New York Taxi Driving Tales Ch. 03

I couldn't imagine Travis Bickle driving anything but a Checker. There's that ominous but striking scene at the beginning when his vehicle emerges from a cloud of steam. With Bernard Herrmann's music on the soundtrack, it sets the tone for the rest of the movie.

A very American product, Checker Motors operated out of Kalamazoo, MI. It was created in 1922 from the merger of two other companies. It had a long history that I'm only going to touch on here. It introduced its first purpose-built taxi in 1928. For a while it dominated the market along with one other company, Yellow Cab Manufacturing. :

I find this amazing, but up until the 1920s, most taxis had the driver sitting out in the open, without a roof over his head. I suppose that was a holdover from the horse-drawn days when the driver sat on an open seat at the front of the roof. Anyway, it must have been a complete hassle to drive that way except in the best weather conditions.

By the end of the decade, taxis were enclosed, but Checker did try out a sort of convertible model in the 1940s. This was for the benefit of the passengers in the back. There was a folding steel roof and also a fabric convertible-style awning. It must have been fun on good weather days. Maybe somebody could re-introduce the concept and Uber and Lyft would go for it.

The company had various models until in finally settled on the A11 model and the similar but slightly shorter Marathon around 1954 and stuck with it. That was the car that became the iconic Checker model.

Until 1964 they built their own engines based on a design from a predecessor company. After that, they went to General Motors for drivetrains. There was an inline six-cylinder and a V-8 available. By my time New York fleets used the six, but individual owners may have gone for the eight. I see the six was rated at 145 hp, but it didn't feel that slow for such a heavy car. Maybe I just wasn't noticing the lack of power.

Station wagons and airport limousine models were offered for a while. There actually were people who bought Checkers as their personal vehicles. I imagine they were folks who liked to go their own way without following mass opinion. The company was building about 8,000 vehicles a year in the early 1960s and for a while a fifth of them went to private owners.

In the 1980s the company attempted to come up with a replacement model. One serious scheme was to use stretched Volkswagen Rabbits, which sounds like a strange idea. In 1982, vehicle production ended but the company continued in the auto parts business until its bankruptcy in 2009.

I find it notable that the last Checker in New York City was retired in 1999. It had lasted far longer than was typical for a taxicab.

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What you got with a Checker was a very high seating position, which was in line with other cars from the early 1950s. Today it might be classified as a "crossover." When I was driving only a few Jeep Wagoneers and other such vehicles had a similar driving position.

The few from the driver's seat was thus great. It was hampered by the lack of a right-side outside mirror, but that was common among all cars back then.

The space in the back was extraordinary. There was room for two little "jump seats" which could be folded back. For insurance purposes, the car was rated for five passengers, although I sometimes had more than that. Some drivers objected to having people in the front seat with them, but I never minded it.

The vehicle had a sort of primitive, retro feel to it. The dashboard and instruments were pretty sparse. I remember that there was space for a clock but it must have been an option that the fleets did not order.

Somehow the seat belts got messed up. There was supposed to be a three-point belt for the driver, but it was usually tucked somewhere into the cushions. The back seat seemed to have the same issue.

Few drivers or their passengers, both commuters and professionals, used seat belts at all in the 1970s. I would say that it probably was under five percent for all drivers, and it stayed that way well into the 1980s. For taxis it was more like zero percent.

There were a couple of provisions regarding crime and hold-ups. There was a partition between the front and back with a sliding window. I guess this window was made of Lexan or something like that. I wondered what caliber bullet it could stand up to, but I never found out.

It was very difficult to hear through this partition, and I became rather careless about just leaving it open, even at night.

There was a safe or lockbox on the floor where one were supposed to stow most of the money. The problem was that, at the end of the shift, one had to go into the office to get the key for it. At some big fleets that meant walking two blocks back and forth. I think I only used it a few times and then I gave up.

I also wondered what would happen if the robber found that most of the cash was locked away. It might make for a rather pissed-off and unpredictable robber. Maybe he'd take the whole car and deal with the safe at his leisure.

By the way, since Checkers were rear-wheel drive without any traction control equipment, they were tricky to drive in snow. It was quite easy to get stuck in snow that didn't seem that deep. Fortunately I never got irretrievable stuck and thus never made an embarrassing phone call to the garage to get a tow truck.

During heavy snow storms, the garages would put up signs saying, "Don't drive on side streets." That was difficult to do because many passengers didn't like being left far from their front doors. If the street looked at all passable, I would make an attempt to drive in.

One in a while, like with the blizzard of February, 1978, the fleets would shut down for about a day until some plowing was done. I don't know what they did during the "Lindsay" storm of 1969, when many streets were impassable for at least four days.

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The pavement of New York streets was at a low point in the 1970s (although they are not that great even now). Some streets seemed to be more pot hole than pavement. This took a heavy toll on the suspensions of all vehicles, especially taxis.

