Eugene Salomon - Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver

And I do.

If you make driving a cab in New York City your career you will get no pension, no paid vacations, no overtime and no health benefits. But you will get a collection of stories. Its inevitable. It comes with the job.

Why is this so? Lets take a minute to examine what taxi driving in this, the Monster City of the World, is all about. Especially if youre not a New Yorker (yet), a review of the basics is in order.

We are all familiar with the image of a street in New York that is filled to the brim with yellow taxicabs. Its a part of the landscape here. How many taxis are there? The answer is 13,237, a quantity that is determined by the city government. Why so many? (Or so few, if youve been standing in the rain for half an hour trying to get one?) Well, Manhattan, the borough where the great majority of these cabs can be found, is an island that is thirteen miles in length and two miles in width. One and a half million people live on this island and almost none of them own a car theres no room for cars! So for many New Yorkers a taxi is a daily means of getting around town. Add to that the million tourists who are here every day and the more than a million commuters who are also here every day and you get an idea of why taxicabs are so important to life in the city.

In New York you can walk out into the street, wave your hand in the air (known as a hail), and before you can whistle Big Yellow Taxi, a big yellow taxi will zip up to you and stop, making itself available for your grand entrance. Your carriage awaits you, sir! Or madam.

Consider how marvelous this is. What convenience! In most places you must call on the phone for a taxi and wait for that taxi to arrive, if it arrives at all. But the population of Manhattan is so dense that it makes the street-hail system workable. Hand goes up, taxi arrives. Amazing!

And the driver of that taxi is required by law to take you anywhere in the city you want to go. He cannot legally refuse you. Of course, it is an imperfect world and if you want to go to Brooklyn in the middle of the evening rush hour, you may be refused every once in a while. In fact, you deserve to be refused if you want to go to Brooklyn at that time! But, generally speaking, your driver will take you anywhere in the city you want to go. Again, this is an amazing convenience, if you think about it.

So we have here a system of thousands of taxis, all in competition with each other, cruising the streets and constantly looking for their next customer anyone with his hand in the air. (Yes, I have stopped for people who were actually looking at their watches, pointing at buildings, or waving goodbye to their friends. And I have stopped not once, but twice, for a statue of a man hailing a cab on East 47th Street!)