Anyone who has been to a busy city like New York or Washington, D.C., knows that it’s one thing to need a taxicab and another thing to be able to flag one down on a busy street. The tradition and use of taxicabs has been around for a long time, ever since man has needed non-pedestrian transportation from one place to another without owning a vehicle. Whether it’s hailing a taxi in New York or using a sedan service in Baltimore, the need has not changed for centuries.
The word “taxicab” finds its etymology in both Greek and Latin, and was first introduced to the United States by the owner of The New York Taxicab Company, Harry Nathaniel Allen, when he imported 600 vehicles from France to open up his business venture.
Though the word is relatively new, the concept has been around for a very long time. Horse drawn carriages, nicknamed hackney carriages, have been available for hire since the mid-1600s in both England and France. These first carriages were very popular but were surpassed in popularity in the mid-nineteenth century by the Hansom cabs, named after their creator, Joseph Hansom, an architect from York. Hansom used his architectural sense of design to modify the existing cab into a faster and safer model with a lower center of gravity. Though the company was taken over by others and the design further modified, the Hansom cab retained its name due its popular use among the public, much in the same way we use “Xerox” to mean photocopy.
It wasn’t until just before the turn of the nineteenth century that motorized taxicabs began operating in Paris, France, and very shortly thereafter in London, followed quickly by New York. It was Harry Allen who painted his cabs yellow in order to make them distinct and began a tradition that continues to this day. The same cannot be said of the black taxicabs in London.
Further innovations include the introduction of taximeters, designed to measure distance and standardize the system of paying the fare, and the use of radios that connected the cabs to the dispatch office, both of which surfaced in the mid-forties.
Other methods of taxiing people from one place to another have also been used throughout time and across the world. The invention and use of the rickshaw is one such example, which was first seen in Japan in the late 1800s. Other methods of transportation have developed as a response to the specific geography of the region, an example being gondolas in Venice.
These days, whether you need a gondola in Venice or a sedan service in Baltimore, you can rely on personalized public transportation wherever you travel, as long as you have the fare and, of course, a healthy tip.