroughs will have safe, comfortable, less costly and legal street-hail service.”

Taxi and Limousine Commisioner David Yassky called the green cab “pleasing to the eye, easy to see from a distance,” adding that it “blends well with the urban landscape.”

Despite opposition from many yellow cab medallion owners, the TLC approved new rules earlier this month to let the city begin issuing permits to let livery cabs legally pick up street hails outside Manhattan. Up to 6,000 cabs can begin applying for the $1,500 permits next month, which only give drivers permission to pick up fares in the outer boroughs or North of East 96th and West 110th Streets. The first set of cabs will hit streets by the end of June, and 20% of them must be wheelchair accessible under a stipulation in the new law, which was brokered by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Traditional yellow cabs will retain the exclusive right to get passengers in midtown and downtown Manhattan and at area airports. Both the yellow and green cabs will calculate fares using the same metered system.

Yellow cab owners were livid with the TLC’s decision, saying it would hurt their business and lessen the value of their medallions. The Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade filed a lawsuit earlier this month asking a judge to toss out the new law permitting the outer-borough cab fleet.

“The city sold the exclusive rights of street hails to medallion owners,” said Michael Woloz, a spokesman for the group. “In one fell swoop, in the bill that was passed in Albany in the dead of the night, that right was taken away from all medallion owners.”

But the TLC countered by saying only a tiny fraction of yellow cabs’ pickups were outside Manhattan, forcing New Yorkers to illegally hail a livery cab an estimated 100,000 times each day. It also promised that drivers busted trying to pick up a fare in prohibited areas would be fined hundreds of dollars and have their cars confiscated.

— Up to 18,000 permits for outer-borough cabs will be issued in three phases over the next three years.

— At least 3,600 of the outer-borough cabs have to be wheelchair accessible; the city will offer a $15,000 subsidy for drivers who get accessible cabs to help cover additional costs.

— The city hopes to raise more than $1 billion by adding 2,000 new yellow cabs. All will be wheelchair-accessible.

The driver, who stayed at the scene, told cops he couldn’t stop in time. He wasn’t charged

A deaf 5-year-old boy was fighting for his life after he was mowed down by a cab in Brooklyn — as his horrified parents, who also can’t hear, looked on.

Timothy Keith’s mother and father were inconsolable after their first family trip to the city turned to heartbreak Saturday. With tears streaming down her face, Timothy’s mother described what happened in a wrenching written interview.

“I was with my son. The(n) he walk to road. I say NO to him,” wrote Eva Keith, 29, of Washington, D.C.

“I saw taxi yellow so fast. Driver hit my son but my son can’t hear.”

The Keiths and a friend had just left their hotel, a Comfort Inn, and were heading to see the Brooklyn Bridge when tragedy struck.

Timothy broke away from his parents and sprinted between parked cars onto Hicks St. in Cobble Hill when a yellow SUV cab hit him about 5 p.m., cops said.

The driver, who stayed at the scene, told cops he couldn’t stop in time. He wasn’t charged.

Timothy, who suffered brain damage, was treated at Long Island College Hospital and later transferred to University Hospital of Brooklyn-SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

The parents’ friend, Brian Walters, 24, who also is deaf, wrote that he wasn’t sure the boy would make it.

Timothy’s dad, Joseph, 29, had to cut short a written interview because he became too emotional.

“Unexpected,” he wrote.

rschapiro@nydailynews.com

In a cab and your cellphone just died? No problem. Just plug it in.

New cabs hitting the streets of New York City next year will have charging ports for riders’ electronics. They’ll also have more leg room, a large skylight roof to gaze at the city skyscrapers and even odor-reducing and anti-microbial fabric to help deal with, well, you know, anything you might smell in the backseat of a cab.

A prototype of the Nissan NV200 will be unveiled Tuesday. The model was selected from among three finalists in a city competition.

With a boxy shape and painted a brighter yellow than the city’s current taxis, the cab offers a different experience for riders – starting with a flat, hump-less floor that makes shifting from one side to the other a simple task.

City Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky said busy New Yorkers looking to get from point A to point B would find plenty to appreciate about the rides that get them there.

“New Yorkers are pragmatic but they also appreciate quality. This is a higher-quality taxi ride than what they’re getting today,” he said Monday.

The doors on the vehicles slide open, so no more risk of hitting a passing bicycle messenger, and they’ll all come with a navigation system, so no more getting lost in the outer boroughs. There are floor lights, to help find anything that may have fallen to the floor, as well as overhead lights for reading. Luggage can go into the cargo space in the rear.

