Taxi

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 7th of September 1914, the Military Governor of Paris, Joseph Gallieni, gathered roughly six hundred taxicabs at Les Invalides and sent them rolling through the night toward the front lines at Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, fifty kilometers away. Within twenty-four hours, about six thousand soldiers had been moved. The drivers, following city habit, kept their meters running the entire time. The French treasury later settled the bill: 70,012 francs. It was the first recorded large-scale use of motorized infantry in battle, and it happened inside ordinary cabs.

  The taxi is one of the most familiar objects in modern city life, yet its origins reach back centuries, its word comes from ancient Greek by way of medieval Latin and 19th-century German engineering, and the question of whether to regulate it has divided cities, economists, and courts for generations. How did a horse-drawn carriage for hire become an icon of urban identity? What does it mean when the simple act of getting from one place to another becomes a political and economic flashpoint? And who actually shapes the rules of who rides, who drives, and at what price?

• 2. A Word's Long Journey

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  Taximeter is itself a compound drawn from two older roots. The first half traces to the German Taxameter, from Taxe, a word meaning tax, charge, or scale of charges, which also connects to the Medieval Latin taxa with the same meaning. The deeper root is Ancient Greek, where taxis referred to placing things in a certain order. The Greeks used it to describe an orderly battle line, or the orderly payment of tribute. In Modern Greek, taxidi means journey, but that word originally denoted a military march.

  The second half of taximeter comes from the Greek metron, meaning measure. Together, the word encodes the promise of metered, orderly payment for a journey. The other half of taxicab, cabriolet, arrived from French, from cabrioler, meaning to leap or caper, which traces back through Italian capriolare to the Latin capreolus, meaning wild goat or roebuck. That French word became the name for a light, springing horse-drawn carriage.

  A popular story claims the vehicles were named for Franz von Taxis and his nephew Johann Baptiste von Taxis, a 16th-century postmaster for Philip of Burgundy who built fast postal networks across Europe. The story is wrong. The word follows the meter and the carriage, not the postmaster. Harry Nathaniel Allen, who imported the first 600 gas-powered taxicabs to New York City from France in 1907, borrowed the word taxicab from London, where it was already in use by early that year.

• 3. Horse, Hansom, and the Street

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  The first documented public hackney coach service for hire opened in London in 1605. Carriages became available from innkeepers in 1625, and the first taxi rank appeared on the Strand outside the Maypole Inn in 1636. The Hackney Carriage Act passed Parliament in 1635 to make horse-drawn hire legal, and the first hackney-carriage licences followed in 1662. Across the Channel, Nicolas Sauvage launched a similar service in Paris in 1637. His vehicles became known as fiacres, apparently because his main depot stood opposite a shrine to Saint Fiacre.

  Joseph Hansom, an architect from York, designed and patented a two-wheel cab in 1834 that transformed the trade. His vehicle was fast, light enough for a single horse, and agile enough to thread through the notorious traffic jams of 19th-century London. It had a low center of gravity for safe cornering. John Chapman and others refined Hansom's original design, but the cab kept his name. Hansom cabs spread quickly to the United Kingdom, to Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, and eventually to North America.

  In Toronto, the first cab service was established in 1837 by Thornton Blackburn, an escaped slave whose recapture in Detroit had triggered what became known as the Blackburn Riots. His company, called The City, put Toronto on the map of cities with organized cab hire.

• 4. The Meter and the Motor

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  Three German inventors, Wilhelm Friedrich Nedler, Ferdinand Dencker, and Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn, developed the modern taximeter. Gottlieb Daimler built the Daimler Victoria, the world's first motorized taximeter-cab, in 1897. It began operating in Stuttgart in June of that year. Paris and London followed with gasoline-powered cabs in 1899 and 1903 respectively. New York joined in 1907, with its imported French cabs.

  Almost simultaneously, electric taxis appeared. Walter Bersey designed a fleet for London, introducing them on the 19th of August 1897. They earned the nickname Hummingbirds for the sound they made. In New York that same year, the Samuel's Electric Carriage and Wagon Company started running 12 electric hansom cabs, eventually growing to 62 before being absorbed into the Electric Vehicle Company.

