I’ve never had a profound love of taxis, whose drivers seem to think their special permit comes with a host of privileges not accorded to the mundane little people the rest of us are. Optional use of flashers, reckless driving, using horns as a form of speech, urinating on the buildings adjacent to taxi stands–these rights and many more are magically granted once you get that cab driver permit.

But what motivated me to write this was an advert I saw proclaiming that using a taxi is environmentally friendly. The gall.

True, using taxis may reduce the number of cars in circulation. But the environment doesn’t much care about how many cars there are, it’s all about how much they get used (i.e. burn fuel).

I have a propensity for living next to taxi queues, and I can attest that–at least here–these vehicles are always on. The taxi stand next to this place has a capacity for 8 cabs (so there are usually about 12 hanging around) and their engines run and run and run. For the radio, the air conditioning, the heating… for the pure joy of hearing the engine purr. I don’t know why, exactly, but these things run 24 hours a day. We passed a law requiring them to shut the cars down. Seems it doesn’t apply if you’ve got that permit.

If those 12 cabs were replaced by 100 cars, those 100 would still be parked most of the day and hence not be filling the air with hyrdrocarbon residues. Yes, it would make the parking situation worse. But that is a good thing, from the environmental perspective–the more terrible parking gets, the more people will give up their cars and using public transit. We have an awesome subway system, and you never need to fill the meter.

So, thanks to their insolent and false advertising, I’ve decided cabs are off my list of possibilities–even if I’m running late. The earth will thank me later.