Taxi
A taxi, also known as a taxicab or simply a cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice. This differs from public transport where the pick-up and drop-off locations are decided by the service provider, not by the customers, although demand responsive transport and share taxis provide a hybrid bus/taxi mode.
There are four distinct forms of taxicab, which can be identified by slightly differing terms in different countries:
- Hackney carriages, also known as public hire, hailed or street taxis, licensed for hailing throughout communities
- Private hire vehicles, also known as minicabs or private hire taxis, licensed for pre-booking only
- Taxibuses, also come in many variations throughout the developing countries as jitneys or jeepney, operating on pre-set routes typified by multiple stops and multiple independent passengers
- Limousines, specialized vehicle licensed for operation by pre-booking
Etymology
The word taxicab is a compound word formed as a contraction of taximeter and cabriolet. Taximeter is an adaptation of the German word Taxameter, which is itself a variant of the earlier German word Taxanom. Taxe /ˈtaksə/ is a German word meaning "tax", "charge", or "scale of charges". The Medieval Latin word taxa also means tax or charge. Taxi may ultimately be attributed to Ancient Greek τάξις from τάσσω meaning "to place in a certain order," as in commanding an orderly battle line, or in ordaining the payment of taxes, to the extent that ταξίδι, meaning "journey" in Modern Greek, initially denoted an orderly military march or campaign. Meter is from the Greek μέτρον meaning "measure." A cabriolet is a type of horse-drawn carriage; the word comes from French cabrioler, from Italian capriolare, from Latin capreolus. In most European languages that word has taken on the meaning of a convertible car.The taxicabs of Paris were equipped with the first meters beginning on 9 March 1898. They were originally called taxamètres, then renamed taximètres on 17 October 1904.
Harry Nathaniel Allen of The New York Taxicab Company, who imported the first 600 gas-powered New York City taxicabs from France in 1907, borrowed the word "taxicab" from London, where the word was in use by early 1907.
A popular but erroneous account holds that the vehicles were named after Franz von Taxis from the house of Thurn and Taxis, a 16th-century postmaster for Philip of Burgundy, and his nephew Johann Baptiste von Taxis, General Postmaster for the Holy Roman Empire. Both instituted fast and reliable postal services across Europe. Their surname derives from their 13th-century ancestor Omodeo Tasso.
History
Hackney carriages
Horse-drawn for-hire hackney carriage services began operating in both Paris and London in the early 17th century. The first documented public hackney coach service for hire was in London in 1605. In 1625 carriages were made available for hire from innkeepers in London and the first taxi rank appeared on the Strand outside the Maypole Inn in 1636. In 1635 the Hackney Carriage Act was passed by Parliament to legalise horse-drawn carriages for hire. Coaches were hired out by innkeepers to merchants and visitors. A further "Ordinance for the Regulation of Hackney-Coachmen in London and the places adjacent" was approved by Parliament in 1654 and the first hackney-carriage licences were issued in 1662.A similar service was started by Nicolas Sauvage in Paris in 1637. His vehicles were known as fiacres, as the main vehicle depot apparently was opposite a shrine to Saint Fiacre.
Hansoms
The hansom cab was designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom, an architect from York as a substantial improvement on the old hackney carriages. These two-wheel vehicles were fast, light enough to be pulled by a single horse were agile enough to steer around horse-drawn vehicles in the notorious traffic jams of nineteenth-century London and had a low centre of gravity for safe cornering. Hansom's original design was modified by John Chapman and several others to improve its practicability, but retained Hansom's name.These soon replaced the hackney carriage as a vehicle for hire. They quickly spread to other cities in the United Kingdom, as well as continental European cities, particularly Paris, Berlin, and St Petersburg. The cab was introduced to other British Empire cities and to the United States during the late 19th century, being most commonly used in New York City.
The first cab service in Toronto, "The City", was established in 1837 by Thornton Blackburn, an ex-slave whose escape when captured in Detroit was the impetus for the Blackburn Riots.
