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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Afew months ago, a team of trained researchers infiltrated the rush-hour crowds in midtown Manhattan, took up positions on busy street corners, and began gesticulating wildly. No one noticed, because the researchers were doing what a lot of other people were doing: attempting to flag down a cab. You may not be surprised to hear that they didn't have much luck. The researchers' experiment proved, as such experiments often do, what most civilians already knew. "There are times of the day and parts of midtown where it is virtually impossible to find a cab," Bruce Schaller, the transportation consultant who designed the study, told me last week.
New York has a taxicab crunch. In recent years, according to Schaller, cabs have carried passengers sixty-five per cent of the time they're in operation. That figure is high, historically speaking, and although after September 11th ridership fell as tourism slumped, the bigger picture...
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