Perhaps the biggest threat to the traditional yellow taxi industry doesn’t come from the newly emerging competition, but from the simple fact that riders are searching for comfortable and convenient rides. Passengers are going to gravitate towards the service that fits these needs and offers them the ability to be productive, even while in the backseat of a taxi. This has led the taxi industry to search for improvements within the taxi experience that would draw in and keep their customers.

Like any service and business out there, the taxi industry took a good look at what was working well and what wasn’t. One area that received quite a bit of feedback from both drivers and passengers was the Taxi TV that has been embedded in the back of yellow taxi cabs across New York for a good decade. While the idea of having a tv in a taxi sounded like a good idea at the time, it slowly turned into something that annoyed passengers with their repetitive ads and inability to turn off or mute. To replace the tvs and to offer passengers a more desired high-tech experience, the taxi industry is rolling out a new gadget in 2017: tablets.

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Evgeny “Gene” Freidman is the man who BusinessWeek called “The Taxi King” and is the owner and operator of the largest Taxi fleet in New York City. But his kingdom has recently begun to fall.

According to court documents, in the morning on August 24, 2016, City Marshals evicted Taxi Club Management, one of Freidman’s Taxi companies, from its commercial space on 10th Avenue as they owed more than $77,000 in rent to the landlord.

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After an outing, you decide to catch a cab. You get home only to discover that you lost something really important in your taxi. Most people, won’t bother to go back and try to find the item, assuming that it has been lost forever. Don’t throw in the towel just yet. Here are some steps you can take to recover your lost property.

1) File a report with NYC Taxi Commission. This can be done over the phone by calling 311. If you live outside of New York dial 212-New-York. You can also do this online at http://www1.nyc.gov/311/. Make sure to have information, like the medallion number, on hand when you call.

2) Contact Police Precincts: Contact Police centers in each borough to see if your item was returned there. You can find a complete list of lost and found police centers on the nyc.gov site.

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A federal appeals court has ruled that New York City can track taxi drivers by using their installed GPS system and this tracking device does not violate the Fourth Amendment rights of unreasonable search and seizure.

In a 2-1 decision, the Second Circuit held that taxi drivers do not have a protected privacy interest in the vehicles they drive and that taxicabs are “not truly private vehicles.”

New York taxicabs were fitted for GPS back in 2004 and this collected data would later be used to keep track on whether taxi drivers were overcharging passengers for a higher suburban rate while they were still driving within city limits.  

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Evgeny Friedman told to keep safe the Citigroup tower area in Queens where taxis were set to be abandoned

A man dubbed the “New York Taxi King” because of his huge fleet of yellow cabs was set to surrender 46 taxi cabs and their medallions after a court dispute over a $34 million unpaid loan with Citibank NA, court papers revealed.

A native of Russia, Evgeny Freidman took over his father’s modest taxi business in 1996 and expanded it into one of the New York City’s largest taxi fleets.

A bankruptcy judge blocked Freidman from his plan to abandon these 46 taxis outside the Citigroup tower in Queens after his very public dispute with the lender.

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