  In New York, the first domestically produced taxicabs were built in 1908 at Bristol Engineering in Bristol, Connecticut, designed by Fred E. Moskovics, who had worked at Daimler in the late 1890s. Albert F. Rockwell owned Bristol, and it was his wife who suggested painting the cabs yellow to maximize visibility on city streets. Moskovics went on to become one of the organizers of the first Yellow Taxicab Company in New York.

  The taxicabs of Paris had been equipped with meters as early as the 9th of March 1898. The meters were first called taxametres, then renamed taximetres on the 17th of October 1904. Dispatching technology caught up in stages: two-way radios entered cabs in the late 1940s, and computer-assisted dispatching arrived in the 1980s.

• 5. Danger, Accessibility, and the Green Shift

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  Taxi drivers in the United States face a homicide rate of 7.4 per 100,000, far higher than the general working population rate of 0.37 per 100,000. Bulletproof partitions were introduced in many cabs during the 1990s, and security cameras were added in the 21st century. Research found cameras more effective when mandated by cities rather than left to individual companies.

  The Birmingham pub bombings on the 21st of November 1974, which killed 21 people and injured 182, showed a different side of cabs in a crisis. Knowing that the 40 ambulances he had requested were unlikely to arrive in time, the fire officer in charge asked the Taxi Owners Association to transport the injured to Birmingham Accident Hospital and Birmingham General Hospital. Cabs filled the gap that official emergency services could not.

  Wheelchair-accessible taxis, sometimes called maxicabs, have expanded fleets in many cities, though demand from disabled passengers often goes unmet because modified vehicles make up only a small fraction of most fleets. London made all its taxis fully accessible by January 2000. The latest designs load from the side rather than the rear, allowing emergency exit from either side door.

  On the environmental side, San Francisco introduced 15 Ford Escape Hybrids for taxi service in 2005, becoming one of the first cities to do so. By March 2010, 788 of the city's 1,378 eligible vehicles were running on alternative fuels, representing 57% of the fleet. Arlington, Virginia launched EnviroCAB, which became the first all-hybrid taxicab fleet in the United States and the first carbon-negative taxicab company in the world.

• 6. The Regulation Debate

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  Seattle deregulated taxis in 1980, and the result was a high supply of cabs, variable and often inflated fares, short-haul refusals, and poor treatment of passengers. The city re-regulated in 1984, restoring fare controls and licence limits. St. Louis saw a 35% rise in taxi fares after deregulation, and its City Council froze new taxicab licences in 2002. Sweden deregulated in 1991 and found average fares rose in almost all categories, taxicab productivity fell, and company revenues declined.

  The Netherlands deregulated in 2000 and found fares rising unexpectedly in large cities while driver behavior became a serious problem. South Africa deregulated in 1987; new drivers organized into rival cartels that used violence to control routes, resulting in between 120 and 330 deaths annually since deregulation.

  Ireland's experience went the other way. Deregulation cut waiting times sharply, proved popular with the public, and did not visibly reduce vehicle quality or driver standards. In New Zealand, deregulation increased supply and initially cut prices significantly in large cities. The effects in smaller cities were modest.

  Proponents of the medallion system argue that the licence functions like a brand-name asset: a driver with a financial stake in the licence has an incentive to provide quality service. Critics counter that in New York City, the monopoly advantage for taxi licence holders was worth $590 million in the early 1980s, while the city operated 1,400 fewer licences than it had issued in 1937. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded in its taxi regulation report that there were no grounds for limiting the number of taxi companies and cars, and that such limits impose a disproportionate burden on low-income people.

  The Taxicab, Limousine and Paratransit Association, established in 1917, counts more than 1,100 member companies across its global membership today. In April 2011, it launched the Transportation on Patrol program, training volunteer drivers to serve as witnesses and watch for criminal activity alongside local police.