The Nissan van, which beat out proposals from Ford Motor Co. and Turkey’s Karsan, will be phased in beginning in October 2013 as older taxis age out of service. All current taxis, including the city’s hybrid cabs, will be off the streets by 2018. Nissan spokesman Steven Oldham said the company would be undertaking a pilot program with the Nissan Leaf electric car to see if it would be feasible to make the taxis electric in the coming years.

The vehicles will sell for about $29,000, and will come with the partitions included, Yassky said. Meters and the medallions will be the responsibilities of the buyers.

Cabbies are helpful. They’ll take you anyplace they want to go.

Driving a cab requires a test. You’re quizzed on, “Can you determine the shortest distance between two points?” If the answer’s no, you are instantly licensed to own your own fleet.

Want to frustrate your driver? Tell him to take you to his garage.

Great innovative ideas have hit NYC’s taxi industry. None include driving lessons. Or destination orientation — like, for example, locating remote out-of-the way hidden places such as the UN, Empire State Building, St. Pat’s.

I went to a fortuneteller. She predicted I’d take a long trip. She was right. I left her and grabbed a cab going crosstown.

One afternoon on 86th and Fifth I’m headed to the Plaza. Even Mister Magoo could chart that course. My driver, an obvious foreigner in 97.8 percent of the world, asked: “Where?” I said: “Not a real stretch, pal. It’s 59th and Fifth.” He nodded and immediately turned left.

However, the man was skillful at the wheel. As he explained, “No good to hit a pedestrian. Because then you must to fill out report.”

This extensive conversation was conducted via what once was see-through plastic and shouted over his CD, which was heavy on cymbals.

Our fleet of yellows is iconic. I love New York. I love our drivers to whom English is a fourth language. I love our hack industry. I’m a New Yorker. I’m used to aggravation.

The industry is now going high-tech. Like innovative rooftop advertising that doesn’t help any passenger in the rain who’s not exactly hot for shots from “Bonnie & Clyde,” which closed four months ago.

Credit cards. TV. Soon, paying with smartphones. And installing chargers so no running out of juice. And communicating with the driver by iPad. Next up video games, so they’ll be able to throw out Alec Baldwin.

They’re becoming full-service operations. I suggest replacing the driver’s license that you can never read anyhow and was printed by Berlitz. Instead, how about sticking up recipes? Or 8-by-10 glossies of Newt Gingrich? Anything to view besides springs poking from your seat or that half-eaten jelly doughnut on the floor leaning against your fawn suede Manolos.

Another thing the industry’s full of is safety stickers. So many on the windshield that if not for a GPS, the hackie couldn’t see where to go.

Hollywood wants to install movies. Bad idea. Even with my route from 86th and Fifth to the Plaza, hard to cram in two hours of “The Hunger Games.” Also discussed? A vending machine on the passengers’ side. Good idea. If the movie’s lousy, you can still get popcorn. They once recorded certain locals — for instance, me — to chat and introduce tourists to New York. Brilliant idea. But the constant babble drove drivers mad. They preferred clanging belly-dancer music.

And can we discuss crabby cabbies who complain, “Don’t tell me how to go. I’m driving a cab 20 years.” Yeah — but wrong.

1. Never a straight line going downtown if you’re heading west. To beat the lights, it’s two blocks down, one block west.

2. Emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel for the Upper East Side, you turn west. Take 10th Avenue. Less traffic.

Even Albanians without green cards know that.

I want it known I am only joking. We all depend on cabs. We love cab drivers even though, instinctively sensing when you’re late for work, is when they pass you by.

Also you have to do what they want. Grab a cigarette? He’s allergic. Want change? He has none. Eating your sandwich? Not allowed. Carrying your dog? The driver, who hasn’t showered since leaving his own country, says: “No. They’re dirty.” And the ride’s expensive. Cheaper to be mugged and wait for an ambulance.

Well-known is that I am a saintly human being and not one to complain. But can we just mention wet weather makes flowers appear and taxis disappear? All things come to those who wait on a rainy day — except a taxi. Their off-duty signs are wired to light at the first drop of drizzle.

Let’s discuss the newest model cab. Anyone but me notice that, clutching a large tote bag, brown paper takeout bag, discount dress shopping bag, computer and your coat — digging into that small door handle and summoning the heft to release the catch, you can break a fingernail? These days a manicure costs more than a medallion.

