The electronic payment that was always "broken" unless you were comfortable enough with confrontation to call the taxi driver's bluff?
I've never experienced a "broken" machine in a cab.
How many big city taxis did you ride before 2013 or so? They cleaned up their act once they got competition.
Quite a few, actually.
Same. Which area? For me it was Pittsburgh, New York, and Rome. The problem was absolutely endemic in all three, and I saw it pretty regularly at conferences and on vacations, too.
I encountered "broken" machines all the time before ~2010, probably more often than working machines, in major US cities.