World Taxi Challenge Breaks Guinness Record
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – A London cab made a stop in Pittsburgh this morning during its trip around the world in attempt to set the Guinness Record for longest taxi journey in history.
Paul Archer and Leigh Purnell of It'sOnTheMeter.com came up with the idea to accept this challenge and break the record themselves while sitting in the back of a taxi one night.
"We thought, what's the longest ever taxi journey? We looked it up and we found out that someone had already set a world record, but we thought, well we could beat that," explained Archer.
The record was about 21,600 miles, and just five months ago they broke that record while in Tibet.
Archer and Purnell have been on the road for over a year now, and so far, have put around 35,000 miles on the taxi.
After making their way around Europe, they shipped the cab across the Atlantic and have made their way along the East Coast from Florida, to Ohio and now, Pittsburgh. Their next stop is Niagara Falls, then Toronto for St. Patrick's Day and finally, New York.
Their tour will finish sometime in May and end in London, where they started.
The 1992 London cab may not look very large, but there is more room than one might expect.
"There's quite a bit of room, a bit of storage," said Archer. "There are normally three of us during the trip. We've got enough space for two of us to sit and one person to snooze in the back."
On the side of the taxi is an image of a Smartphone; their journey is sponsored by GetTaxi, a Smartphone App company that challenged them to circumnavigate the world once they had already broken the world record.
The app, coming soon to the United States, knows where your location is due to the GPS on your phone. All you have to do is press it and it will immediately dispatch a taxi to your location.
You can follow their journey on their blog called It's On The Meter, complete with pictures and stories. You can also donate online, and all the money raised goes to the Red Cross.
