Travelling in a Chicago cab lurching on expiring springs and with knee room sacrificed to allow space for the bullet-resistant screen behind the driver gives reason to thank London’s Public Carriage Office. This body has set design criteria for motorized taxis since 1906, though it had ruled on horse-drawn cabs since 1679. These benevolent despots have presided over a local market distortion that has brought immeasurable benefit to London cab passengers.
It’s obvious that mid-sized cars are constructed to flatter and pamper the driver and that rear passenger comfort is not a priority. So when these vehicles are converted to taxis, as in almost every other city on the globe, they give a rotten experience to the paying rear-seat passengers – dank, foetid, inconvenient to hose out, awkward to climb in and out of, too low, and with poor visibility – a sickening recipe.
The definitive London cab was designed in 1956 by Austin body designer and draughtsman Eric Bailey, apparently because the in-house ‘stylist’, Dick Burzi, wanted nothing to do with it. Bailey referenced current Austin saloons and Anglo-American looks in the fender and body sides (he had just finished work on the Austin-made Metropolitan made for Nash in the United States), but the principal design driver was the passenger space required by the beneficent Carriage Office.
The successor to the Austin cab is the TX4, built by LTI. It has, of course, gone through various redesigns, but its genes are still essentially those of the 1956 Austin FX4 and it has remained as much a symbol of London as the double-decker bus. Long may it continue to defy globalization.
The London black cab is a benign market distortion that owes its existence not to market forces but to an institution – the Public Carriage Office. Pensioner examples also grace a few other British cities.