Cairo’s Taxi Revolution

Hop in any cab in any city of the world and you’re likely to be treated to lively political commentary. That’s especially true in autocratic regimes, where the availability of other spaces in which random strangers can meet and speak openly has often been severely curtailed. Cairo’s sprawling cityscape, for example — segregated swathes of sumptuous subdivisions and mudbrick shantytowns each stretching out into the desert — rendered such common ground rare.

Despite the vastness of Egypt’s capital, car ownership is a relative extravagance, and the growing but incomplete mass transit system barely reaches even a fraction of the population, making taxis among the most vital forms of transport. At any given moment, the city’s classic, black-and-white cabs form a huge percentage of the vehicles trapped in Cairo’s notorious traffic. According to Greater Cairo’s General Transportation Authority, over 50,000 were registered in the city in 2005. Unofficially, the number is around 80,000 (for comparison’s sake, New York and London have around 15k each).

Most are third-hand Yugos, Ladas, or other now-obscure brands imported decades ago from the Eastern Bloc, their drivers often chasing down, often to the exclusion of keeping their eyes on the road, any potential fare they can find. And yet, despite their general reputation for unpredictability, Cairo taxis’ regimented color scheme is also what grants the capital’s sometimes chaotic streets any sense of uniformity and order. But it wasn’t until I was leaving the country that I pieced together their deeper political significance — with the help of Khaled al-Khamissi’s then newly-translated book, Taxi.

Enroute out of Egypt, at 35,000 feet, I became absorbed in al-Khamissi’s chronicle of taxicab confessions — the book is a compilation of the thoughts he’d gathered from the drivers who plied the streets down on the ground that was receding far behind and beneath me. Many began to replay in my mind when Egypt’s historic protests began in January. For all the debate over how and whether social media stimulated the Egyptian Revolution, much less attention has been paid to the urban social networks that reached many more Egyptians than Facebook. Like honeybees, Cairo’s taxis didn’t just collect the fares that were their drivers’ sustenance; they also cross-pollinate ideas — helping to gather and spread political dissent.

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Tracing London’s Taxis

To earn their hackney license, London’s taxi drivers must all famously master “The Knowledge,” a vast compilation of raw data about the best routes through the city’s streets. The memorization process takes an average of 34 months to study — and 12 attempts to pass. That means it’s a safe bet few licensed London cabbies are ever lost, and — since they’re also immune from central London’s congestion charge or from restrictions on private vehicles in places like busy Oxford Street — the patterns driven by the city’s trademark black cabs probably reflect the overall distribution of street traffic in the British capital better than any other proxy.

Part of the BBC’s visually absorbing Britain from Above series, which also includes this mesmerizing time-lapse of Britain’s busiest rail station, the video above examines the patterns tread by London’s taxis over the course of a day by combining GPS data about their location with satellite imagery of the city, telling the story of Londoners’ movements by tracing their routes in light.

What Colour for Montreal’s Taxis?

New York is yellow, London black, Hong Kong red (and green and blue, but let’s not complicate things). What colour will Montreal be? After years of wrangling with the taxi commission, Montreal’s government has finally reached an agreement that will see all of the city’s taxis adopt a uniform livery. The transition could be complete within six years. At this point, however, nobody has yet decided on what that livery will look like.

You might think that the colour of a city’s taxis is something trivial. You’d be wrong. With 4,500 licenced taxis in Montreal — about one for every 400 people, a denser concentration than many cities, including cab-crazy New York — they represent one of the city’s most ubiquitous pieces of design. Since taxis are always passing by, how they look affects how the city as a whole looks, and their livery can become the city’s most easily-identifiable visual symbol.

There are a handful of cities whose taxi liveries have become inextricably tied to their civic sense of self. New York and its yellow cabs is the most obvious example, but there’s also Madrid, which has white taxis with a red stripe, and Tokyo, whose green-and-yellow and sky-blue-and-grey-checkers taxis once inspired a line of Nike shoes. Though its taxi liveries vary from company to company, Toronto has a surprising penchant for bright oranges, reds and yellows.

