New York City Death Cabs

The preservation of human life is an essential instinct. Unless desensitized (as in war, when killing after killing can numb the senses) or decontextualized (as in popular entertainment, like movies, TV shows or professional boxing), members of our species find threats to human life deeply disturbing.

Why, then, do cabbies in New York hate human life?

It's not a matter of incivility. The incivility of New York is a myth, like the naïvete of farmers or the beauty of Californians, who often, in reality, smell.

You want incivility? Visit Boston. It's a cold and hostile place. The personal bubble is thick and frigid, and only rarely do human expressions — "please," "thank you," "howya doin'?," "pardon me" — cut the ice.

New Yorkers, by contrast, like dealing with other people, if only because it's an opportunity to deploy complicated sequences of hand gestures. They chat; they bicker; they banter; they celebrate; they boast. Plenty of friction, but plenty of warmth.

So that doesn't explain why New York cabs actually accelerate toward pedestrians crossing against a light.

The first time you see this, you assume it's a fluke — a lone psychopath inexplicably in possession of cab medallion, his lead foot twitching for a chance to cover those legendary city streets with a fine sheen of blood.

Then it happens again. And again. And again.

Holy hell, they're trying to kill us! With hilarious yellow cars!

And it's not merely about a lazy lack of interest in slowing down. It's a question of speeding up, leaving the pedestrian a simple three-pronged choice: stumble backward, run forward or learn an unpleasant physical lesson about inertia.

There is, of course, a realpolitik explanation for this. If you systematically frighten every New Yorker into not crossing against the light, you never have to worry about slowing down for distracted scofflaw dumbasses. As a result, you can speed past dozens — or even hundreds — of potential fares without stopping to pick them up. Which the cabs around here also seem to like to doing, which is less of a problem, because it doesn't involve killing people.

Some of this irresponsible behavior no doubt goes back to the fact that New York cab fares (if there's no airport involved) are actually surprisingly cheap, although there was just a slight bump. Put a cap on the market's prices, and the pressure vents in strange ways, as anyone who's ever lived in a poorly maintained rent-controlled apartment can tell you.

But the prominence of the speeding-up tendency suggests active organization and a sinister cab conspiracy. For this, cabbies should be congratulated — real widescale conspiracies are about as common as identical snowflakes, and they're equally fragile.

The recourse, of course, is a pedestrian conspiracy — a lemming-like decision to always cross against the light until streets are a chest-high tidal wave of gore and the air of Manhattan is thick with pending litigation and the lamentation of the women.

It's grim, but necessary. Good luck to all those involved. The instigator of the Great Pedestrian Uprising of 2004 will be hanging out in Boston until the killing's through, sipping Dunkin Donuts coffee (served regular) and suffering through New England's perpetual Ice Age.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)