Drivers have computers, phones, CDs, two-way radios, aromatic curry in their front seats. Black cars offer water, mints, ride-sharing apps. Cabs have seat belts, movies and rules. Next up, stewardesses or roadesses offering frequent-rider bonus points. Another 20 minutes, they’ll stick a fitting room in the trunk.

P.S. Why is it that the only souls who really know how to run this country are driving cabs?

It’s been a fare to remember.

The city’s oldest hack is Johnnie “Spider” Footman, a cigar-munching 92-year-old from Harlem who’s been on the job since Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House.”
“I don’t know anything else,” Footman told The Post.

Over his storied career behind the wheel, he’s ferried movie stars such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson, suffered countless bad tippers — and tolerated passengers getting frisky in his back seat. Well, until the new hybrids arrived.

CHECKER PAST: Cabby Johnnie “Spider” Footman began trawling the Big Apple’s streets in 1945 (below), and he’s seen it all.

“They had sex in the back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s,” he recalled with a twinkle in his eye. “The cabs were a lot bigger then.”

He drives his cab two days a week, and spends another two at 55 Stan taxi company in Long Island City, Queens, where he listens to taxi engines for the slightest sign of trouble.

“I’m more comfortable with him than a lot of other drivers,” said depot co-owner Jerry Nazari. “He has a good, calm personality, good knowledge of the city, and he enjoys what he does.”

Spider — nicknamed after a model of the Harley Davidson he used to ride as a member of a Harlem motorcycle club — mixes the old (he wears a tie every day) with the new (an iPhone in a worn leather case dangles from his neck).

And he has no plan to take his foot off the gas any time soon — his hack license, No. 016337, doesn’t expire until 2014.

Footman came to New York City from Florida in 1937, fleeing the virulent racism of the South.

“My mother told my uncle, ‘Take him away from here, because he’s going to get killed.’ ”

Footman went to work in a cab garage at 45th Street and 11th Avenue, cleaning the cars and “tooling around” with their engines. He quickly fell in love. “I didn’t have to go to work through a back door,” he said.

In 1945 he decided to get his license, first to drive a Checker, then a DeSoto Skyview.

“It cost two dimes to get in my cab,” he said.

He was married for 10 years to a lady named Valerie, and had a son, also named Johnnie. He’s been single ever since, and says he’s always been a hit with the ladies.

“I was never disappointed,” he said. “I think that’s why my wife couldn’t put up with me.”

As taxi fares haves changed, so, too, have the customers who pay them, he said.

“Customers were good early on,” he said. “Now, the cabdriver is like a tool, a wrench. You use it when you feel like it, and then you throw it back in the box when you get tired of it.”

And drivers are different too. 

“They do everything the passenger says — and it’s wrong. ‘Make a U-turn here,’ they’ll say. No! It’s wrong! But the driver listens because he’s afraid he’s going to lose his fare, so he takes a chance. Drivers get a lot of tickets on account of that.

“My advice to young drivers? If you know, tell them you know. If you don’t know, tell them you’ll look it up on a map.”

Spider follows his own set of directions.

“My style is listen to me,” he said. “I know quite a bit.”

The nonagenarian ticks off cross streets and avenues with the precision of a fine-tuned engine. Sometimes his encyclopedic knowledge pays off.

“My biggest tip was $20. It’s just how I talk to the passengers,” he said.

He’s also been lucky. “I’ve never been held up,” he said, adding that he always locks the driver-side door just in case. “But sometimes people will get in my cab, jump out, slam the door and then run like a rabbit.”

It wasn’t always that way.

“In the ’40s and ’50s, we trusted each other,” he said. “I’d leave the cab downstairs and take people’s bags upstairs, get paid, and go on with my business.

“Now as soon as you leave the cab, someone breaks in.”

If anyone looks shady, Footman has a strategy for feeling them out. “I stall a lot, get them talking, then I’ll say, ‘I don’t care to go to that neighborhood.’ ” Eventually, the person will get out of the cab.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission said it’s unable to prove that Footman is the oldest driver, but a spokesman couldn’t fathom anyone older than Spider who’s still active.

“The name Johnnie Footman is legendary among taxicab drivers. The history he’s seen from behind the wheel of a New York City cab is the equal of any great archive,” TLC Commissioner David Yassky said.

Just don’t expect to get anywhere quickly when you hop in Spider’s cab.

“I drive more slowly now,” he admitted. “I don’t pass anybody, hardly.”

“He goes about 12 miles per hour,” noted depot co-owner Stan Wissak.

