Foreign News: Curb That Taxi Driver

Since the Battle of the Marne in 1914, when 600 Paris taxi drivers transported a French division to the battlefront to their own undying self-esteem,* a ride in a Paris taxi has been like playing automobile roulette with an impudent fallen archangel. Using their own countdowns, the taxi drivers scoot across intersections in advance of green lights, take Paris’ wide, sweeping boulevards as private raceways for their rickety infernal machines, and command an astonishing virtuosity of verbal abuse, from the drill sergeant’s expletive-staccato to the sarcastic Voltairian blow-dart aimed at the fat pedestrian who slows their way: “Are you sure that everything’s safely across now?”

Against all this the Paris taxi traveler is relatively helpless. He had better not even withhold his tip, for the 14,000 Paris cab drivers can be mysteriously one when their interests are threatened; after some clients from world-famed Maxim’s proved stingy tippers, cabbies boycotted the place for a week. And in 1951, in protest against a police demand that they take physical examinations, they threatened to obey every traffic law to the letter—which would, they vowed, produce the greatest traffic jam Paris had ever seen.

This week Paris Police Prefect Maurice Papon promulgated several dozen decrees designed to curb the cabbies and give the rider a break. Among them, taxi drivers are enjoined against: “Rudeness, obscene language or brutality of any kind, particularly toward passengers”; accepting fares who are being pursued by the police or by “a popular hue and cry”; charging increased fares for letting passengers listen to the cab radio; taking roundabout ways; and (with deft Gallic hairsplitting) “soliciting tips in any fashion, though they are entitled to accept them.” The new orders also ban cab drivers with one arm and those deaf, nearly blind or with serious nervous disorders—obviously aimed at eliminating the familiar Paris octogenarian cab driver, as palsied, liverish and dangerous as his ancient vehicle.

* Characteristically passing and repassing one another until the troops arrived in such mixed-up order that the reinforcement was delayed several hours while soldiers found their units.