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Thanks to the endeavors made by the City Council of New York; a new technological advancement is going to be adapted to advance the services provided by New York taxis.
The City Council of New York City has put forward a bill that will require all taxis operating in the city to be installed with emergency buttons. If the enactment is adopted the New York City cabs will be incorporated into the plan. In yellow cabs, the piece of equipment possibly will be set off via taxi TV screens.
Would you feel safer if your cab had a panic button installed the back seat, offering you direct contact to the NYPD? The panic button is a device that once pressed by the driver it prompts an electronic gesture directly to police zones. The statute was supported by the chairman of council's committee of transport Ydanis Rodriguez and councilwoman Laurie Cumbo. It was encouraged by a rape incident of a commuter in a green cab earlier in this year.
The bill is however still in the initial stages. Taxi drivers will have a button that sets off a distress light on the exterior of the taxi if they are being threatened or robbed. Passengers will also have the chance of pushing the button in the case of an emergency. "With in excess of 400,000 journeys a day, keeping the cab and for-hire, passengers' safety must not be taken lightly," said the City Council Chairman Ydanis Rodriguez in collaboration with her colleague Laurie Cumbo.
A green cab operator was charged with rape in February this year after a Brooklyn incident in which a woman said that she was picked up outside a friend's home in Fort Greene, and then the driver pulled over, scaled up into the back seat and raped her before stealing from her. She felt utterly powerless. The woman had no capacity to call for aid. There was no way to reach out to the police or anyone else to stop the heinous experience from happening.
Rodriguez said after that assault, he and Cumbo sought a way to "ensure that nothing like that can happen again."These panic buttons will give riders peace of mind and can undoubtedly save lives," he said. Since the bill is only in the initial stages, currently there are no cost approximations for the setting up of the device and no conclusion has been made on who would make payment for the alarm buttons. Asked supposing a drunken passenger decides to press the button for the sake of it, Cumbo said the well-being of the passengers can be put at risk out of fear that someone will use the device wrongly.
These panic buttons are anticipated to provide passengers with a peace of mind and will indisputably save passenger lives. A Taxi and Limousine Commission spokesperson said the organization would evaluate the bill. He also added that the safety of the taxi operators and the passengers is one of the primary concerns of the TLC. One industry faction hailed the rule, despite shifting the culpability for increased passenger threats to the surfacing of e-hail apps like Lyft and Uber.
These developments, which are opposed by some taxi drivers, are part of a bigger plan to turn New York City's cabs into a matchless system. The cab panic buttons will be amongst other service improvements programmed to be put into operation in the city's taxis this year,
Several cab drivers have been detained for purportedly assaulting their passengers, instigating a plan to inaugurate panic buttons in all the cabs by the end of the year.
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