But what if an important passenger is in a rush?

“I tell them they need a faster cabby — this one’s too slow,” Footman said. “I do things my way.”

gbuiso@nypost.com

DISPATCHER Stanley Wissak, 84, runs a yellow-cab fleet in Queens.

MOST mornings at 3:45, Stanley Wissak, 84, leaves his Sutton Place apartment on the East Side of Manhattan and drives across the Queensboro Bridge in his Mercedes-Benz sedan with a license plate that reads, “OFFDUTE.”

By 4 a.m., Mr. Wissak is on duty, working as the dispatcher within the gritty confines of 55 Stan, his yellow-cab company on Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens.

With 140 medallion cabs, 55 Stan is one of the larger fleets in the city, and under a less-experienced dispatcher, the busy pre-sunrise shift change might turn chaotic.

But for Mr. Wissak, handing off cabs from the night to the day shift passes for sport.

The night drivers come in griping about drunken passengers, bad tippers and unfair summonses. Their gas, toll and credit-card charges are computed, and the cabs are cleaned out, gassed up and rushed back onto the road.

In a booth the size of a narrow bathroom, Mr. Wissak squeezes past a hulking safe and takes his usual spot at a window, where his feet have worn the floor bare. He leans toward a microphone, and his gravelly voice blares through the lot and the locker room: “Let’s go. Bring in some keys. I need keys.”

As each key is turned in, he slides it back under the bulletproof glass to the next day-shifter shuffling in from the darkness of the Queens streets and sends him or her off with an order to “feel good.”

Forget computers. Mr. Wissak scrawls a long list of drivers on duty in a large ledger, in pencil.

“The way I do it, the job hasn’t changed,” he said at 5 a.m. on a recent weekday. Already, numerous drivers had called in sick, so he began calling his standby men, saying: “Get in here — I got you on a car.”

The drivers rent the cabs from Mr. Wissak for 12-hour shifts, at rates that range from about $110 to $130. Including weekenders and other part-timers, he has 500 drivers.

“I hired them all, and I know where they’re from and the members of their family,” he said. One driver approached and beamed when Mr. Wissak said, “This guy’s daughter is a doctor in her last year of residency at Mount Sinai.”

The next driver, from Ghana, shouted a cheerful greeting in Asante, to which Mr. Wissak replied in his native Bensonhurst dialect, “Aw, you son of a gun.”

Then came another driver: a 6-foot-6 woman nicknamed Shorty, who is from the Ivory Coast. Then came a Dominican who said, “Stanley boss, I am your soldier today, and I am here early.”

“Good, you get a T-shirt,” Mr. Wissak snapped.

Mr. Wissak’s cabs never rest. His cars are sold after two years of continuous use on the road. He has a staff of 15 mechanics to keep them running.

He is continually recruiting new drivers at the weekly hack-license tests and cabdriver schools.

“I look for older guys with families,” he said. “When a guy comes in and says, ‘I got five kids,’ I say, ‘You’re hired.’ ” Younger drivers are flightier, he said, like the one a few years back who left a cab on the Brooklyn Bridge, jumped off — and survived.

“He asked me to take him back, but I told him, ‘No chance,’ ” Mr. Wissak said.

Mr. Wissak’s father, Elias, bought his first medallions in 1938, and Mr. Wissak entered the business after serving in the United States Army Air Forces at the tail end of World War II. He dispatched and drove a fleet of DeSotos and Studebakers.

At one point, Mr. Wissak won a legal battle for the family and broke the good news to his father just before he died, in 1964. “It was the greatest day of my life,” said Mr. Wissak, who now runs the business with a son, Richard, 52, a lawyer who dispatches and often represents the drivers in court.

Mr. Wissak enjoys weekends in Connecticut, European vacations and good Manhattan restaurants. But mostly, often six days a week, he is among his mechanics, gas pumpers and struggling immigrant drivers.

Fleet medallions are said to be worth $1 million apiece these days. Mr. Wissak said they were such a solid and profitable investment that he had established trusts for his grandchildren by putting medallions in their names.

As for his valuable property on the East River, where luxury high-rises have sprung up, he said he had no desire to sell to a developer and retire.

“What else am I going to do?” he said.