Modern taxicabs
The modern taximeter was invented and perfected by a trio of German inventors; Wilhelm Friedrich Nedler, Ferdinand Dencker and Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn. The Daimler Victoria—the world's first motorized-powered taximeter-cab—was built by Gottlieb Daimler in 1897 and began operating in Stuttgart in June 1897. Gasoline-powered taxicabs began operating in Paris in 1899, in London in 1903, and in New York in 1907. The New York taxicabs were initially imported from France by Harry N. Allen, owner of the Allen-Kingston Motor Car Company. Their manufacturing took place at Bristol Engineering in Bristol, Connecticut where the first domestically produced Taxicabs were built in 1908, designed by Fred E. Moskovics who had worked at Daimler in the late 1890s. Albert F. Rockwell was the owner of Bristol and his wife suggested he paint his taxicabs yellow to maximise his vehicles' visibility. Moskovics was one of the organizers of the first Yellow Taxicab Company in New York.Electric battery-powered taxis became available at the end of the 19th century. In London, Walter Bersey designed a fleet of such cabs and introduced them to the streets of London on 19 August 1897. They were soon nicknamed 'Hummingbirds' due to the idiosyncratic humming noise they made. In the same year in New York City, the Samuel's Electric Carriage and Wagon Company began running 12 electric hansom cabs. The company ran until 1898 with up to 62 cabs operating until it was reformed by its financiers to form the Electric Vehicle Company.
Taxicabs proliferated around the world in the early 20th century. The first major innovation after the invention of the taximeter occurred in the late 1940s, when two-way radios first appeared in taxicabs. Radios enabled taxicabs and dispatch offices to communicate and serve customers more efficiently than previous methods, such as using callboxes. The next major innovation occurred in the 1980s when computer assisted dispatching was first introduced.
As military and emergency transport
Paris taxis played a memorable part in the French victory at First Battle of the Marne in the First World War. On 7 September 1914, the Military Governor of Paris, Joseph Gallieni, gathered about six hundred taxicabs at Les Invalides in central Paris to carry soldiers to the front at Nanteuil-le Haudouin, fifty kilometers away. Within twenty-four hours about six thousand soldiers and officers were moved to the front. Each taxi carried five soldiers, four in the back and one next to the driver. Only the back lights of the taxis were lit; the drivers were instructed to follow the lights of the taxi ahead. The Germans, caught off guard, were pushed back by the French and British forces. Most of the taxis were demobilized on 8 September but some remained longer to carry the wounded and refugees. The taxis, following city regulations, dutifully ran their meters. The French treasury reimbursed the total fare of 70,012 francs. The military impact of the soldiers moved by taxi was small in the huge scale of the Battle of the Marne, but the effect on French morale was enormous; it became the symbol of the solidarity between the French army and citizens. It was also the first recorded large-scale use of motorized infantry in battle.The Birmingham pub bombings on 21 November 1974, which killed 21 people and injured 182, presented emergency services with unprecedented peacetime demands. According to eyewitness accounts, the fire officer in charge, knowing the 40 ambulances he requested were unlikely to be available, requested the Taxi Owners Association to transport the injured to the nearby Birmingham Accident Hospital and Birmingham General Hospital.
Vehicles
Taxi services are typically provided by automobiles, but in some countries, various human-powered vehicles, animal-powered vehicles, or even boats are or have historically been used. In Western Europe, Bissau, and to an extent, Australia, it is not uncommon for expensive cars such as Mercedes-Benz to be the taxicab of choice. Often this decision is based upon the perceived reliability of, and warranty offered with, these vehicles. These taxi-service vehicles are almost always equipped with four-cylinder turbodiesel engines and relatively low levels of equipment, and are not considered luxury cars. This, however, has changed in countries such as Denmark, where tax regulation makes it profitable to sell the vehicles after a few years of service, which requires the cars to be well equipped and kept in good condition.Cities like London and Tokyo have implemented specific regulations like London's Conditions of Fitness that dictate size, fuel efficiency, emissions, and accessibility standards far stricter than that for private vehicles. Much like the Checker cabs that were ubiquitous in New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s, the unique attributes of the city often make the vehicles built to fit those requirements ubiquitous to its livery fleets, and often becomes an iconic image of the city itself.
Although New York City's efforts to mandate both a hybrid and wheelchair-accessible vehicle have been largely unsuccessful, London and Tokyo's efforts have yielded unique vehicles such as the LEVC TX and Toyota JPN Taxi that meet and exceed modern emissions and accessibility requirements for the future, and plan to extend to other cities as older models get rotated out of the bigger cities and into smaller markets. Modifications of existing minivans such as the Mercedes Vito London Taxi and the Nissan NV200 have also been introduced as a stopgap measures to fill the need for alternative products, but have been largely rejected by customers.