Taxis and the for-hire trade: a survey

1921–TODAY · AT DIRECTORY SIZE

The trade as the directories show it: The taxi is the oldest for-hire carriage in this record after the streetcar itself, and the least documented — no company-by-company history of South Bend's cab trade exists in the sources reached, and this entry prints the trade at the size the directories and the courts actually fix, no larger. Its first court-documented appearance is the jitney fight told above: the unlicensed for-hire bus of the Sprout case was the cab trade's unregulated edge, and Ordinance No. 2135 of 1921 expressly excepted taxicabs from the jitney definition while subjecting everything else that carried passengers indiscriminately to license and insurance — the legal line between the cab and the jitney drawn by the city itself. The classified directories then name the trade at their sampled points.

Polk's South Bend directory of 1921 lists the Yellow Taxi-Cab & Transfer Company — a branch operation, as the street guide's entry shows — under the automobile headings of the classified section, the national Yellow Cab name present in South Bend within a few years of its Chicago founding. Polk's directory of 1949 lists a taxicab drivers' local among the city's labor organizations — the trade organized by mid-century, as the street railway's men had been a generation before. Beyond those points the directory record sampled for this history does not follow the cab companies by name, and their individual courses — the stands, the fleets, the consolidations, the long twilight of the cab in the rideshare age — stand as a named gap in this record, to be worked from the full directory run and the city's license files when the update cycle reaches them.

What can be said at survey size is the shape: for a century the cab worked the margins of the system the streetcar and the bus defined — the station stands, the hotel doors, the hours and the neighborhoods the fixed routes did not reach — and taxicabs remain listed among the city's modes of carriage in the current record.

Sources:

1. Sprout v. City of South Bend, 198 Ind. 563 (1926) — Ordinance No. 2135's exception of taxicabs from the jitney-bus definition.
2. R.L. Polk & Co., South Bend city directories of 1921 and 1949, as swept in the Business Owners Roster section of this history — the Yellow Taxi-Cab & Transfer Company in the 1921 classified section; the taxicab drivers' local in the 1949 directory.
3. The compiled transportation record of South Bend — taxicab carriage among the city's present modes.