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Taxi Triptych

Taxi Culture

It occurred to my friends and I, as we were travelling in a convoy of taxis down a one-lane mountain road, that it was a bit odd that an afternoon of hiking would start with a ride in a cab. But Hong Kong is an odd place. With a remarkably few private vehicles for such a large city—less than one out of five people here own a car—taxis play a particularly important role in shuttling people around town. I can’t help but compare the culture of taxis here with that of Montreal, which also has an abundance of cabs, but whose approach to them is markedly different.

Hong Kong has more than 18,000 taxis, compared to Montreal’s 4,500, but this works out to the same per-capita ratio of about one taxi for every 400 people. (New York, by contrast, has one taxi for every 600 people, though this doesn’t reflect the fact that most cabs stay on Manhattan and neglect the outer boroughs.) In both cities, taxis are owned by a mix of companies and individuals; drivers work long hours, earn only modest wages and sometimes suffer from stress and neuroses caused by working long, solitary hours for oft-ungrateful customers. But the similarities end there.

The biggest difference is demographic. The vast majority of taxi drivers in Montreal are immigrants or ethnic minorities, just like in most other large North American cities. Many are Haitian. In Hong Kong, though, I doubt there are any non-Chinese cabbies. The way that taxis are regulated by the government differs sharply too. While cabs in both cities are licenced, Montreal takes a far more lax approach in determining the model, colour and livery of taxis — a taxi can be pretty much any type of vehicle, and most drivers opt for standard-issue Toyota Camrys. The only indication it’s a taxi is the sign on the roof.

In Hong Kong, by contrast, cabs are all customized Toyota Crowns, with red livery for taxis serving urban areas, green for those serving the New Territories and blue for cabs on Lantau Island. Like New York’s yellow cabs, they give a certain consistent hue to the streets, not to mention a certain sense of place. It’s always a mild surprise to go to Yuen Long or Tai Po and find that the taxis are green, such is the extent to which the colour red can be associated with traffic in Hong Kong.

Taxi Ads

For some reason, I’d never really considered how and where Hong Kong’s taxicabs are plastered with advertising, so I was somewhat amused to wander into a group of guys doing just that in an out-of-the-way part of the North Point waterfront.

Rainbow Jam

Thanks to its large, multi-hued fleet of taxis and tuk-tuks, not to mention the Thai tradition of exuberantly decorating one’s vehicle, Bangkok must have the most colourful traffic in the world. That’s a good thing, too, because the traffic is jammed so often it would be awfully monotonous without such visual stimulus.

Sham Shui Po Taxi

Life vs. Bombay Taxi-Wallah

Taxi drivers, it’s safe to say, have attained iconic status in the annals of urban folklore. They’re the embodiment of a city’s wiry energy and gritty determination to survive. They are strange, slightly crazy and defiantly individualistic. Surely, it takes a special character to drive strangers around for hours on end, competing with thousands of other drivers for customers and cash. (The debt faced by drivers is often staggering—in Montreal, where 9,500 taxis prowl the streets, taxi licences cost upwards of $200,000.) Maybe that’s why so many of them have such interesting things to say. Pierre-Léon, author of Un taxi la nuit, just landed a book deal; Lebanese-Canadian Rawi Hage wrote his first novel DeNiro’s Game while driving a taxi in Montreal. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and is now a national bestseller.

Most cabbies, however, are just trying to survive amidst the particular challenges of their own city. “Horn OK Please” is a day in the life of a Bombay taxi driver, Lucky, who struggles to earn enough rupees to buy a new air-conditioned cab. This short film, produced by a team of Indian and Irish animators at Belfast’s Flickerpix Animations, is made with a combination of stop-motion models and drawn backgrounds. The result is colourful, chaotic and charming. Take a look.