A complete history of the short life of the Taxi TV

In the mid-2000s, when New York City first contemplated a modern meter system in taxicabs that would easily allow passengers to swipe credit cards, the iPhone had not yet been invented. Neither had the tablet, the app store or Square.

And so what was created was very much of that time: a set of hardwired sensors tracking the revolution of the car's wheels, connected to a digital meter, connected to a credit card processing machine, connected — right at eye level in the back seat — to something that looked like a TV.

This setup has now become a ubiquitous part of the taxi experience in Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and many cities far from New York. The in-cab TV jolts awake when the meter does. A local mayor welcomes you inside. There's a weather update, maybe a movie trailer, a little Jimmy Kimmel or a single-question snippet of "Jeopardy!" Cab far enough, and you get the whole thing on repeat. Cab often, and the script may work its way into your dreams (Alex Rodriguez! The answer is "WHO IS ALEX RODRIGUEZ!").

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Now the city that gave us what it called the "Taxi Passenger Enhancement Program" believes the whole thing has become outdated. Last week, New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission voted to begin a pilot project testing new meter technology in cabs with a goal of also "retiring" those back-seat screens. The taxi TV, not even a decade old, may already be on the way out, a victim of all the headlong technological innovation that has happened since, as well as the gripes of drivers and passengers who struggled to find the "mute" button.

This also means, yes, that New York has declared passé a technology we only got in the District two years ago.

"We started this with a very TV-centric view of the experience," said Jason Gross, the global head of product and marketing for taxi systems at Verifone, one of two companies that dominate the in-taxi market across the country and that modeled their products in New York. "It was a day and age before people understood what a tablet was."

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The best idea New York had for what it wanted in 2004 was a TV. And at the time a TV with an "off" button was a clear improvement over what had come before: New York's "talking taxi" audio clips, in which Elmo howled at passengers to buckle their seat belts. The screens also enabled advertising and content deals that offset some of the costs of the full meter system, typically several thousand dollars per car.

Today, though, more and more passengers have smartphones, on which they have a lot more options than Jimmy Kimmel. That means the captive audience in the back of a cab isn't so captive any more. Increasingly people want to pay on their phones, too. And annoyed riders today have alternatives, like Uber, that are taxi TV-free.

Where screens have now proliferated into every cranny of our lives — on airplanes, at bus stops, at gas pumps, in the dentist's chair — now some of us may be craving the peace and quiet we get while retreating into our own tiny screens in the back of a cab.

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Gross insists that riders don't loathe the taxi TVs as much as the New York media has suggested. More than 80 percent of passengers in New York, according to Verifone's data, leave the screens on while they ride.

But drivers in particular have long lamented them, even if the blaring back-seat TV is the least of their troubles today in the larger technological war with Uber. Drivers who lease their cars don't see direct ad revenue from the TVs, and the credit-card processing fees have cost them 5 percent of their earnings, a figure they argue offsets any tip gains they get from the generous suggested prompts on the screen. When the TVs were initially installed directly behind the driver, drivers also complained that the screens overheated the seats where they spent eight to 10 hours a day.

"Imagine having a computer monitor behind your back where all your co-worker does is play YouTube videos," said Bhairavi Desai, head of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

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Last year, the TV in the back of Stephen Benesoczky's leased cab was broken for about 10 days. The credit-card reader worked, but the TV programming didn't. He filled the sweet silence that ensued with classical music. After the TV was repaired, Benesoczky, who's driven a New York cab for 30 years, decided to start asking passengers to silence the thing.

"Could you turn off that annoying TV if you don’t mind?" he now asks. And he always says it exactly like that, that annoying TV, so as to underscore that what may seem a nuisance on a 10-minute ride is anathema on a full-day shift. "I make my point," Benesoczky said. "It’s really true — so that’s what I say."

Lost in the din of the TVs, Desai added, has been the lost art of conversation in a cab, the chitchat about foreign capitals or bedbug outbreaks or Broadway shows worth skipping. Benesoczky, who's originally from Hungary, used his passengers to perfect his English.

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Cab drivers were once uncle-like figures, or encyclopedias of the city, as Colgate University historian Graham Hodges put it. Playing the part was central to the job, and an antidote to its isolation. But not in the era of the taxi TV. Think of Holden Caulfield in "Catcher in the Rye" plying his cab driver about where the ducks in Central Park go when the lagoon freezes over.

"It was a perfectly normal thing for them to do, to have this crazy conversation," said Hodges, who has written about the history of New York taxis. "And that’s gone, partly for racial reasons" — cab drivers have increasingly become immigrants with language barriers — "partly because of cellphones. But certainly these TVs don’t help at all."

The Taxi and Limousine Commission acknowledges that it fields complaints from drivers and passengers alike about the TVs, especially when the mute buttons malfunction. The TVs are supposed to go silent when there's no passenger in the car, but drivers have complained that feature doesn't always work. At night, drivers also sometimes get the glare of Jimmy Kimmel's face in the rear window.

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The taxi commission wants to upgrade the entire system, replacing the digital meter with a virtual one that tracks distances and fares using GPS and that could help innovate taxi meters nationwide. During the pilot, the taxi TVs will be replaced, perhaps by something as simple as a tablet the driver hands the passenger. A more streamlined meter system could require less (and less expensive) hardware in the car and would more closely resemble how apps like Uber charge customers. New York regulators describe the shift as inevitable technological progress.

"At one time in history, NASA needed a lot of room to house a simple computer," said Allan Fromberg, a spokesman for the TLC. "Now it’s in your pocket or on your wrist."

Verifone, which plans to compete for the new pilot, too, argues that some kind of passenger screen will be necessary, even if the content and design of it is unclear. Taxi TVs, for all their more recognizable advertising and comedy bits, also show maps of the city and consumer alerts when, for instance, a cab enters a new rate zone. And they've been designed to help the visually impaired pay their fares.

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Michael Woloz, a spokesman for Creative Mobile Technologies, the other major company that contracts with cab owners to provide the technology, pointed out that the city has gained a lot from the TVs that officials are now panning. The city gets 20 percent of the air time for public service announcements, a common agreement in other markets.

"The one thing you cannot turn off is the City of New York's intro," Woloz said. The devices, in fact, are programmed so they can only be dimmed once that message ends. "So if passengers are annoyed that when they get into the car they're bombarded by this bright video that they have no control over — well, the city itself requires that."

New York's pilot will initially include at most 1,000 cars in a market with more than 13,000 yellow cabs, so your next ride there may not feature a newly spare media sanctuary. Washington, for one, also has no plans to get rid of the screens. But the demise of a technology is like its adoption; it creeps slowly across the country.

"Not to disparage Washington," said Fromberg, the TLC spokesman, "but I think New York City is particularly comfortable with being at the forefront of things. Really we’re doing this because we want to get ahead of the curve, because we do sense things headed in this direction."

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