VeriFone’s smart meter comes with credit card payment keypad and TV screen, which will feature short loops of NBC content and weather.

D.C. taxicab riders might have to wait a little longer for what would seem to be an expected convenience these days: being able to pay with a credit card. The Post reported yesterday that the D.C. Contracts Appeal Board overturned a $35 million contract that would have brought smart meters to the city’s 6,500 taxicabs by this month:

The Contract Appeals Board ruled that the process that ended up selecting VeriFone Systems’s $35 million bid was riddled with “pervasive improprieties.” The company beat out seven other firms, including Creative Mobile Technologies and RideCharge, which mounted separate legal challenges in July.

In their ruling, the judges said the city offered “meager” documentation to justify the VeriFone award. They also sharply criticized a city contracting officer for not doing an independent analysis of the bid proposals, adding they were “troubled by the numerous unexplained and glaring errors, inconsistencies and oversights that clearly occurred” during the procurement.

The VeriFone smart meters were announced to great fanfare in August, but few cabbies started installing them over concerns that the contract would ultimately be overturned and have to be rebid altogether. Many cab drivers additionally complained that they were being forced to adopt the same city-mandated smart meter, when individual cab companies had started working with different companies on installing the meters, which offer credit card payment, GPS and TV.

There’s no timeline for getting the smart meters into the city’s cabs.