THE HIDDEN LIVES OF TAXI DRIVERS

A nonfiction book examines the challenges faced by taxi drivers in England.

HBO’s Taxicab Confessions used a hidden camera to get passengers to candidly discuss their drivers. Finnegan takes the opposite approach, using her listening skills to get taxi drivers to open up to her about their lives as they shuttle her around her home city of Milton Keynes, England, and elsewhere. “More than just the some-time knights of the roads—itself a precious role—taxi drivers are also, it might be argued, in some ways the philosophers of our times,” she writes in a lively and often insightful ethnographic study compiled from five years’ worth of informal interviews with drivers. The author conducted most of the interviews in Milton Keynes, a provincial city with “some hundreds of licensed drivers—too many some drivers say,” while finding “similar patterns” in London (home of the iconic black cab) and other British metropolises. As elsewhere, immigrants constitute the majority of the drivers, including one who “had been a nationally admired fine jewellery craftsman in Pakistan” and another who, when not driving, spends his time “either in his mansion in Islamabad or, during the summer season, in his country estate there.” Finnegan shows that taxi driving is a demanding profession. Drivers are expected not only to know any place, street, or road where someone may need to be taken—one professional in Milton Keynes “had, among other things, to keep up his expert knowledge of the changing locations of brothels”—but also “how to deal with passengers in various physical and emotional states.” Indeed, “individuals tend to open up in this liminal setting of even a short taxi ride,” asserts Finnegan, noting that drivers describe themselves as “the agony aunts of the streets.” The author could have spent more time showing the impact of Uber and other ride-hailing companies on the taxi business but succeeds admirably in portraying the drivers’ “human qualities outside of their taxi-industry selves.” As one driver tells Finnegan, “If I wake up feeling in a bad mood or everything has gone wrong, but then I do something to help a passenger, I feel good for the rest of the day.”

A survey that perceptively captures the lives of taxi drivers and their distinctive qualities.