Saturday, March 04, 2006

Cabbie Videos

As of about 8 months ago cameras were installed in the majority of the cabs in Las Vegas. If im not mistaken my company had them installed in all of their cabs. Regardless I haven't driven a cab without a camera since they first installed them.

A lot of people want to know how the cameras work. They are mounted on the windshield just below the rear view mirror. They have two lenses one looking forwards and the other inside the cab. The cameras are constantly recording on a loop. A twenty second snapshot will be permanently saved (the 10 seconds prior and after the event) when one or more of the following events occur:

1. A door is opened. Every time you open a door a twenty seconds is saved. This is designed so that every person that gets in your cab you have a shot of. OF course there are countless shots of you getting in and out of your cab doing absolutely nothing. *Management and or TA/officials will only look at that footage if there is an incident.

2. A G Force event. i.e. a crash, very sudden stops or takeoffs, huge speed bumps etc. The camera is set to a predetermined sensitivity. Which by my estimation is fairly accurate. You have to do something pretty drastic to set it off. As you will see, there are only 3 saved clips of me in my cab.

3. Panic Button. A manual button is located on the underside of the camera. Of course most people will notice you activating it (even if they don't know how they work). So this is good to do just that. Just to let them know that you have them on video.

4. Distress light. A button is on the floorboard in the cab, just like the old high beam switches in pickups. This switch activates the distress light on top of the cab. A green blinking light that if any cop sees he will be doing a felony stop. Assuming the worst, guns drawn and giving instructions. I advise you follow those instructions should that occur. Upon activating the distress light, the camera is activated again as well.

After my accident in #449 I had the idea of taking a blank into work and convince my boss to let me have a copy of the videos from my accident. Mostly because I thought it would be hilarious. After that idea I decided that I should just try and get them to copy all of the videos they had of me. At the time I didn't know how many they had but it turned out to be three. My boss seemed cool about it when I asked him so a few days later I brought in a blank in a sleeve with a short note explaining what I was requesting and left it in his box. A couple of weeks passed and no word so thinking I just need to press him about it, I went in there on my day off pressed him for it and he delivered....hey what do you know it only took 5 minutes (rolls eyes). Anyway I got both angles of all three vids. I hope you find them as entertaining as I did.

My Accident: You about read that and the events leading up to it in #XIII.
http://lvcabbiechronicles.blogspot.com/2006/02/xiii.html

Front-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CeitLZkvk
Rear-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W19cnojM1s

Groutesque guy: I was SB on Industrial on night and hit a huge pothole that I didn't see doing about 45. At that moment my passenger at the time was talking to me about his apparent "grotesque" sexual preferences. When I first watched this one when I got home I didn't recall the ride. I wish now I remembered more of it.

Front-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N41ljQG8ghY
Rear-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAzaKnI-lfw

Caesars SpeedBump: Caesars installed these new huge ass speedbumps as your leaving out the back to go to Frank Sinatra....that I apparently forgot about on this night. I got air of the backend of the damn thing. I noticed it set the camera off from the light and you can see me apologizing to upper management.

Front-http://youtube.com/watch?v=jE-OTIQQaxo
Rear-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bDgBzuK3U

3 comments:

HoundOfDoom said...

So, the videos are private?

Ell said...

I tried to watch the videos as well and discovered they are private. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? At any rate, love the site.

Anonymous said...

Came across your blog today and I love it. I work as a paramedic/firefighter in Canada and I've been reading these between calls all night. Can't get enough and now my whole stationhouse is bugging me for more. The only thing we suggest - make these videos public!