captain cab wrote:
Black cabs show the best side of London
To date, I've only written complaining articles about life in London, so I thought it was time to praise something. I spent last week in New York and while there are many things I love about that city, the yellow taxis are not one of them. Within hours of arriving I was pining for a black cab.
You notice the difference between a black cab and a yellow one the moment you get in. To begin with, yellow cabs smell. It is an acrid combination of body odour, rotting food and human waste.
I would often wonder about this last smell, until one day the mystery was solved. My driver pulled up at a traffic light, opened his door and poured away some yellow liquid from a bottle he kept under his seat. They all do it, apparently. They use their cabs as toilets.
Then there's the fact that at least 75 per cent of the drivers don't know how to get from A to B. You tell your driver you want to go to 9th Avenue and 14th Street and he gives you a blank look.
This is quite surprising when you consider that New York's streets are laid out in a very simple grid pattern, with avenues running one way and streets the other. My five-year-old daughter could find 9th Avenue and 14th Street.
Compare this with the experience of getting into a black cab. They're usually spotless, with an air-freshener sitting on the back shelf.
The drivers nearly always know exactly how to get where you want to go, no matter how obscure the destination. Indeed, on the few occasions I've witnessed black cabbies consult the A-Z, they do it furtively, as though they're ashamed to let you see them looking at a map.
As for satnav, a driver told me recently that you're as likely to find one of them in a black cab as you are a leaflet urging you to join the Labour Party.
The crucial difference, of course, is that black cabbies have to "do the knowledge". This doesn't simply mean they know how to get from A to B, it transforms their whole attitude to their profession.
Driving a cab is not a dead-end job, as it is in New York. It's a trade and its practitioners take pride in their work. That's why their cabs are clean.
London taxi drivers are not the flotsam and jetsam spat out by a teeming metropolis, they're ambassadors for the city. They know that if London is to maintain its status as the capital of the world - the New York of the 21st century, in fact - our cabs need to be the best in the world.
And they are.
I agree.
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