E-mail: character@nytimes.com

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) is today releasing a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a smartphone application that will allow passengers to pay their cab fare with their smart phone. Paying via smart phone could enable passengers to receive receipts by email (helpful for locating lost property or filing compliments/complaints) and potentially allow them to accumulate “points” or “rewards” through a frequent riders program, among other benefits. While fare payment is the primary focus, the TLC is also interested in other functions such as locating lost property, alerting passengers to available taxis, allowing passengers to find other passengers for ridesharing, and providing customer service to passengers. The app would be developed and implemented at no cost to the City, and would be free of charge to passengers. However, there is potential for financial returns for the developer through the collection of credit card processing fees and advertising. Instructions for accessing the RFP are contained in the Notice of Solicitation.
Click here for the Notice of Solicitation
Click here for Industry Notice

 

Plastic partitions pose safety issue

They oughta have their heads examined.

Taxi passengers who don’t buckle up are winding up in emergency rooms with horrific facial injuries after smashing into hard plastic partitions meant to protect drivers.

“MY FACE WAS COMPLETELY BUSTED OPEN” SAYS UNLUCKY TAXI PASSENGER WHO COLLIDED WITH DIVIDER

Doctors say they have been treating a steady stream of New Yorkers for busted noses, broken teeth, cuts and even brain trauma — some just from fender benders or short stops.

“This is a New York City tragedy and public health issue that has not changed in almost two decades,” said Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, chairman of emergency medicine at Bellevue Hospital and NYU Langone Medical Center.

“We don’t have a good system to count them, but there isn’t a week that goes by that we don’t see at least two patients with these terrible injuries.”

Dr. Rahul Sharma, who has worked in several city emergency rooms, is all too familiar with the damage the anti-crime partitions, required since 1994, can cause.

“Ask any ER doc in Manhattan, and they will tell you they see it very frequently,” he said. “People have a false sense of security in the backseat of a cab . It’s dangerous without a seat belt.”

The threat is so serious, the Taxi and Limousine Commission asked Nissan to design a new partition for the 2013 “Taxi of Tomorrow” that will be built in — not installed later.

The new model, to be unveiled next month as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s effort to create a uniform taxi fleet, will also undergo federal crash testing with the partitions for the first time, TLC Commissioner David Yassky told the Daily News.

“If the partitions in taxis on the road now were subject to federal safety standards and crash tests, they would all flunk,” said another taxi official.

The partitions — which have a nose-to-partition distance of roughly 16 to 19 inches for passengers in the backseat — aren’t the only problem: Two out of three taxi riders don’t buckle up in the back, a TLC survey survey found.

The barriers in yellow Crown Victorias and Toyota Camrys now on the road have protruding steel nuts and bolts, sharp-edged credit card machines and change cups at face level.

In the case of even a minor crash, that can spell disaster for riders.

Take the case of Thomas Evans
After a meeting last June, Evans, the CEO of Bankrate.com, hailed a cab on E. 72nd St. The driver took off, and less than two blocks later, he rear-ended another car.

Although Evans, 57, always wears a seat belt in his own car, he never did in cabs. He was looking down to turn off the TV when he was thrown against the partition.

“There was blood everywhere, and in my eyes. I couldn’t see anything,” said Evans, who ended up with a broken nose, facial cuts and six stitches in his forehead.

“The partition is so close to your face if you have forward momentum. Now when I get in a cab, I am nervous and always have my hand and foot against the partition to brace myself just in case
— and I wear a seat belt.”

Most passengers get to their destination without incident. There are 485,000 rides in 13,237 yellow cabs each day, and the vast majority are safe.

But even cabbies are frustrated with riders’ failure to buckle up because they often have to stop suddenly to avoid hitting a bicyclist, jaywalker or another car.

“New Yorkers don’t like to be told what to do,” said one veteran driver.

“I picked up a lady with three children at Grand Central, and when I asked her to put seat belts on them, she ignored me. A bike came in front of me, I hit the brake, and one of the children fell down on the floor. She blamed me. I tried very hard to do the right thing.”

Pierre Serge, who has been driving 10 years, said fares are “oblivious,” paying more attention to their phones than safety.

“It’s like gambling; you never know what is going to happen,” he said.

Goldfrank said the only time he saw a decline in taxi victims came when the TLC installed public service recordings of famous New Yorkers like Ed Koch and Joe Torre telling riders to buckle up.

“But it drove the cab drivers crazy,” said Goldfrank, who walks between the hospital and Grand Central every day to avoid taking cabs after all the ugly crashes he has seen.

Added Dr. John E. Sherman, a Fifth Ave. plastic surgeon who has been treating cab accident victims for 20 years:

“No cab should be allowed to leave the side of the curb unless passengers have buckled up. Period. End of story.

“It ought to be the law.”