Today is apparently National Taxi Day, which means today we get to talk about a program where New York City got some very famous voices to give safety tips for taxi riders.
This started in the 1990s.
The city had just started requiring that all taxis have bulletproof shields between the front and back rows.
Those were good for driver safety, but if the taxi got into a collision and the passenger in the back seat wasn’t wearing a seat belt, they could get hurt slamming into the partition.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission had already used recorded messages to remind passengers to take their stuff with you as they got out of cabs, so why not make new recordings encouraging them to buckle up?
And why not enlist some well-known voices for those messages?
The city worked with musicians like Eartha Kitt, Isaac Hayes and Bernadette Peters, comedians like Joan Rivers and Chris Rock, athletes, actors, the voice of Moviefone, Dick Clark, the Rockettes, all sorts of people.
Talk show host and author Dr. Ruth Westheimer apparently knew which cabs played the messages she’d recorded, and she made a point of riding in those, just to see how the drivers would react.
But that brings us to one of the problems with the program: the cabs only ran messages by one of the celebrities; they didn’t rotate through the whole set of recordings.
Drivers only heard one person, day in, day out, over and over.
And that might have been ok if the driver was, say, a fan of New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, but if they got Elmo from Sesame Street and couldn’t deal with the voice, it was just too much.
More than a few passengers said they didn’t love the messages either; according to one survey, more than 1 in 10 said they deliberately chose not to buckle up because of the messages!
So in 2003 the city replaced the celebrity seat belt announcements with little TVs that played weather forecasts and ads.
But obviously it’s still a good idea to put on your seat belt in the taxis.
This Saturday in Las Vegas, Major League Eating presents its Hotcake Eating Championships.
The organizers say there’s not currently a world record for eating hotcakes, which means you could set one if you take part!
A Celebrity in Every Taxi (Ironic Sans)
NORMS Las Vegas: Hotcake Eating Championship (Major League Eating)