Fleet cabs were some of the most messed-up vehicles I have ever driven. Everything that could go wrong did. Sometimes it was small things. One doesn't notice the lack of sun visors until they were needed and they were not up there.

As I think Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, machines can be identical when they leave the factory but become completely different depending on how they are used and maintained. He should have spent some time with New York cabs.

The Checker was a reasonable competent car when new. After a while, through constant use and abuse, each one developed its own quirky but often unpleasant personality. Some felt like the suspensions were made of concrete; others felt light and springy. The mechanics knew these personalities and would comment on them. (All fleet taxis are numbered.)

When I took a car out, I would first check to see that the lights and signals and other such things were working. I had one car for which the only way to blow the horn was to touch a wire against a piece of metal where the button had been. And horn blowing was an important requirement in cab driving.

Then I would often drive over a big bump at one the Queensboro/59th Street Bridge entrances to see how it handled.

There weren't too many outright engine failures. I remember I once had a transmission start to go on me. Instead of calling the garage, I attempted to drive it across the 59th Street Bridge and got stuck in one of the outside lanes, at night - not a safe place to be. Also, with no cell phone, I had no way of calling the garage.

I was outside trying to wave away oncoming traffic when a truck driver offered to push me across. He got me all the way to the garage entrance, which was near the north end of Queens Plaza.

Some of the drivers were oblivious to their vehicles; as long as the meter worked, they drove anyway. I sometimes was dismayed at the terrible cars they handed over at the end of their shifts.

When drivers were first hired they had a daily "shape-up" and got the first car available (which could take quite a while for the night shift). Eventually drivers got a "steady car," a specific one assigned to them if it was in service.

If a car had a steady driver on both shifts, they could work together to make sure the car was maintained reasonably well. The guys on shape-up tended to be indifferent, which helped explain why some vehicles were so bad.

By the way, the meters were much older than the cars and got transferred to from cab to cab as the years went by. These were electro-mechanical rather than electronic like the present ones. The ones I used had push-buttons, not the levers with the little metal "flag" on top as Travis Bickle had. Those were around by not in my fleets.

It happened that during my driving period the Post or the Daily News published a story about the sad state of fleet taxis. A reporter went to the Taxi and Limousine Commission inspection garage in Queens and inventoried what was broken on a certain car in there. There was a photo of it with text boxes pointing to each defect. These defects were quite extensive but the car was hardly an anomaly among New York cabs.

Fleet cabs generally operated for about two years and, I think, 150,000 miles. Non-fleet cabs were better maintained and could go quite a bit further, maybe four or five years at least.

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After 1970 all medallion cabs had to be solid yellow. All car services, gypsies, etc., could be anything but yellow to distinguish them easily. If you look at old photos, you will see cabs of different colors, often combining green and yellow or red and yellow.

The most common alternative to the Checker in New York was the Dodge Coronet. It made for a lousy taxi because the interior was so cramped, especially in the back seat. Some companies tried out the smaller Dodge Aspen. It did have the advantage of being boxy and thus probably had a more usable interior. I have no idea how they held up to the city's potholes; I never drove a Dodge

During the energy crisis of 1974 there were some Chevrolet Novas in use. By 1978 they were long gone. Owner-drivers and "mini-fleets" (I'll discuss that concept somewhere else) often used Chevrolet Impalas or the Ford LTD. There was an occasional full-size Dodge. A few foreign cars were around; I remember Peugeots and at least one Mercedes-Benz. There were no Japanese cars; most of them were far too small. Of course, in places like Mexico, even the Volkswagen Beetle saw duty as taxis. How that could be done with a two-door car must have been interesting.

My company tried an Impala as an experiment. I got it twice, I believe. On one trip I almost crashed it on the FDR Drive because the suspension was so bad. I went over a substantial bump and I scared the hell out of myself as the car almost went out of control. My passenger, a guy going to The Bronx I think, never commented on it.

Also, the Impala was only rated for four passengers, not five. As I mentioned, those limits were often ignored. I guess there would have been insurance problems if there was an accident and people got injured.

Otherwise, it didn't have the great view of the Checker, but it still was sort of a likeable vehicle - when it was kept repaired.

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Nowadays the yellow cabs are still out there but the ride-hailing services are catching up fast. (Although the virus crisis is hurting every service.) All kinds of cars are used for both, including mini-vans and SUVs. The Lincoln Town Car used to be popular with car services but it's out of production and thus it is disappearing from the streets.

Japanese models seem to dominate now. At one time it was thought that front-drive cars couldn't hold up to professional use, but that has changed. Among car services and ride-hail outfits, the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord are very common.

One thing I remember about the old days was that my hands would often be covered with black oil stains after a shift. It came off the steering wheel and had been left there by the hands of various mechanics who moved them around.

Another item I remember about the old cabs was the musty smell they would develop in the interior. I would instantly be transported back to the past if I ever smelled it again. Proust had his madeleine cakes; I have taxi seats and floors.

I don't take cabs or ride-hails that often, but they must have cleaned up their act. That smell is long gone.

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