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January242006

Once upon a pair of wheels

Filed under: Headline Shooter   Tagged: ,

Via Moldawer, a great blog by a woman cabbie, New York Hack. She posts some beautiful photos of sights seen en route, and her records of spirited conversations will remind you relationships between cabbies and passengers need not be either silent or contentious. For instance:


On a related note, I once drove a woman home who told me she had married her cab driver. He picked her up and they made a connection. Numbers were exchanged, dates went on, and eventually a marriage was had. At the time of our conversation, they had been married for nine years.

Actually, I can't remember the last time a cab driver and I had anything but a good conversation. It's like "bad service" in restaurants—funny how people who begin the interaction in a friendly way so rarely experience it. Every cab driver I ask tells me that the rude people and awful tippers are mainly the rich. Sad. Also, I'm sure you're too intelligent to repeat this ignorant cliché, but for emdashes' non-New York readers, New York cabbies are far from bad drivers, and their English is pretty damn fluent. (Maybe you just can't decipher accents?) My aunt, who in the '70s supported her acting career by driving a cab in New York, agrees. She thinks there were more female cabbies then, too. I wonder why that is?

My friend Liza Featherstone helped edit a book by Biju Mathew called Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, which I'm looking forward to reading and which, of course, is the book whose book party the great Ben McGrath covered for Talk of the Town:

Exactly what the full range of party chatter was is tough to say, because a variety of languages were spoken, but an interloper, with a little persistence, was able to discern that most drivers would probably disagree with the cheery characterization of the yellow cab (made at a recent design forum at Parsons) as “New York’s movable public space.” A fairer, if blunter, slogan might be: “Our workspace, where you annoy and disrespect us.”

“They treat the car like they’re slobs,” a driver whose handle on the Bengal Cabbie Association’s CB radio channel is Babar said of his passengers. He added that those who sit in the front seat, and who make radio requests, are usually drunk. Drunk passengers occasionally throw up, and the smell lingers for weeks.

“There are so many things,” Rizwan Raja, a Pakistani driver, said, rattling off a list of his pet peeves: putting one’s feet up on the partition, smoking, crossing the street lackadaisically. Requesting multiple stops is also frowned upon. “These people come out of expensive, posh bars, where one beer is twenty dollars, but they make groups together so they can share a taxi and save a couple of dollars,” Raja said. “ ‘Three stops’—that really, really blows me off.” Tips, ever since the fare increase, have been meagre: “Sometimes forty cents, sometimes twenty cents.”

Raja went on, “The worst is when they ask, ‘Where are you from?’ Once you answer that question, then it’s ‘What is the relationship between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani government?’ ” Raja, who says he is asked that question “almost every day,” has recommended that his passengers see “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

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