53rd Street to Chelsea, by way of Secaucus

If, like me, you endure a love-hate relationship with your GPS — loving it when it routes you around sudden traffic jams, hating it when the re-route steers you into a rural ditch — you might be interested in this dispatch from The New York Times: The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has used GPS data to drop the hammer on crooked drivers who cheated passengers out of more than $8 million. According to the Times,

The 1.8 million fares represent a tiny fraction of a total 360 million trips over the 26-month period in question. Agency officials said, however, that they were alarmed enough that they immediately ordered the companies that manufacture the meters to create a system to alert riders when the higher rates are being charged.

The bad news: The new system will use the cabs’ back seat digital display screens to display the warning message. Independent data have shown that the last time anybody failed to ignore the back seat displays was 1989, around the time Tommy Tune and Ed Koch were its biggest stars. Score one more victory for enterprising small businessmen.