Motor Cars in New York.

Progress, Volume III, Issue 7, 1 May 1908, Page 231

Motor Cars in New York.

Now that the tide of pn\ate custom has ebbed away, American manufacturers ha\e turned to a new field of enterprise which promises better results than the selling of high-grade pleasure cars The cab trade in New York has been a constant source of surprise to the visitor for many years and little or no improvement is noticeable even to-day. Heavy and ungainly electric hansoms, carrying their batteries under an immense erection on the top of which sits the driver, looking like a comic monument on a huge pedestal, bump and rattle over the uneven pavements and thread their way amidst the traffic like antedeluvian hearses. The hansom and the " growler " are not unknown either, but they ply mostly to and fro between the railway stations and are the reverse of smart. The best are those which are chartered by the hotels and stand in ranks as they do in London. New Yorkers " m the know" manage to ride for a few blocks for the sum of 50 cents, or two shillings, but the stranger who hops m at the Waldorf or the Holland House and expects to be carried to, say, Sherry's or along Broadway to the

theatre district, for less than a dollar will at once have his error pointed out to him in terms more forcible than polite The drivers are all uncivil and rapacious specimens of American citizenship, and independence with them amounts to a disease. Why this state of things should have lasted so long m a great city like New York is a real puzzle. That a service of smart motor-cabs, run at moderate charges, would be a paying investment here seems to saufer aux yeux, yet the schemes for inaugurating them are merely in their infancy.