In the middle of the night in New York City I have looked for but couldn't find a cab in some random place where I would very likely be risking my wallet in wandering about. If only I knew where I could catch a cab or just increase my odds a few percentage points it could be the difference between a mugging and a safe ride home.
What would be helpful in these situations would be a tool built into my cell phone/PDA to find cabs near me that are unoccupied and looking for fares. By reading my own GPS location a system could focus just around me. Taxis are starting to have GPS built-in to radio their positions to dispatcher computers. So take this one step further and have the phone use a web request to send the current phone gps and receive back a map of available cabs in the area. Refresh the view every few seconds and you could get the direction of motion and cross the street at the right time to catch one before it slips away.
The display could look like those old video games like Berzerker when you could see where all your enemies were located as little colored dots around you except now they would be cabs.-- dhousman, Oct 22 2004 Zingo http://www.zingotaxi.com/they know where you aaaarreee. [neilp, Oct 25 2004] E-Taxi http://www.wired.co...,1382,44824,00.html"To hail a cab, a customer just sends a text message asking E-Taxi for a car. The SMS message is sent to cab drivers who are closest to the pickup point, and the driver who takes the fare calls the customer by mobile to confirm. Hayes said the system uses triangulation to locate the closest cabs; GSM systems can tell which mobile phone tower a mobile is receiving its connection signal from." [Klaatu, Oct 25 2004] It takes too long for them to respond. Plus then I need to cancel it if I get a cab on the street.-- dhousman, Oct 23 2004 Nah you don't!-- spiritualized, Oct 23 2004 I like this quite a lot, although perhaps signposts to taxi-ranks would do the trick ?Basically, just another (albeit real-time) POI overlay onto maps See link for an almost as clever though different take.-- neilp, Oct 25 2004 [spiritualized], you do when they have your cell-phone number and you want to use them again..-- neilp, Oct 25 2004 Totally baked [link]-- Klaatu, Oct 25 2004 random, halfbakery