Share a Cab; Unclog the Streets

A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that if New York taxi riders were willing to share a cab, the Big Apple could reduce its fleet of 13,500 taxis by up to 40 percent.

"The predicted economic and environmental savings are considerable," said mathematician Steven Strogatz (Cornell University), among the paper's authors.

Of course the computational technique known as shareability networks fails to factor in passengers' preference for privacy and the resistance likely to be mounted by cabbies facing mass layoffs.

"These are tricky problems to think about," said Strogatz, "and they’re not math problems, exactly."

Read the New York Times' coverage.