As I stepped out of Grand Central Station yesterday I saw one of the city’s new prototype taxis — a Taxi of Tomorrow — roll by, carrying passengers west on Forty-Second Street. This new taxi design is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s scheme to standardize the city’s fleet. His opponents have noted that the vehicle is not hybrid and not handicapped accessible, and that city hall doesn’t have authority over the Taxi and Limousine Commission to specify what vehicles they use. What’s critical to the entire project but never really discussed is the new taxi’s image. The Taxi of Tomorrow is a big boxy tangerine-colored van. More than a machine of deisel and steel, it looks like a mobile storage shed. Stopped on Forty-Second Street behind a red light, squeezed between city buses and black towncars, the taxi looked ungainly.
Of course there’s nothing essentially glamorous about the Nissan sedans that make up the bulk of the taxi fleet now. But at least they look like cars, like instruments of motion, with a compact low-to-the-ground profile. These vehicles offer independence from the sidewalks and the subways, and they offer transport, both literal and imaginative, to some other place: to a party, to a job interview, to a rendezvous, to a mysterious unexplored corner of the city. The Taxi of Tomorrow has a sadly utilitarian profile. Rather than speed or transport, it offers space inside for stretching and storage, though not enough, apparently, to accommodate a wheelchair. From the outside the van looks like a beast of burden, a mule with which to cart old furniture to the dump, to shop for groceries, or to take small children to school. These vehicles need to be useful, but they also need a little panache. Why should our taxis, such an integral part of city life, be clunkers like this? For anyone who has, late at night, after dinner and drinks, hailed a cab in a half-dream state, and hurtled down Park Avenue, when there’s no traffic and noise, through the dazzle of light thrown from empty glass towers, a cab feels like a chariot. Why can’t a cab look like one too?
Photograph by Nalina Moses.