Amidst noisy commutes, slightly quieter cabs

Whenever I’m driving somewhere and I’m in the car by myself, I like to turn up on the volume on the music I’ve taken with me for the ride. Maybe I’ll sing along; maybe I’ll just enjoy the background music. No matter what, though, it’s a time for me to control the soundtrack to my ride.

At all other times, though, we don’t want to hear any extraneous sounds during our commutes. For example, few things annoy commuters more than tinny music trickling through leaky headphones, and subway riders have had a very strident reaction toward the MTA’s ongoing attempts to bring cell service to its underground stations. In fact, in a recent poll, the Straphangers Campaign found that over 43 percent of respondents thought that allowing cell reception under was a bad idea. Elsewhere, we grow weary of the pre-recorded announcements that provide a noisy intrusion into a commute we want to be our own.

Driving these sympathies are feelings of self. We ride the subway with everyone else, but we want our commutes to be our own. We want to set the pace, the space, the time, the sounds, and this onslaught of other voices — from MTA warnings to cell conversations to music — grows annoying. Just as bad as the subways are taxis. Once upon a time, a variety of public figures from Elmo to Joe Torre told us to buckle our seat belts, and today, interactive TVs complete with ads and talking heads bombard us with sounds.

This weekend, when I got into a cab to head from the subway to Chelsea Piers amidst a strange bout of winter weather in late October, the TV started playing, and it would not stop. Five ads rolled before Brian Williams started yammering about NBC News. With the cabbie’s radio on, albeit at a respectful volume, the TV was just too much, and we scrambled to press the mute button. Now, though, we will soon gain a respite from the taxi noises.

As Christine Haughney reports in The Times today, quieter TVs are coming to a taxi near you. She reports:

The two major software providers of Taxi TV technology, Creative Mobile Technologies and VeriFone Media, have taken several steps designed for a quieter ride. In some taxis, the default volume has been lowered, and the volume button has been relocated; passengers will also get a quick tutorial on how to lower the volume or mute it altogether. And now, for the first time, passengers can even silence the introduction video that plays before the regular Taxi TV programming begins.

For many passengers, the changes are long overdue: in a recent survey of 22,000 riders, 31 percent said the televisions were the worst element of the ride. Cabbies also welcomed the changes, even if they cannot hit the mute button themselves.

“All day we hear it, same thing all day,” said Ghayyur Abbas, 34, a taxi driver who on a recent night blared Rihanna at an even higher volume to block out jokes that the comedian Jimmy Kimmel was making on Taxi TV. Mr. Abbas said he dreaded the coming weeks, when Taxi TV would start running a chorus of holiday-themed jingles: “Halloween is coming. Then it’s going to start. Then Christmas.”

So far, says Haughney, approximately half of the city’s taxis are now quieter with more changes on the horizon. “We’ve had to balance the interests of the advertisers and the passengers and the drivers,” Jesse Davis, head of a company that has outfit 6600 taxis, said. “The advertiser or content provider wants the sound as loud as possible. The drivers, for the most part, would rather not hear it.”

One of Davis’ co-workers from Creative Mobile Technologies noted that fewer customers were muting the quieter TVs, but drivers still find the volume intrusively, repetitive and annoying. So do I, and the mute button is the first thing I find after telling the driver where I’m going.

New York is known for its noise. Horns blare; trains rumble by. We want quiet as we ride. We want to control the volume. We want to pick the music. Maybe one day, we will, but for now, a quieter taxi ride is a step in the right direction. If only we could do away with those TVs for good though.