autoblog.com — Enter Standard Taxi, a Troy, Michigan-based outfit who is looking to do for the US what LTI has done in the UK: create a highly recognizable and enormously practical taxi specialized for North American use.
Sep 21, 2006 View in Crawl 4
stonebearSep 21, 2006
The US used to have a purpose built cab, the checker cab. It was magnificent, but it died out for the same reason this won’t catch on. The fact that purchase and parts costs are very high with this type of vehicle outweighs the advantages of enhanced longevity and utility. Until taxi service gets the subsidies other modes of public transportation get, it is simply more cost effective to deploy and maintain cheap, general purpose sedans for taxi service in the US.
Closed AccountSep 22, 2006
The checker cab was fscking brilliant with massive amounts of leg room, elbow room, head room and a huge trunk (maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit since I only remember riding in them as a kid)... with the only down side being curb weight and a large bench seat in the back on which you would tend to slide from side to side depending to the tenacity of the driver to deliver you in record time... and I don't think parts were too costly since they were mostly 1950s Studebaker technology.Cabs, in general, are inefficient, offering no economy of scale that reduces transportation costs (imagine, if you will, a highway full of cabs delivering paying customers to their destinations, stuck in a huge traffic jam)... besides, if everyone is going to take a cab, then half the population has to drive the other half.