Images by Jake Tilson
The relationship often begins with a physical gesture – a finger raised in the air, a step forward off the curb, a whistle or shout. Although sometimes spontaneous, the decision to take a taxi is usually a calculation: a need to get somewhere quickly, a judgment based on the vectors of time, distance and speed. Hailing a taxi can also be a necessity (arriving in a new city) or a luxury (getting home quickly after a long day) or a means of security (after a drunken night out). Taxis serve all these functions, day and night. They are as vital a part of the infrastructure of our cities and towns, as crucial to the urban flow as the underground cabling that provides us with electricity or the pipes that bring us water.
If it’s a truism that the identity of place
has weakened over the past 100 years, that cities have become increasingly
bland as a result of the remorseless press of commercial globalisation, then
taxis are one of the few urban signifiers that have stubbornly resisted this
trend. They have retained a distinctive cultural and technological
fingerprint; you know you’re in London or New York as soon as you catch
sight of a cab coming at you down the street.
Taxis are a part of the urban fabric that is seen and used everyday but, at
the same time, they are an aspect of contemporary life that most of us tend
to overlook or ignore. I think this is because a ride in a taxi is by its
very nature a transient experience, a means of getting somewhere else, a
pause between two points, and hardly ever perceived as an end in itself. Yet
in New York City, in 2002 alone, there were 171 million taxi trips taken by
an average of 1.4 passengers, which works out as a staggering 240 million
people hopping in and out of those beat-up yellow cars. The average
Manhattan adult (who, collectively, account for well over half of all taxi
journeys in the city) hails a taxi on average 100 times a year. Take these
numbers and the multiplicity of experiences they represent, and then imagine
all the rides taken through the streets of Bombay or Paris or London, and
you begin to realise that this adds up to a lot of time spent on those
vinyl, cloth or leather seats; an entire cultural history waiting to be
composed out of the phenomena of gazing out of the window, chatting with the
driver or making out with a lover. A ride in a taxi buys you a semi-private
space, an arena where you are simultaneously free of the public gaze from
the street as well as the domestic constraints of the home.
Baudelaire defined modernity as the experience of the fleeting and the fragmented, and in some ways the experience of a taxi ride fits this description perfectly. As they swerve and rattle through the streets they take us on individualised journeys through the urban landscape, often weaving together parts of the geography that would otherwise remain disparate. A taxi ride frequently diverts the passenger from the main boulevards, arteries and streets (a good taxi driver always knows the best short-cuts) and these self-contained transitional minutes spent moving through semi- or unfamiliar areas are the perfect moments for dreaming and gazing; they enable us to see a place afresh.
Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, making his way independently, passionately and impartially (the conflicting qualities necessary for engaged observation) through the visual delights of the city, the taxi rider exists at the heart of the multitude and yet is set apart from the ebb and flow; he or she sees the world, is at the centre of the world and yet remains hidden from the world. We see Tokyo’s density and gleam glimpsed from behind the Christo-like wrapped front seat of a night-time ride, with the gloved hand of the driver lending the image a haunted, sci-fi aura. In Bombay, we see the architectural mix-and-match, the effortless conjunction between the sacred and the profane, nicely echoed by the personalised touches added to the otherwise anonymous cab interior. And in New York inside the taxi all seems calm, almost serene, a temporary cocoon safe from the thrust and frenzy of the non-stop city.
Adam Levy is a writer and documentary film-maker. He lives in New York.
Jake Tilson is an artist/designer.