A brief history of NYC taxi cabs

Morris and Salom Electrobats pass in front of the Old Metropolitan Opera House on Manhattan's 39th Street in 1898. The Electrobats are electric battery-powered cars that served as early taxis in the city.

In the mid-1900s, horsedrawn Hansom cabs were once again the primary means of transportation in Manhattan after the collpase of the Electric Vehicle Company.

In the 1940s, before the innovation of radio dispatch, cabbies would use callboxes - special phones stationed throughout the city - to contact the dispatch office. Here, taxis drive along Broadway Avenue in the city's Theater District in 1947.

By 1957, there were about 1,000 five-passenger Checker cabs on the streets. For years, the Checker was the iconic New York taxi before being phased out slowly. The last Checker was officially retired in 1999.

New York cabbie Anthony Magni cleans road dirt from a sticker on the front fender of his car on July 12, 1971. By the 1970s, New York cabbies had earned an international reputation for rudeness. Some drivers began putting friendly bumper stickers on their cars in an attempt to improve their image.

Steam rises from the sidewalk in February 1980. In the mid-1980s, as new waves of immigrants arrived in New York, the demographics of cab drivers began to change. By 2000, 82 percent of the more than 60,000 cabbies were foreign born, according to the U.S. Census.

Handheld wireless devices became ubiquitous by the turn of the century. New Yorkers, like this woman in the back of a taxi in October 2000, were now able to browse the Internet while sitting in a cab.


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Sikh cabbies takes a walk while waiting for their dispatch to pick up passengers at a taxi holding area next to JFK Airport in May 2006. Skyrocketing fuel prices made it difficult for cabbies to eke out a living. Drivers were taking home about $75 per twelve hour shift after fuel costs and other expenses were factored in.

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg lost a four-year fight to force the taxi industry to replace all of its 13,000 vehicles with gas-electric hybrids. In the end, about 4,300 vehicles - about a third of the fleet - will be hybrids like this one.

A prototype of the Nissan NV 200 taxi is off-loaded from a truck on April 2, 2012. The iconic New York City taxi has gotten a passenger-friendly makeover from Nissan with low-annoyance horns, USB chargers and germ-fighting seats to cut down on bad odors. Medallion owners will be required to buy the Nissan NV 200 at a cost of about $29,000 starting in late 2013.