I was going to attach this to my Alaska post since it happened during my trip but decided to post separate.
I am 68 years old and took my first taxi/cab ride ever while in Vancouver B.C. had to taxi from motel to Vancouver international.
OMG !! it was like scenes I have seen in movies, we were in no hurry but this driver was driving like he was escaping Godzilla or something
in, out , passing and every time he stopped with a car in front of him he was close enough I could read the Fruit of The Loom label on the driver in font of us shorts !!!! it was crazy !! our driver also gave the 1 finger salute to another cab driver who he didn't think got out of his way fast enough !! I think we for sure traded paint with him but neither driver was going to stop !! this all took place in a Toyota Prius, I sure don't know what the life of that vehicle is going to be . anyway it was almost like a amusement park ride.
So first cab ride in 68 years don't know if my heart can take another.
Has anyone here had similar experience ?

 

I jumped in a cab in Ketchikan and asked the driver to take me to the dump. I was told early in the morning the dump was loaded with bald eagles. When he spoke I knew he was from the south, so I asked him where he was from. " Marietta, Ga. " I said do you know the big chicken? [A local land mark}

https://www.marietta.com/attractions/the-big-chicken

Long story short he was doing his best to make enough money to leave. He hated it, Rain, rain, rain

 

When I was in the Navy, my ship had made a port call to Naples, Italy and me and a buddy took a cab to a an old landmark that we wanted to see.

So off we go and the driver was dodging cars, laying the horn and whatever else he could do to get us where we needed to go.

We came upon a train tunnel that ran parallel to the road we were on, so the driver shoots into the tunnel and starts driving along the railroad tracks. (Miind you, this an active line). To separate the tracks from the road, there was a steel divider rail with an open section in the middle. So as we're tooling along the tracks, we see a train light coming from the other direction, and me and my buddy are like "uh oh "... It was a single set of tracks, so we were playing "chicken" with a train...not a good idea. Well, just as the train was approaching, the driver made his move and made a hard right through the opening in that divider and we were back on the road.

Now I know why so many Indy car drivers are from Italy...lol

 

Italian cab drivers get a concurring nod. Try intentionally driving on the wrong side of the road into multi lanes of oncoming traffic around Vatican City while cussing and gesturing with an arm out the window. China is a close second. Anything goes as long as you do not make contact with another vehicle. Wrong way with an electric scooter head on into multi lanes of traffic night or day is typical. I have also seen this occur with an electric unicycle bearing its own headlight of course. I would give chains of motorcycles racing between mult-lanes of cars with a few inches width to spare through the tunnels of Paris an honorable mention. A cabbie driving flat out at night coast to coast through the mountains of Panama also comes to mind as a chilling experience.

 

I had a ride like that in Mexico. There was four of us, so I sat in the front. He take off fast, in and out of traffic, yelling at other drivers, slamming on the brakes, and taking off fast. My seat did not latch, so I'm flying back and forth, look back at my brother, and we are laughing, driver looks at me, and say, don't worry, same price for me. We did finally make it down town.

 

I had one of those taxi rides once. I was stationed at NAS Willow Grove, PA and had to get to the airport in South Philly. The taxi driver took the Skulekyl (not really spelled right) expressway from Warminster to the airport. I swear there was a few times he swapped paint with others. The speed limit was non existent and not a cop around.

 

25 years of business travel had me on a few adventures. A few memories off the top:

Taxi in Bangkok where the driver was so tired he fell asleep at a traffic light. Taxi in Tokyo where the driver had **** playing on his TV screen as mounted on the dash.

New York where the driver lost the rear axle on the freeway from LaGuardia to midtown. I flagged down another cab with a newly married couple who took pity on me and paid for their cab to town.

Formula 1 wannabe in Prague. 60+ in a 25, stuff like that. High G force ride. I was tired and generally figure these guys know their cars and road enough to care more about them than me.

Anytime in India. Traffic lanes are merely a suggestion, 2 inches (or less) is enough margin between vehicles, many of which are scooters or motorbikes with >2 persons on them. Honking is a language to them going from “Beep beep, I’m here” to “BEEEEP, BEEEP, I’m pissed off”. When there’s an accident the cops ask “Did you horn sir?”

Best was Cairo at 3:00 a.m. I was working for a big bank and a driver held up a sign for BigBank so my buddy & I took the car. We hadn’t ordered it. But at 3:00 a.m. after arriving from CA, I didn’t care much. We get in the car, driver gets on the freeway and turns off his headlights. Why, I’ll never know but there were good overhead lights on the freeway, so no big deal. We’re cruising along about 70 mph and the driver misses his exit. Whoops. “No problem sir”. He throws the car in reverse on the freeway! And we make the exit.

Wow, more adventures than I thought.
Chris

 

Rented a car when my ship was in Ketchikan for the weekend back in the early '90s. Long before the area was ruined by tourism driven downtown development. Drove to both ends of road...the joke was that autotheft there was a misdemeanor, because there was nowhere to go. Explored the logging roads inland a bit, it was great.

The dump was full of bald eagles and bears, we just sat and watched them for quite a while.

 

Got in a wreck in Toyota City, Japan. Toyota is big in Japan, like the cars are more Toyota than everything else combined. Old style Toyota Crowns are the cabs, and the cabbies are good. White gloves, nice, and, if you give them a piece of paper with where you want to go in kanji and in English, it helps. (I usually have a sheet of my anticipated destinations made up, as I don't speak Japanese well.)

A coworker of mine and I were tooling along a back alley in a Crown cab and this Prius t-bones us. Cabby pointed at our destination 100 yards away and we understood to Pay And Leave Now as the Japanese Five O would hassle us a lot, and him more, if we were there. So we paid and left and expressed to him we hoped he would be ok and traded bows.

Another time, I was doing something different than what I was doing the previous couple weeks, and my buddy was in a cab (that I would've been in had I not done this side job) and got sideswiped by a guy racing down the road and he flipped himself. Big scene, and we had to modify our procedure for American engineers over there. We already carried a passport, but now we needed to carry a piece of paper that said what we were doing in Japanese and who to call who was our sponsor who could answer questions from the heat if they needed them.

 

There is an interesting difference in etiquette for cab drivers among countries. For instance, the last time that was in Rome yelling and gesturing with one arm out the window was accompanied by lots of horn blowing. (With the passage of 20 years, I understand that this practice could been changed by now.) In contrast, within the rings of the big cities in China, you better have a real emergency before sounding a horn. Automated horn sound detectors are set up. These detectors are used to identify the vehicle sounding its horn and issue automated fines:

Beijing Installs Car Horn Detectors to Battle Noise Pollution (radiichina.com)

 

I was stationed in Germany, my wife driving following a cab. We realized we had left something at the apartment. Just then the cabee decides to do a Uee. We do the same needing to back. Out of nowhere the Polizei put on there lights and pull us over. I ask the officer, what is the problem. He explained, you did UTurn it's illegal. Of course we point out the cab. He responded cabees pay extra for the privilege. He takes my wife's license comes back laughing, Grburtstag (birthday). No ticket.

 

 

I just returned from Berlin and has some great interaction with the German police. They had about 6000 of them trying to protect the Russian ambassador and his entourage from being attacked by some mad Ukrainians at the Russian War Memorial just down from the Brandenburg Gate. The German police were very cool and spoke fluent English.

 

That's your typical cab ride in NYC... and if you think that's bad don't ride the bus. Nothing to see here move on.