Between paid advertisements and weather updates on cab monitors, D.C. taxi riders have also heard a message about District voting rights. But those videos, which aired over the past seven months, are in the process of being replaced with a public service announcement about D.C. libraries.  

Neville Waters, a spokesman for the D.C. Taxicab Commission, said the DC Vote public service announcements discussing District voting rights should have been replaced last month. However, the PSAs are still airing in some cabs as the monitors transition to the new content.  

DC Vote is planning to create new videos next year to be used specifically in cabs and they hope the ads will air in taxis again in 2015. Waters said the commission “would certainly consider DC Vote” when evaluating PSAs for the cab monitors.  

The most recent DC Vote videos, which first popped up in cabs in March, consisted of two 15-second spots, one featuring civil rights activist Julian Bond and the other featuring DC Vote’s executive director, Kimberly Perry.  

“The goal of the PSAs, from our standpoint, was to educate the 20 million visitors that come to our city and ride in a cab every year,” Perry said in a phone interview Monday.  

The D.C. Taxicab Commission deemed the videos as “non-commercial in nature” which qualified them as public service announcements, so DC Vote was not charged a fee for airing the clips.  

Perry said the ads were also relatively inexpensive for DC Vote to create, thanks to discounted and donated resources. Perry also said the PSAs were very effective in informing visitors, residents and government employees about their cause, citing an increase in DC Vote memberships since the PSAs aired in March.  

The PSAs directed viewers to visit the organization’s website and featured Bond and Perry making a similar statement noting, “D.C. families pay federal taxes, our sons and daughters fight and die in wars, but we have no vote in Congress. Isn’t it time we ended this injustice?”

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