Cabbies

What do taxicab drivers think about?

One thing they thought about in Chicago last week was what would become of them if Samuel Insull (purveyor of light, heat and trolley rides to most of Chicago and its purlieus) should decide to take the city's taxicab situation in hand. That was the rumor, vague and unelaborated but still striking--that Samuel Insull would stride among the Chicago taxicab companies, either to compete with them or absorb them as one more of his big utility schemes.

Chicago has 15 cab companies, 5,000 cabs. Competition is sharp, service perhaps the best in the country (Chicago is the mother city of Yellow Cabs). But Chicago cabbies fare thinly, they are so many. Samuel Insull might, on his record, be expected to thin out the cabby ranks, profit fatly by organizing adroitly, eliminate some of the risk that exists when too many cabbies are speeding and dodging to glean a living.

If Chicago presents a cab problem, New York City presents a greater. Chief City Magistrate William McAdoo last fortnight deplored the presence of 17,000 cabs, most of them plying night and day in the congested runways of an island only 12 1/2by12 1/2 miles. Competition between the 17,000 is so great that, in Mr. McAdoo's words, "You can stand on any corner and count the number of taxicabs in proportion to other vehicles and two-thirds of them are taxicabs, cruising, cruising, empty, empty, everywhere!"

A taxicab spokesman replied that 17,000 was only 2% of the total vehicle registration in New York City, that New Yorkers want and need cabs at all hours. The Times, without warning, waxed humorous, and said: "Mr. McAdoo may be pardoned the slight hyperbole. It has been scientifically demonstrated that the average load of a taxicab in these parts is .83 of a passenger. Private automobiles offend to a somewhat less degree, averaging 1.7 passengers and just a trace of dog --generally lap dog."

The taxi industry in Manhattan has its own trade paper, the Taxi Weekly. At almost any corner you may occasionally see drivers who are not "cruising, cruising," and have been lucky enough to find parking space, poring over the news of their profession. Last week, for example, idle* eyes lit up at the screamer headline "HIGHER CAB RATE PLANNED."

Another news item began: "Watch for this man," relating the evil practice of a "large, well dressed man" who had slipped from a cab on Fifth Ave., ostensibly to change a $20 bill, and never returned.

Two pages in the Taxi Weekly are a power for good conduct among Manhattan cabbies, tabulating penalties meted out in the city's special Hack Bureau to perpetrators of prevalent hackmen's peccadillos: driving "with the flag up" (metre not recording); taking indirect routes; smoking while carrying passengers; withholding receipts from employers; forgetting license badge; charging an Englishman who undervalued U. S. currency $14 for a $1.40 ride.

* NOT lazy. Last week, Manhattan taxi-men protested strenuously through their Weekly against an advertisement of Listerine toothpaste which showed a cabby dozing at his steering wheel, with the caption : "Even for lazy people."