The world of New York taxis finally explained

It’s hard to think of the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission as a champion for design thinking. But I bumped into my old friend Rachel Abrams the other day, and she was brandishing a copy of Taxi 07 – Roads Forward, a policy document she helped produce for the TLC (ha!). Taxi 07 is an object lesson in using design thinking and great storytelling to change public policy.

We’ve been using storyboards, cartoons, diagrams and collage for many years to explain to clients what we’ve learned about their businesses, to analyse the complex interdependencies between services and products, processes, brand, customers and marketplace and to show what future alternatives might look like. Rachel and her co-editors, working for the Design Trust for Public Space and the TLC, have now applied this kind of system view and powerful visual explanations to changing a vital part of the New York transport system.

Taxi 07 gets right to the guts of the Medallion Taxi Fleet in grainy photos of New Jersey ‘hack’ garages where they hack production Crown Victorias into cabs, cartoon narratives illustrating passenger problems and driver issues and diagrams of typical journeys, but it also tells the story from the customer’s point of view and this, said the TLC (worryingly!) was a first.

The book also explodes some urban myths, like the scarcity of cabs being down to shift changes, and also shows that some myths are true, for almost no trips originate north of Central Park – you just can’t get a cab up there.

The document ends with a call for a comprehensive taxi service design process that looks at the entire system of activities and relationships involved in service delivery: the cab, communications with customers, owning and operating taxis and regulation. If you want to know simply everything there is to know about the public and private world of the New York taxi cab, or just want to see a really good way to tell a multi-faceted story, download your copy here.