Is this a good color? (Photo by Jason McKnight)

How is the city’s taxicab fleet doing? Are the drivers friendly? The cars tidy? The vehicles low-emission? Do you take a lot of cabs? And how could they be changed?

Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh wants to know with an online poll she opened today that seeks to gauge how well the details of a proposed overhaul of the District’s livery industry are being received by the public.

Cheh, who chairs the D.C. Council’s Environment, Public Works and Transportation Committee, was confronted at a press conference last week by cabbies who are angry with some of the proposed changes to their business and about the D.C. Taxicab Commission’s enforcement policies.

The Council’s taxi bill, which is backed by Mayor Vince Gray, would implement a number of new technical and cosmetic regulations on the city’s fleet of more about 8,500 cabs, the most visible of which would be the application of a uniform color for metered taxis.

But what color? There’ve been reports of city officials settling on white paint jobs, but cars that hue are terribly difficult to keep clean. Yellow would be a bit too obvious, to say nothing of the endless barbs we’d hear about how cabs are so much better in New York.

So Cheh is throwing it open. On the critical issue of what shade to paint the taxis, the councilmember’s poll offers several options:

Purple or orange cabs? Those certainly would be distinctive, if not a bit circus-like. And, yes, I know a certain answer is missing, but I don’t think “Answer No. 5” appears in the Pantone Color Matching System.