Rolling around in the back of a New York City taxi on Monday, look what I saw in the backseat: a live TV monitor beaming back at me.

Now wouldn’t it be cool to have a TV in the backseat of a DC taxicab? A TV system that can show you location on a real-time city map, can give you a Zagat restaurant reviews when you’re hungry, and best of all, offer a direct conduit to the DC Taxicab Commission?

But this cool wiz-bang technology isn’t coming to DC if we stay with zones. There’s no impetus for psycho taxi drivers to add electronics if they can zone gouge with taxi fares based on invisible lines and crap maps.

I join Max in calling on Mayor Adrian Fenty to step in where the DC Taxicab Commission is too chicken-shit to tread. Fenty, let Senator Levin’s requirement come to pass.

Give us meters in DC cabs!

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Wayan Vota

Married, mortgaged, and soon to be a father, Wayan Vota is in the fast lane to mid-life respectability – until the day his brood finds his intimate journal of global traveling and curses him with the ever-eternal reply “I’m gonna be just like you, Dad!”